Month: September 2014

Shifting Centres and Dead-ends: – An Analysis of the Presidential Election in Turkey

Post author By Ezgi Yildiz
Post date September 9, 2014

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the first publicly elected President of Turkey in the history of the Republic, winning 52% of the votes at the presidential elections of August 10. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu, joint candidate of the CHP (secularist, so-called centre-left) and the MHP (nationalist, centre-right), finished second with 38% of the vote. Selahattin Demirtaş of HDP (pro-Kurdish, left) came in third with 9.6% of the votes.

August 10 elections illustrated well the conundrum of Turkish politics and the success of Erdoğan’s AKP in shifting the centre of Turkish politics to the right.

All posts

The rise and fall of the Albanian migrant working force

Post author By Arlind Qori
Post date September 4, 2014

71st anniversary of the Party of Labor of Albania

This article is published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croatian online web portal Bilten.Org

One of the main characteristics of Albania’s post-socialist history has been the big wave of migration to the West that has been undertaken by the workforce, especially to Greece and Italy where most Albanian migrants have worked for more than two decades. This large-scale emigration has been triggered not only by the economic and political collapse of the really existing socialist formation, but also by the neoliberal process of vast privatizations and deindustrialization.

Insert

“Populism” against democracy or Europe against itself? Challenging conceptual orthodoxies

Post author By admin
Post date September 3, 2014

Giorgos Katsambekis

(Originally published in the collective volume Populism, Political Ecology and the Balkans, Athens: Green Institute Greece, 2014, pp. 43-55) – source ΧΡΟΝΟΣ

Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser introduce their recent volume, entitled Populism in Europe and the Americas, as follows: ‘One of the most used and abused terms inside and outside of academia is undoubtedly populism’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012: 1). It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to maintain that statements like this one have become cliché among academics discussing populism, reflecting an urgent need to seriously engage with populism’s meaning, implications and ambivalences.

All posts Insert Interviews

The fight for socialism in Slovenia. An interview with Anej Korsika

Post author By James Robertson
Post date September 1, 2014
2 Comments on The fight for socialism in Slovenia. An interview with Anej Korsika

Anej Korsika

Anej Korsika is a political scientist, a member of the Marxist think tank, Institute for Labour Studies in Ljubljana and a member of the socialist party Initiative for Democratic Socialism.

James Robertson is a historian of Yugoslavia, a member of the International Socialist Organization and of the editorial board of Left East.

JR: Let’s start with a brief history of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism (IDS) and its role in the formation of the Združena levica (UL, United Left) earlier this year.