Month: December 2014

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Student Protest Blocks Macedonian Capital

by Ivan Menkinoski, source FaceBook

source: Balkan Insight

by Sinisa Jakov Marusic

Over 12,000 students opposed to government-planned external, state-supervised exams for graduates attended a mass protest on Wednesday in Skopje.

 

 

Thousands of students, university professors and others supporters said “No” on Wednesday to a government plan for state-supervised tests graduates, in what was arguably the biggest student protest to take place in Macedonia in two-and-a-half decades of independence.

Students shouted “University is the voice of freedom!”, “No justice, no peace!”,

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The formation of the Workers’ Front (Croatia): “Revolution, if necessary”

From left to right: Mate Kapović, Denis Geto and Dimitrije Birač. Photo credit: Anita Bukljaš, Index.hr

This interview was originally published in the Croatian portal Index. The English translation appeared at the official website of the Radnicka Fronta.

“If you want to live in a more just society, join us in our struggle,” the members of a relatively new initiative on the Croatian political scene, the Workers’ Front, are inviting people to join their ranks. The goal of the Workers’ Front is to fight uncompromisingly for workers’ rights, and one of the methods they plan on using is participating in parliamentary elections, possibly next year already.

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Eastern Europe against TTIP Trojan Horse

Posted by  on Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Wir Haben Es Satt demo 2014 (click for 2015 demo)

Written by Derek Freitas: Food Sovereignty Campaign Coordinator forEco Ruralis

The proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is meeting increased resistance in Eastern Europe. The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) “STOP TTIP!” is having some success with activating people living in this region of the EU to prevent the approval of this invasive free trade agreement. Some highlights of citizen actions taken in Romania, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria shed light on this momentum.

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Bulgarian youth in the maelstrom of political struggles

Photo credit: Velko Balabanov, Natfiz Occupy

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here.

In Bulgaria there is a (neo)liberal hegemony over student politics that hasn’t been challenged up until last year’s university occupation. This process, however, is not that clear cut, the situation gets more complicated with the deepening of the fierce debate over the meaning of the occupation. The stakes are extremely high: the Right needs its monopoly over the “youth” to condemn alternatives as backward-looking and nostalgic for the socialist past.

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Hungary’s war on women

By Andrew Ryder at SocialistWorker.org

A PUBLIC service announcement (PSA) produced by the Hungarian government has provoked worldwide outrage by placing the blame for sexual assault on survivors. The video depicts young women dressing provocatively, drinking and dancing, with the consequence of an attack by a stranger, before ending with the words, “You are responsible. You can do something about it.”

The media initiative coincided with a statement issued by police in Vas County on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, warning women that flirting might be expected to “elicit violence.”

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Intelligentsia as a style: social protest, organic intellectuals and the post-Soviet condition

Of all the concepts worth re-examining at the cusp between the 2000s and 2010s in Russia, it is the concept of the “intelligentsia” that likely takes one of the most important places. On its own, this boundary marks the transition from the post-Soviet state of affairs to the still very vague manifestations of the post-post-Soviet. The Moscow events in December 2011 simultaneously signified both the completeness of post-Soviet forms, its “actuality”, and the beginning of a systemic crisis of these forms.

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The German Greens: Or how they learned to stop worrying and game the ‘poverty migrants’

How much are our lives worth?

€1 billion, according to Germany’s Green Party. So high a pledge is reminiscent of a racket, in which a potentially dangerous situation is artificially created so as the mafioso can pretend that s/he is able to protect the victims under threat. The story that follows is that of a racket. It is a story of how the Greens, through their use of the stereotype of the thieving EU migrant (or ‘social benefit tourist’), have aimed to pacify the emerging radical refugee movement in Germany.