Categories
All posts

Utter Chaos Under the Heaven, the Situation Is Excellent – Aftermath of Students’ Protests in Albania

What PD and LSI leaders hope is that by withdrawing momentously from political privileges, such as the MP salary, they will be accepted by the popular classes as their genuine political representatives. In addition, they have tried to imitate some of the slogans, the gestures, and ideas of the student movement. They promise an uncompromising war against the oligarchs, and organized crime, tuition-free universities, the implementation of other important social rights, while maintaining, in a characteristic right-populist agenda, neoliberal economic policies like a 9% flat tax, and other pro-business mantra. Secretly, they hope that by withdrawing from the system, history will repeat itself.

Categories
All posts

The Albanian student struggle has reached historic dimensions

This article is published in co-operation with the Serbo-Croatian portal Bilten.           Chronology Tuesday, December, 4 was a normal day in Albania. The news went out that the students of the Faculty of Architecture were boycotting school. The reason was a governmental decision to charge students approximately 30 Euros for each […]

Categories
All posts

Scrap mines, call centers and hashish plantations: The grim options facing Albanian workers

Editors’ Note: Over the last three decades or so, the workplace has receded from visibility in scholarship and in cultural productions. This disappearance is a global phenomenon of the neoliberal era, but the shift in East European societies, which used to valorize labor in many ways, has been particularly extreme. To the outside observer, it […]

Categories
All posts

Albania and China: the reemergence of an old friendship?

  Note from the LeftEast editors: this piece has been published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian Left portal Bilten.Org. Nobody could have expected before the sixties that a tiny and a large country, 7000 thousands kilometers apart, the Popular Republic of Albania and the People’s Republic of China would forge a strong political alliance based […]

Categories
All posts

Great Albanian Oil Robbery

This piece originally appeared on the Serbo-Croatian language portal, Bilten. It is reproduced here with generous permission from their editors. The last time I wrote about the oil industry in Albania was the spring of 2015. An enormous eruption of natural gas and oil occurred near the village of Patos-Marinzë, in southern Albania, where the […]

Categories
All posts

Healthcare tailored to the interests of capital

The following article was originally published by the Serbo-Croatian online platform, Bilten. It is republished here with that site’s kind permission. During the electoral campaign of 2013, the Socialist Party of Albania, then in opposition, made a stunning promise for a Third-Way party. Its chairman Edi Rama stressed that once in power the Socialists would […]

Categories
All posts

Property Claims as Social Power Struggle in Albania

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten.Org Several days ago the European Court of Human Rights reached a verdict on contests between three property owners and the Albanian state. It held that the Albanian state owes the property owners 12 million Euros in compensation for not […]

Categories
All posts

Crime or Ideology? A Critical Note on Albanian Corruption

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The original publication in can be found here. Everything started in July 2014 after a fight in the corridors of the Albanian Parliament. Two members of parliament, Arben Ndoka and Pjerin Ndreu from the ruling Socialist Party, used their […]

Categories
All posts

Can the dead be resurrected? The impossibility of politicizing mainstream parties in Albania

Jeremy Corbyn’s conquest of the Labor leadership position and the advancement of Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’ race to the White House show that there can be still life in the atrophied bodies of the once-called social-democracies of the West. What’s interesting politically about these outsiders from the Left is their capacity to embody grass-root […]

Categories
All posts

The rise and fall of the Albanian migrant working force

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. […]