Categories
All posts

Smartphones and the European flag: the new Hungarian demonstrations for democracy

Part 1. Events On 25 October, tens of thousands in Budapest marched against the government’s new proposal to introduce a 0,5 EUR/1GB tax on internet data traffic. After organizers officially closed the event, protesters moved on to the headquarters of the ruling party, Fidesz, brought down part of the fence, threw old computer parts at […]

Categories
All posts

“More of the same”: Elections without choice in Romania

This article is published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web-portal Bilten.Org It is customary for people to complain that they have no real choice to vote for in electoral contests. No candidate is really much different from the other. They are so similar that it makes no sense to choose since there is no real […]

Categories
All posts Interviews

“What is playing itself out in Ukraine now is the clash of two opposed imperial agendas”. An interview with Gonzalo Pozo.

Source: Interview by Yuriy Dergunov, Commons: Journal of Social Criticism In the post-Soviet space the very notion of geopolitics is associated with ultra-conservative, right-wing political discourses (Aleksandr Dugin’s example is prominent here), so in our progressive circles geopolitics is widely regarded as a pseudo-science. Your idea of Marxist geopolitics would probably seem paradoxical to majority […]

Categories
All posts Interviews

“Bulgaria has still not reached the bottom”. An interview with Mariya Ivancheva.

This interview was taken by Ioanna Drosou from the Greek newspaper Epohi and the original version in Greek is available here. How would you comment on the result of the elections? The results of the election are no big surprise for anyone. As some political commentators, myself included, predicted already in February 2013, when Boyko Borissov […]

Categories
All posts

The Western Left Should Not Repeat the Mistake Ukrainian Protesters Did on Maidan

Source: Socialist Worker, Ireland The protesters that started gathering on Kyiv’s main square (‘maidan’) almost ten months ago were driven by a certain kind of ‘occidentalism’ (if I may introduce this term by analogy with orientalism). Europe, which stood as an epitome of Occident for them, presented a generalized image of Ukraine relieved from all […]

Categories
All posts Interviews

“We need to support forms of liberation struggle unconditionally”. An interview on Syria with Joseph Daher.

Note from the LeftEast editors: The following interview was conducted with the Syrian revolutionary Joseph Daher by Italian journalist and activist Mattia Gallo. It provides an important perspective on the current Western intervention in Iraq and Syria that has been excluded from much of the mainstream media reporting of this conflict. We acknowledge that the […]

Categories
All posts

Debt, Rents and Homelessness: Housing Policies in Postsocialist Romania

On September 16, 2014, about 30 people protested in front of the Bucharest City Hall. They demanded to be offered a housing after they had been forcefully evicted a day before from their houses on 50 Vulturilor Street, in the 3rd District of the Romanian capital. They also asked the municipality to stop the speculative […]

Categories
All posts

General Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina – What Changed after the February Protests?

February 2014 proved to be a turning point post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Massive protests spread throughout the country resulting in mass violence and the formation of citizens’ assemblies called plenums. One crucial demand the plenums had all over the country was the establishment of an expert government, which would feature non-partisan, expert and incorruptible […]

Categories
All posts

How a Bulgarian teacher made the news… for all the wrong reasons

This article is published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croatian online web portal Bilten.Org  On the 15th of September 2014, the first day of school in Bulgaria, a photograph of a third grade Bulgarian teacher, Silviya Zubeva, taken by a parent, was leaked through 9gag[i], with versions appearing later in Bulgarian, English, and German. The picture, […]

Categories
All posts

Islamists, Kemalists, and Kurds: will the Kobani crisis force a realignment?

Over the last two days in Turkey, twenty-two people have died protesting the “Islamic State’s” assault on the predominantly Kurdish Syrian city of Kobani.  One died of a wound to the head from a tear gas canister, the others from bullet wounds.  Some shots were fired by police, others by members of far-right organizations.  In […]