Lefteast
Serbia held early parliamentary elections on 16 March 2014. The results were an apparently spectacular victory for the outgoing ruling coalition, and the Serbian Progressive Party above all, which secured 48.35 percent of votes cast, or 158 out of 250 seats. The Progressives’ erstwhile allies, the Socialist Party of Serbia, won 13.49 percent or 44 […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. Original publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. With approaching parliamentary and presidential elections in Macedonia this April a ‘new political situation’ is emerging. After almost nine years of total dominance by the current governing coalition […]
RAMPA DE GUNOI (THE LANDFILL) People looking for sources of income and cheep living conditions settled down right near the landfill starting with the end of 1960s and carried on informal labour (waste selection) since then. Today approximately 250 persons are living within this neglected and life threatening territory in 50 improvised barracks. They were […]
Imagine a country that once was considered the last stronghold of Stalinist socialism. A country that after the velvet revolution quickly became the apt pupil of the IMF, was one of the first to implement neoliberal reforms, and was also considered in the early nineties by none other than the IMF to be the ideal […]
Note from the editorial board of LeftEast: an earlier version was published on the All the Russias’ Blog of NYU’s Jordan Center: http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/dangerous-liaisons-ukraine-western-slavists/ Writing in the middle of a crisis is always dangerous. Analysis, predictions, recommendations can be proven dramatically wrong within a matter of days. I write these lines as the main author of […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The following interview was originally published in the Slovenian journal Pogledi. It is translated and published here with kind permission from both interviewer (Bostjan Tadel) and interviewee (Anej Korsika). The Initiative for Democratic Socialism (IDS) is a Leftist organization initially conceived following the mass protests that shook Slovenia in the winter […]
Mariya Ivancheva interviewed Tamás Gerőcs and Tibor Meszmann about the post-colonialism film club of the Public Sociology Working Group ‘Helyzet’ on 18 February 2014, in Budapest. We are now at the Gólya Community Centre in Budapest. I would start with a question about how these three things, namely the Gólya (Stork) centre, the Helyzet (Position […]
The last years have seen strong mobilizations around the right to abortion in Spain: justice minister Alberto Ruíz Gallardon announced the criminalization of abortion in 2012, now the law has been voted through congress. As 8th March 2014 approaches, protests against the re-insertion of abortion into the domain of criminal law are intensifying in Spain […]
The socialist union “Left Opposition” offers its assessment of the Russian aggression in Crimea and the destructive role of Ukrainian nationalists. The intervention of Russian armies was made possible as a result of a split in Ukrainian society. Its unity is impossible with the oligarchs and chauvinists in power. Only solidarity will save Ukraine. […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: Faking “the people” has been extensively used in the recent wave of protests in Eastern Europe. Usually, it is governments—Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian—who have the monopoly on ordering state workers to take a day off and be bussed to the capital, where they are given a meal, pre-prepared posters and banners, […]