Lefteast
LeftEast publishes Volodya Vagner’s interview with Georgian unionists in collaboration with OpenDemocracy-Russia. Georgia has recently seen a wave of strikes by newly established unions. In summer 2018, the Ertoba2013 union, which organises Tbilisi’s metro workers, shut down the Georgian capital for several days, before the city municipality eventually met its demands. Earlier this year, a new […]
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a video of the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov circulated by a Bulgarian Facebook group. The video began with an excerpt of a speech by the Prime Minister delivered to his party at the beginning of the year. In it, pondering the falling popularity of his government, he […]
By any measure, November 11’s fascist-led Independence Day march in Warsaw was terrifying. The authorities said 50,000 people marched through the Polish capital, while the organisers claimed 150,000. The true figure is likely to be somewhere in between. The march was obviously huge, however. Participants lined up in over sixty rows at the start; the […]
The last couple of months have been turbulent for The Left party (in Slovenian, Levica). Firstly, the Left failed to cross the threshold in the EU parliamentary election. Even the fact that their candidate, Violeta Tomić, was also the Spitzenkandidat for the Party of the European Left did not help. And secondly and more importantly, its […]
If elections in liberal democracy were to be described as briefly as possible, perhaps it would go something like this: the people get to decide if they want change or more of the same (with both options, of course, embodied in aspiring representatives). Such was the explicit dilemma defining the political discourse in Bulgaria in […]
This article appeared first in German on mosaik blog. Aside from a handful of local and international organisations, it is women who are leading the charge to support refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina. mosaik editors Franziska Wallner and Klaudia Wieser report on what they witnessed while accompanying the ‘SOS Balkan Route’ donation convoy from Austria to the […]
On October 6, a fare hike on Santiago’s subway network triggered protests led by secondary students, putting on display the terrible conflict-management skills of president Sebastien Piñera’s right-wing government in Chile. The mass fair-dodging was too quickly called a criminal act, and from then on, government officials started digging their own graves. What started out […]
Editorial note: The following piece originally appeared on Verfassungsblog | On Matters Constitutional. We carry it here with kind permission from the author. Two weeks ago, on a Friday night, I was grabbing a bite to eat with a few Romanian colleagues at Bill’s Restaurant on Green Street in Cambridge, England. Two of us stepped outside for […]
What is happening in Lebanon is truly special. It is special in terms of local and regional politics and it is special as a more specific instance of the struggle against the rule of neo-liberal capitalism in the world. Lebanon’s capitalism has always been extreme and reactionary. When people talked about laissez-faire capitalism, Lebanon’s capitalism […]
We are publishing this article in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian internet portal Bilten. The current government coalition in Bulgaria comprises one center-right and three far-right parties (Ataka, the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria – NFSB, and VMRO). These three “junior” partners, which go by the name of “United Patriots” (UP), exert political gravity […]