Playing it safe when losing is a bad strategy. Yet this is precisely what Bulgarian voters did in the 2017 Bulgarian elections. 32,65% of Bulgarians voted for Boyko Borisov’s party Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), giving it a comfortable lead ahead of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) with 27, 20% of the […]
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The recent attacks waged by the Hungarian Fidesz government on independent media outlets, NGOs, or academic institutions, has been accompanied by a violent attempt to erase the memory of socialist alternatives. The removal of George Lukács’ statue, and the closure of its archives are just part of this conservative revolution and its new kulturkampf … […]
There is little on the global horizon these days that points toward socialism, but one thing we have more than enough of is regressive anti-capitalism: a mentality more than a political standpoint, which insists on personalizing the impersonal logic of capital, railing not at the society of commodity exchange, but at banksters, parasites, the New […]
This text was originally published in Russian in OpenLeft.ru. We would like to thank Eliza Ivanova for the translation. Introduction On March 26th, people in many Russian cities participated in rallies connected to the recent anti-corruption investigation by Alexey Navalny’s Anti-corruption Foundation. One could say that these were the most numerous street protests of the […]
On Friday evening a new legislative proposal suddenly appeared on the website of the Hungarian Parliament. The draft put forward a number of modifications to the statute regulating higher education, alterations mainly affecting the activity of foreign universities in Hungary. The step was widely interpreted as a governmental attack on Central European University (CEU), a […]
How ‘Freedom Day’ went in Belarus, and what to expect next: comments from Belarusian activists On 25 May 2017, demonstrations marking Freedom Day took place in cities across Belarus (Freedom Day is the anniversary of the announcement of the self-proclaimed Belarusian People’s Republic on 25 March 1918; it is celebrated mainly by Belarusian nationalists). The […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: As a part of a broader series of comments and analyses from different actors and groups in the Romania Left about the recent protest wave in the country, we are now publishing the policy statement/manifesto of the new left formation DEMOS. DEMOS is a leftist and environmentalist political platform from Romania established […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: In this interview conducted by Gleb Napreenko, published in Russian in the Colta.ru-hosted Discordance: a Journal of Social and Art Criticism and generously translated for LeftEast by Kristina Mayman, sociologist Greg Yudin speaks about the deceitfulness of opinion polling, the fear of the elites for the people, and the political suicide of the intelligentsia. Gleb Napreenko: […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: For the last several months in Turkish politics, the party-state’s agenda has been dominated by two interconnected operations: consolidation of power and elimination of opposition. The former will culminate in the constitutional referendum of April 16 this year, which will, if successful, transform Turkey from a parliamentary into a presidential […]
Introduction and Context The Two Revolutions The following text is a short fragment of an eye-witness account of the 1917 Revolutions: Voicu Nițescu’s Twenty Months in Russian and Siberia published in Brașov (Romania) in 1926. The book, a rather long-winded work of three volumes, is not the work of an enthusiast: there is hardly […]