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From hero to zero: The spectacular rise and the immediate decline of the Romanian president

There is nothing quite like it in contemporary European politics. Perhaps there never was. The story of the current Romanian president seems more of a farce, a figment of imagination, than a real story. As with everything Romanian, it would be deeply funny and amusing if it weren’t tragic. President Klaus Iohannis came to power […]

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All posts Protests

FREEDOM is not easy to obtain! And we must fight for it to deserve it! Every day in ever greater number!

Note from LeftEast editors: As Macedonian protestors gather for another night of protest, we re-publish here a public statement by Leftist Movement Solidarnost, following this morning’s arrest of Zdravko Saveski, one of the most vocal, brave and tireless fighters for equality and social justice in the country. Numerous other arrests have been announced, in the midst of […]

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Social upheaval in times of neoliberalism: The deep roots of Macedonia’s protest wave

“In a neoliberal universe, where markets are the gauge of value, money becomes, more straightforwardly than ever before, the measure of all things. If hospitals, schools and prisons can be privatised as enterprises for profit, why not political office too?” Perry Anderson in London Review of Books, 2014, 36:10, pp. 5 Mass protests have vigorously […]

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Interview with MEP Soraya Post,on the occassion of International Romani Day

  Ismael Cortes interviews MEP Soraya Post, on behalf of LeftEast. On the occasion of the International Romani Day, 8th April, the European Parliament hosted the Roma Week in collaboration with different civic organizations. A year has passed since 15th April 2015, when the European Parliament adopted the resolution on anti-Gypsyism and established the European Roma Holocaust […]

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On Marxism, barbarism, Russia, Greece and more: Interview with Kees van der Pijl

Kees van der Pijl is a Dutch political scientist who is emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is known for his critical approach to global political economy and has published, amongst others, a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (2007, 2010, 2014); Global Rivalries from the Cold War […]

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“To EU or not to EU?” This is just the wrong question

Reflexions on the debates on the Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine Agreement On the 6th of April in the Netherlands just over 30% of potential voters took part in a referendum on the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement. This Agreement is one of the numerous Free Trade Area Agreements established between the EU and countries all […]

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What Europe are we sacrificed for? TTIP and its lasting consequences

The following piece was originally published in Serbian at Masina.rs. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement that will soon be signed between the United States and the European Union. According to the website of the European Commission (EC), this agreement ‘removes custom duties’ and ‘barriers to investment’, which allegedly […]

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What’s DiEM25, really? Reply to Open Letter by Souvlis & Mazzolini

Note from the LeftEast editors: this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. Varoufakis’s reply first appeared on the personal blog of Yanis Varoufakis. Shortly after DiEM25’s Rome launch, I received a splendid Open […]

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An Open letter to Yanis Varoufakis

In the following open letter, George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini respond to the recent DiEM launch in Rome. Dear Yanis, We decided to write you this letter after following closely the launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive aims to discuss a series of issues regarding your initiative that we found […]

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Book Review: Carbonella and Kasmir, In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

The informal sector in the economy has been rising recently from a concept that designated marginal forms of labor occurring in Third World cities – that grew in the 1970s without formal growth and created a from Western perspective atypical ‘Third World unemployment’ (cf. Hart 2009) – to one designating flexibilized, temporary or quasi-self-employed work […]