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Estonia: Not the neoliberal stronghold you’ve been sold

Estonia is not exactly the ideal place for anti-austerity movements these days. Its electorate overwhelmingly voted its center-right government back into power in 2011, right after three years of deep cuts, unemployment soaring from 4% to 16% and the sharpest drop in GDP in the entire European Union. To add insult to injury, the most […]

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The “refugee”: Bulgaria’s apocalypse surplus (part 1)

by Tsvetelina Hristova and Raya Apostolova In the summer of 2013, as a mass of people was fleeing the escalating conflict in Syria, Bulgaria experienced its first “real” push at the border. Or at least this is how media outlets and commentators attended to the thousands who were crossing the Turkish-Bulgarian border, forgetting that the […]

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Volodymyr Ishchenko: “For Ukrainians, as for any other people in the world, the main threat is capitalism.”

Note from the LeftEast editors: We publish the transcript of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s interview on This is Hell! radio station with Chuck Mertz from the 19th of April 2014, organized in cooperation between the Chicago-based radio station, AntidoteZine.Com, and LeftEast. This is the complete transcript of the interview, including the last two questions which Volodymyr answered […]

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Hungary: A Black Hole on Europe’s Map. An interview with Gaspar Miklos Tamas.

An interview with G. M. Tamás by Jaroslav Fiala (A2 magazine) 1/You were writing on post-fascism. In recent years, the growing rise of nationalist and racist forces has taken place across Europe. What is your explanation for this phenomenon?   The whole nature of European politics has changed after 1989: the two hegemonic blocs had […]

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How healthcare kills: lessons from neoliberal Bulgaria

    Nоte from the LeftEast editors: Тhis article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here.  In the last days of March 2014, a Bulgarian woman, Dobrinka Krumova, aged 26, died because neither private, nor public hospitals in Dupnitsa in South Bulgaria accepted her for […]

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European Left poised to take third place in European elections

source: AlexisTsipras.Eu Poll results across Europe show a particularly encouraging rise in the popularity of the Left. According to some estimates, the European Parliamentary Group of the Left (GUE-NGL), is expected to increase its number of MEP’s from 35 to at least 60 in the upcoming Parliamentary elections this May. Alexis Tsipras’ candidacy for President […]

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The unfolding of the Bulgarian political crisis of 2013

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. The upcoming EP elections will be a test for all major parties in Bulgaria, after a year of constant protests aiming to challenge the status quo. In February […]

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Child beaten at EU Border: Brutal Push-backs continue in Bulgaria

source BorderMonitoring.Eu On April 21st, 2014 Border Monitoring Bulgaria (BMB) recorded yet another case of a push-back of a single Syrian mother with her four children (10, 17, 22, 24 years old) accompanied by severe police violence. Relatives reported that in their attempt to receive protection in Bulgaria, the family was forcefully returned to Turkey. […]

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“We are witnessing an alarming revival of old-fashioned geopolitics”. An interview with Madina Tlostanova.

Madina Tlostanova is an internationally known scholar whose writing critically examines questions of epistemology, history, geography, power and identity. She has published widely and in multiple languages. She presently is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Her book Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian […]

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Macedonia: Repeat Performance (2001)

Note from the LeftEast editors: In his text, ‘From the banality of elections to a new political situation’, published on LeftEast in cooperation with Bilten.Org, Artan Sadiku calls for a serious rethinking of left political perspectives since the widespread belief that the social question would inevitably trump national divisions has been disproved by nationalist struggles […]