Lefteast
The recent period in Tbilisi saw the streets being swept up in waves of demonstrations against the law on “transparency of foreign influence”. The oppositional media constantly regurgitates the idea that the youth of Georgia, Gen Z, unequivocally upholds protests. I have seen claims that this is a “Children’s revolution”, and that the demonstrations have […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article is a slightly expanded and edited version of a text, which appeared first in Slovak in Kapital. We publish the English original with permission. The article appears within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). “For capitalism migrant workers fill a labour shortage in an especially […]
Editorial note. On June 2, 2024, local elections were held in 88 cities and municipalities in Serbia, in addition to rerun elections in the City of Belgrade. The local elections in Belgrade were repeated because of serious irregularities in the December 2023 elections for local representatives to the City Council. Compared to December, this time […]
On May 28, the Parliament of Georgia has overcome a presidential veto over the controversial “foreign agents law.” Initiated by the ruling party Georgian Dream (GD) in March 2023, the law soon had to be withdrawn because of backlash. This year, however, the GD achieved their goal. The legislation introduces mandatory registration for any “non-entrepreneurial (non-commercial) […]
We co-wrote this article at the beginning of May. On May 28, the Georgian parliament overrode the presidential veto and finally adopted the Law Against Foreign Influence. Although written at an earlier stage of the protests, everything that happened since then has largely confirmed the conclusions we drew back then. Since early April, Tbilisi, the capital […]
Thanks to Z magazine’s generosity, LeftEast is delighted to republish Kristina Božič‘s interview with Majd Nasrallah on the life of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Majd Nasrallah has worked in Palestinian cultural institutions and is a local community organizer with a degree in international law and human rights. He talks about criminal violence being the last […]
LeftEast is delighted to reprint this interview Vladimir Mitev recently conducted with our comrade and Macedonian political scientist Sonja Stojadinovic for Cross-border Talks, in which they discuss the internal situation and foreign policy dynamics immediately after the swearing the May 8 elections and the swearing in of Macedonia’s new president (Gordana Siljanovska from the […]
In April, British foreign minister and former prime minister David Cameron travelled to all five Central Asian republics – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan – plus Mongolia, with the goal of reinforcing Western influence in the region. While in Britain much of the coverage has focused on Cameron’s decision to burn £42 million in […]
This text is a conversation between Iuliia Gataulina and Mina Shahmoradi, respectively members of Russian and Iranian political activist groups in Tampere, Finland. We see value in this conversation because it does not usually happen: in today’s increasingly polarized world, we have been witnessing how the political opposition usually acts along the same lines as […]
The outsized role that foreign-funded NGOs play in Georgia’s politics, policy-making, and public services has led the country into a chronic crisis of its democracy. There is a massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s peculiar political economy. It goes back a quarter of a century, predating the 2003 Rose Revolution. The late president Edvard […]