Lefteast
Romania came into worldwide attention again recently. On August 10, an 80,000-strong protest against the current ruling coalition and its perceived policies to curb anti-corruption turned violent. The police intervened brutally, using tear gas, water canons and truncheons against demonstrators. Close to 500 people requested medical assistance and hundreds more filed complaints against the gendarmes […]
This article is published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croatian portal Bilten. Debates over natural conservation have been at the center of public attention in Bulgaria. They usually appear as clashes between investors and environmentalists over tourist resort projects. Media represents them as a contradiction between concerns with the employment of citizens, living in the vicinity […]
In the June 9th 1968 issue of the Hungarian central party newspaper Népszabadság, there is a short news piece hidden on the bottom of page 13: The Capital Court issued a verdict on Saturday, in the conspiracy case of György Pór et. al. The court found Pór and Sándor Bencze guilty of initiating a conspiracy, […]
Writing with our feet On August 10 eighty thousand people gathered in Bucharest’s Victoriei Square to protest the attempts of the Social-Democratic Party government to defuse the offensive of the powerful National Anti-corruption Directorate against PSD leaders. Many of the protesters were Romanians living abroad, who had returned especially for the occasion. The one thousand […]
From our “correspondents on the ground” we are publishing here an opinion piece on the situation in Turkey after the June elections. The analysis tries to make sense of the lasting stabilization which, despite its permanent weaknesses and shortcomings, the AKP regime seems to have achieved, both through its political appeal and its class alliances. In […]
Update: Since the time of writing of this article, over three weeks ago, the Turkish lirahas lost over 25% of its value against the US dollar and inflation is rapidly catching up on this figure. A significant factor in this devaluation has been the diplomatic crisis between Turkey and the United States over the former’s […]
The article was originally published in the portal of the Bulgarian left, New Left Perspectives. KOI’s 2018 report “The people” against welfare payments: or the art of making those in need ask for more restrictions against themselves authored by Vanya Grigorova is a follow-up of an earlier, 2016 report entitled Poor against poor. That previous report […]
The Serbian President’s rhetoric since July 2017 has been suggestive of a compromise deal – but, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, the future is still uncertain. Last week, Kosovo’s authorities failed to publish their promised draft statute for the Community of Serb Municipalities (ZSO) i.e. for the several tens of thousands of Serbs concentrated in north […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: days after The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (a.k.a. The Istanbul Convention) was declared “unconstitutional” by the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, the witch-hunt against the so-called “gender ideology” took its first symbolic victim. A project on gender equality nominated in the first […]
The debate over the ratification of the so called “Istanbul Convention” in Bulgaria, as in some other countries in the region, became a huge public scandal and probably the most important political matter of 2018. Originally intended to provide states with a framework for prevention and reduction of domestic violence against women, the document has […]