Tag: elections

Categories
All posts

The Wonder That Brings Hope: The Union Candidate in Albania’s Parliamentary Elections

It is these conditions that prompt the need for a reliable and hopeful alternative. Elton Debreshi is such an alternative. A figure with the potential to challenge the hegemony of the corrupt power and bring hope to all the marginalized social groups. It is not his political ambition that pushes him to the podium of the parliament, but the historical demand of miners and citizens for a real and honest representation. A representation intact from the influence of criminal groups, violence and dubious businesses. Elton Debreshi has, for many years, sustained through his work the system that produces goods, on behalf of the oligarchs. Now it is time to seek on behalf of the city of Bulqiza the fair share of those people who work and live on a rich land, blessed with chromium, but spend their lives in poverty.

Categories
All posts

Unprecedented Victory for the Left in Kosova: The Movement for Self-determination (LVV) Wins by a Landslide

LVV wants to end the endless dialogue (that is neither helpful for Kosova or Serbia). The technical dialogue is in the way of any principled dialogue based on shared premises. On the other hand, throughout the campaign, LVV has shown that its priority remains the dialogue with the Kosovo Serbs and other national minorities on social and economic issues. There is no doubt that only through a will for collective political change can the difficult journey for a radical transformation of the economic and political structures of the country begin.

Categories
All posts

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Milo

Note from LeftEast editors: this article is published in cooperation with the web portal Bilten.Org. On September 23rd, the Parliament of Montenegro had its first, quite uncertain post-election session, which saw Aleksa Bečić, a leader of the opposition, elected as its president. The session, as well as its outcome, was mired in uncertainty due to […]

Categories
All posts Protests

Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects

Although Belarus is often referred to as a repressive state, the familiar ‘Parisian arsenal’ of tear gas canisters, water cannons, rubber bullets, and stun grenades was used here on a mass scale for the first time. Western technologies of violence were complemented by traditional post-Soviet police brutality: beating and detention of random people, torture, humiliation, and sometimes threats of rape in jail, the hunting down of journalists, etc.

None of the opposition leaders joined the crowd or made radical statements. The opposition movement turned out to be on the whole amorphous, without clear leadership at the top and any leaders from below. At the same time, the ruling elite showed no signs of a split, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy generally remained loyal, although there have been signs of hesitation at the lower and regional levels (with several state media journalists and police officers resigning).

Categories
All posts FeminEasts

Rainbow Resistance: The Fight of LGBTQ Activists in Poland against Post-Election Repressions

Only one day after the Polish National Electoral Commission announced the incumbent president Andrzej Duda as the winner of the close runoff elections, a queer activist was arrested in Warsaw. According to witnesses, Margot’s arrest looked more like a kidnapping because ununiformed police officers handcuffed her with the use of force and dragged her out of her friend’s flat. (…) Queers have become public enemy number one in Poland.

Categories
All posts

Slovenian Corona Coup d’Etat

In the blink of an eye, the coronavirus epidemic revealed to the world just how vulnerable global capitalism is: the stock market is in freefall, global supply chains are coming to a grinding halt as privatized healthcare buckles in an instant. The fallout from decades of liberalisation, privatization and financialisation is immense. Even the most […]

Categories
All posts

Don’t Mistake the Finger for the Moon: Bernie Sanders and the Movement

Note from the LeftEast editors: Now, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Corbyn-led Labour party in the United Kingdom, the left’s hopes for an electoral path to power using the vehicle of some pre-existing mass, centre-left party have been reduced to just one name: Bernie Sanders. His populist, common-sense account of the problems […]

Categories
All posts

Irish voters reject the Right: a new opportunity for the Left?

Sinn Féin, a nationalist party that sits with the left/far-left group in the European parliament and from the 1970s to ’90s was attached to an armed insurgency in Northern Ireland, won the most first-preference votes in this month’s general election in the Republic of Ireland. It now has about the same number of parliamentary seats […]

Categories
All posts

Sinn Féin and the land issue: notes on the 2020 Irish general election

A century ago a change began in Ireland but some radical change can take centuries. An Irish Countess (married to an undocumented polish immigrant) was elected Minister for Labour for Sinn Féin. This was a first as women had yet to gain the right to vote. The US-based Irish Republican Brotherhood had pushed through an […]

Categories
2014 on LeftEast All posts

Russian Socialists and the Struggle for Democracy

For the past few weeks, protests for fair elections in upcoming municipal polls have become weekly in Moscow and St. Petersburg as thousands have defied authorities to attend unsanctioned rallies. The police crackdown has been particularly harsh in Moscow. Protests on July 27 and August 3 resulted in over 2000 detentions. Images of police in […]