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What Liberalism Did to Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan is a product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, born under the auspices of self-determination and a capitalist economy, in line with post-cold war’s end-of-history expectations. Among neighboring Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan is the only democracy in the region. Now, 31 years later, we see in this small and mountainous region the elementary […]

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[VIDEO] Book symposium: From the crisis of liberalism to the rise of illiberalism in Hungary

Note from LeftEast editors: This book symposium took place on 21 May 2021 as part of the online conference ‘Thirty Years of Capitalist Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe: Inequalities and Social Resistance’ organised by the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Four books were presented at the panel: The […]

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A Comedian in a Drama

This article was first published in Jacobin. In Sunday’s election Ukrainian voters dealt a decisive rebuttal to the post-Maidan establishment. Yet well-organized nationalist forces represent a time bomb under the new president-elect. American readers won’t be too surprised by a tale of an inexperienced candidate winning against the establishment’s pick. But in the case of […]

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Bulgarian Lessons: Liberalism as Market Power plus Expensive Electrification of the Whole Country

This article is published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croation portal Bilten.org. The past few days, a high-voltage scandal is literally grilling the main politicians and business elites in Bulgaria: an obscure local energy company is going to buy the Bulgarian assets of the largest electricity distribution company in the country, owned by the Czech state company […]

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Towards an “Orbanization” of Croatia?

This article was originally published in the Croatian edition of Le Monde diplomatique. LeftEast thanks the editors for allowing us to carry this translation. The election of the new Croatian government has caused a great storm in a part of the local public, despite the fact that it seems that the political future will remain […]

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Mapping the Hungarian Left: parties and movements

By 2010, after eight years in government the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) had eroded the popularity to such an extent that MSZP lost 60% of its former voters (1.4 million people) and its traditional coalition partner, the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) disappeared from the political map of Hungary. In parallel with the weakening […]

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“We should recognize that there are other imperialisms”: A Marxist dissident explains what the left gets wrong about Russia. An interview with Ilya Budraitskis.

Charles Davis talks to Ilya Budraitkis on Salon.Com . Here we present the interview. The whole lengthy material can be accessed on the Salon website. Obviously the biggest story in Russia and here in the United State is the recent assassination of Boris Nemstov. Here in the West, Russia right now is portrayed as sort of a police […]

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Words from Budapest. An interview of Gaspar Miklos Tamas with New Left Review.

Interview with G. M. Tamás Your trajectory has been an unusual one: a dissident libertarian philosopher under Communism in both Romania and Hungary, who has emerged as one of the foremost left critics of the capitalist order in eastern Europe, and author of a striking set of essays on the historical and cultural legacies and contemporary […]