LefteastNote from LeftEast editors: This article was first published in Mašina, we publish it here in English as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Turkey goes to the polls on 14 May for presidential and parliamentary elections. Opinion polls suggest that the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Parti (AKP) […]
Note of LeftEast editors: On the eve of this fall’s parliamentary elections, the room for political manoeuvre before our Russian comrades (and all other opposition forces) has shrunk to a bare minimum. In these circumstances, engagement with other opposition forces in a broad front against the party-state appears the only option. Mikhail Lobanov’s parliamentary candidacy […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The original publication can be found here. On October 24, the Romanian Parliament voted a law that regulates the fiscal regime of the offshore gas exploitation in the Black Sea. It rules in favor of the gas companies that […]
September 9, 2018 saw regional elections on a massive scale in Russia, with 4,000 representative seats, at various levels of government, at stake: special elections for 7 deputies in the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma; 26 of the 85 heads of regional governments across Russia; as well as elections to regional parliaments […]
The Slovak national anthem begins with this dramatic stanza: “That Slovakia of ours / has been asleep so far / but the thunder’s lightning / is rousing it / to come to.” And it continues in a similar spirit: “Slovakia already arises / tears off its shackles.” While the author Janko Matuška, a member of […]
Last Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally got the main item that has been driving his political agenda for the last several years: a majority (51.4%) in a popular referendum to legitimate his de facto executive presidency. Or did he? LeftEast asked Zeynep Serinkaya, Onur Bakiner, and Işık Sarıhan about how this victory was “achieved,” what its consequences will be, […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: In this interview conducted by Gleb Napreenko, published in Russian in the Colta.ru-hosted Discordance: a Journal of Social and Art Criticism and generously translated for LeftEast by Kristina Mayman, sociologist Greg Yudin speaks about the deceitfulness of opinion polling, the fear of the elites for the people, and the political suicide of the intelligentsia. Gleb Napreenko: […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten.Org What was predicted to be “The Kosovar Spring” in fact turned out to be opposition’s “Spring of the great loneliness”, if we can raise an analogy with one of the masterpieces of the Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare, […]
On August 30, tens of thousands of people (120,000, according to organizers), protested outside the Japanese parliament against new military legislation that would allow the military to fight abroad. This would happen for the first time since World War II to Japanese troops. According to its constitution, Japan is barred from using force to resolve […]
Interviewed by Aleksandra Markova – activist and journalist. Half of the people arrested in the Bolotnaya Case are leftist activists. Open Left spoke with one of them after he was freed in the recent amnesty. I went with Vladimir Akimenkov to a self-service restaurant. He found it difficult to distinguish the food on display and […]