Lefteast
“For more than twenty years have the wage workers of this country begged and prayed their masters, the factory lords, to reduce their burdens. It has been in vain.” – this proclamation could easily have come from a 1st of May rally in 2015, as it remains equally relevant today. But it dates back to […]
Thousands of pupils, students and teachers marched today across the country, in a renewed challenge to governmental education policies. Organised by the High School Plenum, the protest comes two months after the Student Plenum declared victory against reforms in Higher Education on the 24th of February, 3 months after the students’ first march on the […]
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 […]
It isn’t dead. You wouldn’t know that by the news from Bosnian media today, however, one year to the day since the largest and most violent anti-government protests in Bosnia’s recent history took place. They took their cameras to the squares and city centers around the nation, filming the small crowds gathered to mark the […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. In Bulgaria there is a (neo)liberal hegemony over student politics that hasn’t been challenged up until last year’s university occupation. This process, however, is not that clear cut, the […]
On Monday, the 17th of November, around three thousand students demonstrated on the streets of Skopje. Size-wise, this may appear relatively insignificant. On the same day, 700 km southwards, over 20,000 demonstrators joined a rally in Athens to mark the 41st anniversary of a student uprising against the country’s former dictatorship. The news story on […]
By Maxime Benatouil – 04 Mar 14 Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, Deputy Director of the Center for Society Research in Kiev (28 February) What root causes explain that such large parts of the population joined the protests, on Maidan and elsewhere? Volodymyr Ishchenko: First, let me tell you that the protests weren’t exclusively initiated by […]
On the 10th of November of 2013, the movement of the Early Rising Students embarked on a “March for Justice” in the capital of Bulgaria, Sofia. Since the 24th of October the students of Sofia University occupied first the main auditorium and gradually the entire school. A few days before November 10th, they decided that […]
Mary N. Taylor I’ve just come back to New York from Sofia, Bulgaria, where there have been daily protests gatherings and marches, punctuated by chants of “step down” and, less frequently, yet consistently, “red garbage” and “mafia out of parliament”, accompanied by the sound of a three whistle march step. A general assembly has met […]
In December 2012 students started a series of demonstrations against recent government reforms of higher education. In Budapest and many other towns the students set up discussion forums, organized strikes, and occupied streets, squares and bridges. Besides the slowly reacting official national and local Student Union (HÖK, HÖOK), the newly organized Student Network (SN, HaHa) […]