Month: December 2014

Whether on the road from Istanbul or from Esenboğa Airport, a strange sight welcomes visitors to the capital of Turkey: an opulent city gate, dressed up in neo-Ottoman designs, spans the highway through which vehicles pass on their way to the central city.  Reminiscent of Türkmenbaşı’s gates of Ashkabad, these new monuments testify to the solidity and whimsy of Mayor Melih Gökçek’s twenty-year reign over Ankara just as do those gates to that of the natural-gas kingpin over his Central Asian country.

This publication has been made in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian political web portal Bilten.Org

The Movement of Socialists (Pokret Socijalista, PS) together with their leader, Aleksandar Vulin, the current Minister of Labour in the Serbian government, for years have been trying to maintain their public image as the Left political option. At the same time, Vulin has reduced wages and retirement benefits, changed the labour law to the detriment of Serbian workers, slashed disability support pensions, and imposed a work obligation on people receiving social assistance.

The new protests and protest movements that emerged in the late autumn of 2014 in Hungary created the impression among many observers and participants that the erosion of the hitherto unshakeable Orbán-régime has begun, potentially leading to its disintegration within 1 or 2 years.

Why was this feeling widespread? The following reasons could be named, bearing in mind though that they are all based on anecdotal evidence and rudimentary observations, as no serious empirical analysis of the protests is available yet:

–       a widely held feeling that many of the participants were previously politically inactive, first-time protesters, often quite young

–       protests have spread to other cities than Budapest

–       in contrast to the protests of 2011-2012, which in retrospect seem like the last gasp of the fallen-from-grace liberal political forces of the Wende, in these protests, liberals have played almost no part whatsoever.

In February 2014, Bosnian workers, beaten down by 20 years of savage capitalism in the post-war divided country, rose up together demanding changes to their conditions and the conditions of their compatriots. We are inspired by their struggle, but the government is now going after them for protesting.

Grandmas and grandpas, students, and workers are being charged criminally, after the fact, for blocking traffic, facing steep fines and jail time. The police did not arrest them or ticket them during the protests, because they knew there would be outrage and resistance.

From October 3rd to 26th, the festival “Women Commentators” was held at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture Królikarnia in Warsaw, at which contemporary art of both Ukrainian and Russian female artists focusing on socio-political criticism was presented. The festival was initiated by renowned Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra and curated this year  by Katya Krupennikova, a Russian curator who also works in Warsaw (the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle). In addition to the specially organised discussion platform and documentary cinema program, the festival featured a museum exhibition showcasing artworks commenting on the current situation of war between Russia and Ukraine, made by artists including Lesia Khomenko, Alevtina Kakhidze, Ekaterina Lazareva, Olga Jitlina, and many others [1].