Tag Archives: protest

March 14, 2019

Manifesto of the CEU Radical Student Collective

by Radical Student Collective  

Note from the LeftEast editors: The Central European University – a private University in Budapest founded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation – has attracted the attention of the world media with its strife against the Victor Orban government in Hungary. A struggle over its right to remain in the country ensued in early 2017 when the notorious bill remembered as LexCEU was hastily passed by hungarian legislators. It contained a Catch 22 clause making the functioning of the institution built os symbol of the transition from state socialism to liberal democracy impossible within the Hungari ..

January 28, 2019

Justice for David and a future beyond nationalism in Bosnia?

by Chris Baumgarten  

 Protest movements Pravda za Davida and Pravda za Dženana may help change Bosnia’s dysfunctional system of governance. While they probably will not make the country’s system of corruption disappear anytime soon, they are likely to become a long-term threat to the country’s political establishment. “We have the potential to change something, to do something against nationalism”, Suzana Radanović, mother of young David Dragičević whose death at the hands of the police in March 2018 led to mass protests in Banja Luka and spread across Bosnia and Herzegovina, told me in an interview. We spoke after a ..

January 24, 2019

The Protests against Russia’s Pension Reform and the Reasons for Their Defeat

by Ilya Budraitskis  

Note from LeftEast editors: The main political event of 2018 on Russia’s domestic scene was probably the pension reform and the unsuccessful resistance against it. In this piece published in Russian in Sotsiologia vlasti 30(4)2018 co-translated for LeftEast by Kate Seidel, Ana Gurau, and Dasha Vodchic, Ilya Budraitskis takes this episode as a lens on the government modus operandi and on the logic driving the different segments of the opposition. The Russian authorities’ actions in as they were preparing to raise the retirement age in summer 2018 involved both a thought-out strategy and a relatively weak propa ..

December 31, 2018

The World Today Attila Melegh With Tariq Ali – EU Eyesores #3: Hungary

by lefteast  

Hungary is a landlocked country positioned on the EU’s eastern border. Today, it is also a major route for migrants and refugees travelling to Western Europe. The Hungarian government has responded by building a large border fence, and by scapegoating and persecuting the migrants passing through. This week, Tariq is speaking to sociologist Attila Melegh, who has also been a victim of government scapegoating for defending the rights of migrants and asylum seekers.

December 13, 2018

Albanian Students Revolt: What Is to Be Done?

by Griselda Qosja  

In the last days, thousands of students have flooded the narrow street where the Albanian Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth is located. Demonstrations of this magnitude are not alien to the public. In the last three decades there have been plenty of anti-government demonstrations in Albania, and apart from a few notable exceptions, they have been successfully co-opted by various mainstream political parties. Thus, one of the main features of this protest has been a clear collective attempt to keep it unaffiliated with any political party, the main reason for this being the fear of losing the credibility. The ..

June 25, 2018

The Yugoslav students on the wave of revolts in 1968, interview with Dragomir Olujić (Part 1)

by Philippe Alcoy  

The year 1968 marked a peak in the class struggle at the international level. Students and workers became protagonists of revolts in the West, but also in the East. The general strike and mass mobilizations of workers and students in France is one of the better known examples from that year. The uprising in Prague is the most famous example from Eastern Europe. 50 years later, a number of commemorations have been taking place around the world, reflecting on the legacy of those years. Few know that Yugoslavia also saw its own student revolt in 1968, strongly supported by the working class but also by important Yu ..

March 27, 2018

No Sweets for Massacres: Katliamın Lokumu Olmaz! An Interview with Boğaziçi Students

by lefteast  

Note from the editors: In the week following a non-violent demonstration on the campus of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul against a pro-government Islamist student group handing out sweets to celebrate the victory of the Turkish Army and its allied militias in the Syrian-Kurdish district of Afrin, Turkish police have repeatedly swept into the campus in pursuit of anyone suspected of involvement in the anti-war action. The ongoing wave of detentions on the Boğaziçi campus form part of a strategy familiar from earlier police action on university campuses in Turkey, and which intensified even before the Presiden ..

January 29, 2018

Solidarity undone: the left-green protest that didn’t happen in Bulgaria

by Polina Manolova and Phillipp Lottholz  

The recent protests against the destruction of the national park in Bulgaria’s Pirin mountain reveals the relation of forces in Bulgaria’s green movement. The start of Bulgaria’s EU Council presidency on 11 January 2018 put the country into the focus of European public opinion. As usual, the spotlight was on the progress of Bulgaria’s integration into the EU and, unsurprisingly, on the ‘cloud of corruption’ hanging over the country. While PM Borisov obediently promised to tackle this issues within the next two to three years, people across Bulgaria took to the streets, seizing the opportunity ..

May 3, 2017

The times they are a changing: Rebuilding collective action in Albania

by Griselda  

Following a wave of protests in Zharrez, Albania, Griselda Qosja spoke with activists affiliated with two of the leading leftist organizations in Albania, Organizata Politike and Thurje. From Aristotle to Hegel, the distinction between state and market has been the basis of understanding the role of civil society. In Albania, however, since the 1990s, unfortunately the role of civic activism has been often marginalized in public opinion, and perceived as an agent linked to the Open Society Foundation (OSF)[1] or backed by foreign embassies. Probably, an atavism of the communist regime, where the fight against fo ..

April 7, 2017

The Art of Empathy: An Interview with Russian Graphic Artist Victoria Lomasko

by Victoria Lomasko  

Victoria Lomasko is a fixture at Moscow’s trials and protests, documenting the tumultuous processes that shape today’s Russia. Not content to limit herself to the political life of the country’s capital, Lomasko travels around the country and through the former Soviet republics, exploring the domestic, psychological, and spiritual condition of its diverse marginalized groups. Sex workers in Nizhny Novgorod, women in underground lesbian clubs, teachers in a remote village school, and children at the juvenile prison colonies, where Lomasko volunteers as an art teacher, have been some of the subjec ..