Eurozine Editorial

It would have taken a miracle for Viktor Orbán to lose the election. Hungary is a fortified kleptocracy where the ruling party has captured the state and controls 80% of the media. It certainly didn’t help that the opposition’s campaign failed to deliver a post-illiberal vision.

Europe is facing a vast humanitarian crisis. This time, there is a good chance that governments will rise to the challenge. If only because it is all too clear that uncontrolled mass migration is one prong in Russia’s hybrid war against ‘the West’.

Clinging to his nukes, Putin will only lose power if his own turn on him. It’s hard to predict when, if ever, the leaders he has humiliated and threatened into submission will do the basic calculus and find that obeying the tyrant will inevitably cost way more than defiance.

Amidst the geopolitics, Ukraine lacks a sense of agency, observe two leading journalists of the Euromaidan generation. But cultivating confidence is difficult when journalism itself seems to have lost its bearings.

A pluralist mainstream requires a flourishing media ecosystem outside it. The mainstream has important democratic roles, but catalysing change is not one of them.

Contracting COVID-19 in the UK over Christmas was far from joyous. While politicians, favouring business over health, were betting on Omicron’s mild symptoms leading to few hospitalizations, especially for the vaccinated, the isolated and sick were negotiating a procedural nightmare of defunct privatized healthcare provision.

Black Europeans, faulty vaccines, dying seas and politics in football: here are the Top10 articles from Eurozine in the second pandemic year.

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New COVID-19 variants keep the international public anxious, and this crisis, permeating all social, economic and political spheres, isn’t even in full bloom yet. Although impossible to contain, it also highlights many potential solutions, which had been lying around for a long time without the political will to act upon them. In gearing up for the much bigger turmoil of an ecological nature, we need to stop concentrating on global centres of power, and give more credit to young motivated people.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, learning and teaching have come under additional strain both at school and in the home, exacerbating existing weaknesses in the system. How to move forward – to diminish rather than increase inequality, to question the labour market’s hold over education and to uphold academic freedom — is critical for students, parents, teachers and society as a whole.

It is no coincidence that in both France and the US, nations uniquely proud of their democratic traditions, debates are emerging about constitutional reform. Recent articles explain why.

Although a Social Democrat-Green-Liberal coalition in Germany has moved one step nearer, nothing is assured. With the smaller parties wielding unprecedented leverage, a willingness to compromise on policy could still outweigh the winner’s prerogative.

How is the lexicon of war chosen? And can the target of this speech, the perpetual ‘other’ use those very words to their own emancipation?

To describe Afghanistan as a ‘humiliation’ for the US and its allies misses the point. If at all, it is a humiliation for a generation of politicians who viewed foreign policy as grand strategy conducted over the head of electorates.

One year after the rigged presidential elections, protesters in Belarus are still demanding a democratic shift and respond with mutual solidarity to a repressive regime. But what does it take to keep on fighting when your cause falls out of the spotlight?

Journalism is steadily becoming less and less liveable, due to structural problems and political interference. From heroic poses to varying degrees of denial, each professional develops their own individual strategies to cope with sustained pressure.