The results of Greece’s snap general election, triggered by Syriza’s defeat in May, are eagerly awaited. Support for the far-right Danish People’s Party has collapsed, while Lithuania has grown more conservative. But isn’t there more to European politics than national swings and roundabouts?
The anachronistic appearance of the post-communist world fascinated westerners visiting eastern Europe after ’89. As Håkan Forsell puts it, the East offered the image of a ‘future that would never happen’. Four decades of totalitarianism were rapidly forgotten by the seekers of ‘true Europe’.
Although the Kremlin did try to interfere in European politics, focusing on Russia is misleading. Since some governments in the European Union are more interested in spreading fake news than stopping it, tackling disinformation cannot rely on them, Péter Krekó writes.
How precisely are crisis and political movements related? Looking at ‘breakdown’ and ‘world-systems’ approaches to social movements, Donatella Della Porta explains how conventional accounts of extreme rightwing politics fail to explain the new forms of political backlash against late neoliberalism.
Central and eastern Europe is boiling right now. Climate change is here to stay and dealing with it demands a new form of morality. It’s time to get those handheld fans out of grandma’s cupboard.
The conservative EPP and the Socialists & Democrats lost 71 seats between them in May’s election. Could this change the face of European politics? As Portugal exits austerity and Romania confronts corruption in politics, liberalism and populism thrash it out in France. The European centre will hold but must reach out.
Since censorship in state socialist Poland was more lenient than in other countries of the Eastern Bloc, a peculiar counterpublicity was formed between samizdat, émigré publishing and western radio stations which amplified the voice of dissent.
Climate change is the biggest story ever – and yet the media do not do it justice. To blame are a number of journalistic vices, from misinterpretation of the principle of neutrality to a failure to contextualize; from slavishness to conventional media formats to a tendency to individualize the problem. A new climate politics starts by resetting the media agenda.
What next for Britain and the EU? Though the Brexit Party will now be one of the largest national parties in the European Parliament, combined support for the ‘hard Remain’ parties is greater still. The EP election played out as a referendum on Estonia’s government too, while Latvia was spared a populist surge.
Can Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahdha secure the gains of the 2011 uprising and adapt itself to secular democracy? The coalition has been praised for its progressiveness as its new constitution enshrined sexual equality, omitted Sharia law, and maintained the separation between ‘mosque and state’. Leftists, however, fear that these are ‘fig leaf’ measures.
A clash of the titans is emerging in Eurozine, as the anniversary discourse starts to recount the cultural heritage and the political failures of 1989. Aleida Assmann heavily criticizes Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev; Holly Case and Ulrike Liebert offer resolutions.
The European elections have been key to determining citizens’ priorities, albeit with one significant caveat in Ireland. In Poland, voters clearly care more about social welfare than abstract issues like rule of law. And issues of real consequence for the Western Balkans may finally be addressed, now that the elections are over.
The trope of building bridges between peoples on opposing sides of a conflict often seems compelling, and infers an inevitable benevolence. Yet Mykola Riabchuk considers the strategy itself to be misguided, especially when those bridges actually separate people instead of bringing them together.
Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev argue that illiberal politics in central and eastern Europe should be understood primarily as a reaction to the ‘imperative to imitate’ the West after 1989. But to downplay the ideological substance of the new authoritarianism is reckless in the current situation, responds Aleida Assmann. Recalling the contribution of eastern European dissidents to Europe’s culture of human rights offers a corrective to the damaging myth of the ‘victorious West’.
For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to ‘be like the West’ has generated discontent and even a ‘return of the repressed’, as the region feels old nationalist stirrings and new demographic pressures. The origins of illiberalism in central and eastern Europe are emotional and pre-ideological, rooted in rebellion at the humiliations that accompany a project requiring acknowledgment of a foreign culture as superior to one’s own.
The Labour Party’s surprising success in the Netherlands may merely have proven opinion polls wrong but the political earthquake experienced in Austria will clearly have lasting consequences. Both Austria and Malta happened to achieve gender equality among elected MEPs, prefacing a drive to achieve the same among appointments to top EU jobs.