Eastern Europe

One of the great European “auteurs”, Jiři Menzel, has died aged 82. He is one of the last of a generation of film directors the likes of which will never be seen again. They included his fellow Czechs Miloš Forman and Vera Chytilova, the Hungarians Miklós Jancsó, Marta Mészáros and István Szabó, and, from Poland, Andrzej Wajda. From the Soviet Union, Andrei Tarkovsky and Elem Klimov. From other parts of Europe: Theo Angelopoulos from Greece, the doyens of the French New Wave such as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Margarette von Trotta...

In late August, at the request of independent trade unions in Belarus and supported by global union federations, LabourStart launched a campaign demanding an end to state repression in that country. The campaign title was “Stop the violence — defend democracy and human rights”. In a mass mailing to trade union activists, we summarised what had happened in Belarus, noting that “a wave of spontaneous work stoppages swept across the country. Workers started to form strike committees to prepare for a nationwide general strike in support of democratic change.” Our message quoted from some of the...

Belarus has been gripped by protests and strikes following the fraudulent “re-election” of dictator Alexander Lukashenko on 9 August. On 22 August Another Europe Is Possible held a meeting with voices from the frontline of Belarus. Lizaveta Merliak, International Secretary of the Belarusian independent trade union of miners and chemical workers, told us strike committees are now being formed all across Belarus. This is in spite of the fact that Belarus’ repressive strike laws prevent trade unions from putting forward political demands or striking for political reasons. Valentyna Katorzevska...

"For Your Freedom and For Ours: why the Left should support the protests in Belarus" On 9 August, Belarusians went to the polls in a presidential election that, just like every presidential or otherwise election in long-standing autocrat President Alaksandr Łukašenka’s 26-year-long rule, they already knew would be neither free nor fair. The reigning president had already imprisoned several high-profile political opponents, attempted to prevent opposition rallies, curtailed the number of independent observers at polling stations and attempted to crack down on independent attempts to verify the...

On Sunday 9 August the old-style Stalinist president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, rigged the presidential election to stay in power. He has run the country since 1994, controlling state media and the vast state machine. 70,000 attended the rally of the anti-Lukashenko presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya which took place in the capital, Minsk, at the end of July. Tikhanovskaya had entered the contest after her husband, Sergey Tikhanovsky, a well-known blogger and alternative presidential candidate, was arrested and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. Tikhanovskaya’s platform...

Andrzej Duda of the radical right Law and Justice party has been re-elected as Poland’s president, defeating the liberal conservative opposition’s candidate Rafał Trzaskowski 51%-49% in the second round. Ana Oppenheim spoke to Sacha Ismail about the election and struggles in Poland. Ana is a Polish-born socialist who lives in the UK. She is a member of the Labour Party and the Polish left party Razem, an activist in the Labour Campaign for Free Movement and has just been elected to Momentum’s national coordinating group. Poland was due to have its presidential election in May, but with the...

The new emergency law passed in Hungary has made waves in the international press, and rightly, though much of the coverage has been inaccurate. For example, the BBC on 30 March said: “The Hungarian Parliament has voted by 137 to 53 to accept the government’s request for the power to rule by decree during the coronavirus emergency”. However, the 2012 Hungarian Constitution (put in place by Fidesz) already grants the power to rule by decree in a state of emergency. The new law is actually about the edicts that are issued during a state of emergency. A state of emergency legally lasts until the...

John Cunningham’s article Central and Eastern Europe 30 Years On (Solidarity 529) was really interesting and thought provoking. John’s describes and analyzes how the European Union’s Single Market and the operation of “free movement” led to the devastation of what were once reasonably advanced and self sufficient economies and societies, with the loss of significant proportions of mainly younger, more economically active parts of their populations, and their subjugation as part of the “core-periphery” model to almost semi colonial and exploited status within the EU. I think this amounts to a...

Picture: Syrian refugees on the Serb-Hungary border The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989. For those of us old enough to vaguely remember when it was erected (1961 – I was 11) it was an amazing to see “Ossis” (Easterners) and “Wessis” (Westerners) clambering over the Wall, knocking chunks out of it and dancing in the street. This hideous structure, this monument to everything that was vile about Stalinism and its subjugation of the people of Central and Eastern Europe, disintegrated on our TV screens, although it was well into 1990 before the whole monstrosity was finally demolished...

A reader reports from Hungary The results of the 13 October municipal elections in Hungary have seen the first victory for the opposition since 2010. The candidates fielded against Fidesz won the capital, many districts of the capital (each district also has its own mayor), and 50 out of the 100 most populous cities. They’ve mostly lost in the countryside. The reason for this success was the co-operation between opposition parties. In multiple cities, they all joined together to back a single candidate, thus avoiding splitting the vote. In Budapest, the opposition backed Gergely Karácsony...