Eastern approaches

ANYONE with a name like Borat who runs for high office in an ex-communist state would seem to be heading for a fall. All the more so if he supports a programme of spending cuts and other austerity measures.

Yet on December 2nd Borut Pahor (pictured above) ousted the incumbent, Danilo Türk, to become Slovenia’s new president. With all but a tiny proportion of the votes counted, Mr Pahor, a former prime minister, had secured a 67% share of the votes.

The role of the president in Slovenia is largely ceremonial though he can exert considerable moral influence. Mr Pahor’s triumph will not change much, even for Slovenia’s population of two million.

Continue reading "A vote for austerity policies" »

AS the electoral turmoil faded into the background, Ukraine marked two important anniversaries last week. The first was eight years since the Orange Revolution of 2004. The second was eight decades since the Holodomor.

Holodomor literally means death by hunger. In 1932 and 1933, a vast famine in Soviet Ukraine killed three to seven million people, according to estimates. While people starved, the grain was shut away in barns for export. Many historians agree that the famine was man-made; some say it was genocide.

Yet the Holodomor is not widely known about outside Ukraine. In the 1930s, it was hushed up by many western correspondents in return for access to the Kremlin.

Continue reading "Ukraine remembers the Holodomor" »

LISTS have a terrible resonance for Hungary’s Jews. When the Nazis invaded in March 1944 they used the lists of members of the Jewish community to organise one of the swiftest and most efficient episodes of the Holocaust. With the ready assistance of Hungarian officials and the Gendarmerie 430,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a few weeks, most to their deaths. On some days the gas chambers and crematoria processed more than 1,000 people an hour.

Continue reading "Márton's list" »

AT nightfall on October 28th everyone knew who had won Ukraine’s parliamentary elections. But it took two weeks for the official results to be published. The vote counting in a handful of problematic constituencies dragged on for days. Five remain unresolved.

In Verkhovna Rada, the 450-seat parliament, President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions will have 185 deputies, the opposition Fatherland 101 and the Communists 32. Nobody expects much from the reelected Party of Regions or the young but dull Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who led Fatherland in the elections.

Continue reading "After the elections" »

Gordon Bajnai makes Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling populist party, nervous. A mild-mannered businessman, he seems an unlikely David against the government’s Goliath. He served as prime minister between 2009 and 2010, as a non-party technocrat leading a Socialist administration. That government was trounced in the polls and Fidesz won an unprecedented two-third majority.

He announced his return to politics at a rally on October 23rd, the anniversary of Hungary’s failed 1956 uprising, at the head of Together 2014, an umbrella organisation that aims to draw support from the centre-right to centre-left.

Continue reading "Bajnai is back" »

ONE hundred years ago war was raging in Europe but almost everyone seems to have forgotten this. After the Ottoman defeat by the Italians in Libya, in autumn 1912 the Montenegrins, Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians allied to drive the Turks out of their remaining possessions in Europe. In the second Balkan war, in 1913, the Bulgarians, feeling cheated, fought the Serbs and the Greeks. The Romanians joined in, and the Ottomans got some territory back.

The wars cost perhaps 200,000 lives and reshaped the map of south-eastern Europe. They ushered in an era of ethnic cleansing and population exchanges, which saw millions lose their homes and ancient communities uprooted and dispersed.

Continue reading "Reshaping the map of south-eastern Europe" »

THE Czech Republic's rickety government warded off a potentially fatal assault from its own ranks. But expect little stability in the long run. The three-party, centre-right cabinet survived a confidence vote on November 7th but its majority in parliament remains feeble.

The fate of Petr Nečas's cabinet was in the hands of renegade lawmakers from the prime minister’s ruling Civic Democratic Party, also known as ODS. The six men (one of whom left the party recently) demanded that the government gives up its plan of raising taxes in order to meet Brussels' budgetary criteria and keep the state's borrowing costs low. They had insisted on killing the disputed bill.

Continue reading "Another lease of life" »