In the run-up to the upcoming presidential election in Russia, the Western media have focused on the capitalist contenders such as Vladimir Putin and the more West-friendly Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova while unsurprisingly failing to acknowledge the absence of a genuine left candidate from the picture. After touching briefly upon the thwarted liberal contenders, […]| Lefteast
Post-flood restoration on the Željeznica River. Author’s photo. Editors’ note: This article is the last of a six-part series. You can read the entire series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. It seems that at every place in Bosnia-Herzegovina where there is a lovely river, there is a dire threat to its well-being. But just about everywhere, local people are mobilized to defend their livelihoods, their health, and the natural beauty that surrounds them. The post Grassroots ...| Lefteast
Coal-fired power plant at Ugljevik. Author’s photo. Editors’ note: This article is published in a six-part series. You can read the entire series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 6. On my way to Majevica, I stopped for the night in Ugljevik, to the northeast of Lopare. The name Ugljevik is derived from “ugalj,” the local word for coal. The first thing that struck me was the smell of sulfur in the air. The post Grassroots Resistance to Environmental Destruction in Bosnia-...| Lefteast
Typical view of Majevica hills as seen from Busija. Author’s photo. Editors’ note: This article is published in a six-part series. You can read the entire series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, and Part 6. International corporate invasion and the resistance against lithium mining In Bosnia, the quantities of minerals underground are often listed in the millions of tons. There are an estimated 1.5 million tons of lithium carbonate, 94 million tons of magnesium sulfate, and 17 ...| Lefteast
“Ozren is not for sale!” Author’s photo. Editors’ note: This article is published in a six-part series. You can read the others here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. Interethnic cooperation and resistance to mining around Mt. Ozren Take a country the size of West Virginia, half of it covered by mountains. Say those mountains contain thousands of tons of lithium, zinc, lead, nickel, cobalt, and many other strategic minerals. The post Grassroots Resistance to Environmental Dest...| Lefteast
Source of the Pliva River. Author’s photo. Editors’ note: This article is published in a six-part series. You can read the others here: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. U tuđemu svetuBez oca i majkeBez brata, bez sejeSvaka tuđa zemljaTuga je golemaIn a strange landwithout my father, my mother without my brother, my sister every foreign landis a great sorrowLyrics from “S one strane Plive.” Autumn sun flickered through the leaves as my guide Peđa and I walked along the ...| Lefteast
“Others’ profit, our downfall? Lithium and other metal mines, as well as catastrophic pollution, are coming to us! It’s time for united resistance!” – environmentalist sign in Lopare, Majevica. Author’s photo. International mining companies, with the collaboration of corrupt local politicians, ravage the hills and rivers of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Local and regional construction companies add to the despoilment of the rivers by building mini-hydroelectric dams by the dozens. Contrar...| Lefteast
Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the archive of Albano Pereira, selected by Raquel Varela for the 2019 exhibition “Quando mudamos um país ele mud-nos com ele,” supported by the Municipal Council of Oeiras. Note from the editors The translation of this article by Raquel Varela and Roberta Della Santa began as a collaboration between Posle and LeftEast in 2024, marking the 50 year anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. We are publishing it now, in 2025, a year marking the inde...| Lefteast
Far-right football hooligans during the match between FC Carl Zeiss Jena and FC Berlin on April 7, 1990, which resulted in riots in spite of the police presence. Photographer Jan Peter Kasper. Source: German Federal Archive for Wikimedia Commons. On an October morning in 2024, security footage captured two hooded figures throwing Molotov cocktails at a refugee accommodation center in Neu-Hohenschönhausen, Berlin. No one was injured in the attack and the damage was minimal. The assailants wer...| Lefteast
Protest sign reading “Smiling at you, smiling, is Laura Kövesi.” Source: Protestografija (cropped). Notes on the Serbian student movement As in many other regional cases, most notably in Hungary, Poland, or Romania, the commonplace framing of the recent protests in Serbia by Western analysts revolves around the protesters’ anti-corruption demands and demands for the rule of law. The baffled Western—oftentimes liberal—mind cannot comprehend why such disenfranchised people would elec...| Lefteast
The Rise of a Post-Soviet Oligarch After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Georgia entered a period of widespread privatization and economic liberalization. The Soviet command economy was dismantled, and state holdings were sold for pennies. The IMF, Western banks, and other large foreign bureaucracies played a crucial role in this process, urging the establishment of policies that would reduce the state’s role and make room for private enterprise, often in partnership with the ...| Lefteast
Still from the trailer of Not in My Country: Serbia’s Lithium Dilemma. Voiceover and subtitles: “To mine or not to mine? That is the question.” “The European Parliament is the same as the Serbian Parliament: they are not interested in dialogue,” said Zlatko Kokanović, activist from the environmental association Ne damo Jadar (We Will not Give up Jadar), after he was prevented from joining the debate that followed the screening of Peter Tom Jones’s documentary Not in My Count...| Lefteast
Francesca Albanese (in the center) at an alternative event organized after the cancellation of her guest lecture at Freie Universität in Berlin. Photo: Hana Ćurak. Note from LeftEast editors: The horrors of violence and the struggle for justice in Palestine are intertwined with the struggles unfolding in streets, classrooms, and university campuses across the world. As students in Serbia take to the streets to demand an end to authoritarianism and systemic violence, their voices echo those...| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: At a time when we must keep our eyes wide open, the ongoing protests in Serbia demand urgent attention and support. Students and self-organized Serbian society are offering a powerful lesson in fighting for social justice, basic rights, and the true meaning of solidarity. Events are unfolding rapidly: tomorrow, March 15, 2025, a large protest is set to take place in Belgrade, where the Serbian president has openly threatened peaceful demonstrators with violence. T...| Lefteast
Source: Aytan Farhadova/OC Media (2024). Currently, there are more than 330 political prisoners in Azerbaijan, however the Azerbaijani authorities deny their existence in the country. The group is diverse, encompassing journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders (among them labour rights activists and trade union organizers[1]), deported political exiles along with religious figures and political party members. It also includes anti-war and environmental activists, as well as analysts ...| Lefteast
We are witnessing a significant transition from a welfare economy to a warfare economy. Supranational economic structures designed to promote people’s well-being are now being repurposed to support conflicts and enhance border security. Meanwhile, political and cultural elites appear disconnected from the escalating crises. Federico Fellini’s E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983) is one of the best films that depicted significant transitions of this kind in history. This is not jus...| Lefteast
Results of the 2025 German federal election. The main maps shows results for the single-member constituencies (Direktmandate), with crosshatching indicating seats forfeited under the new electoral law. The bottom left shows proportional list seats by state. Source: Erinthecute / Wikimedia Commons. Germany faces its deepest political and economic crisis since reunification. The economy has not recovered from the pandemic, class stratification has deepened (almost one fifth of residents are on ...| Lefteast
Protest signs reading “I want to be able to afford rent on the minimum wage,” “Social housing, not residential complexes,” “Rent for people, not for profit.” Over the last two decades in Romania, the housing question has received more attention than before, from left-wing as well as, at certain times, liberal or even right-wing organizations, alliances, and/or political actors. The country has the highest rate of overcrowding in homes in the EU (which it joined 2007) and a large p...| Lefteast
Leftist filmmakers of the 1960s revolutionized the art of documentary. Often inspired by the radical art of the Soviet 1920s, filmmakers in countries like France and Japan dared to make film into a powerful weapon in the fight against fascism, weaving fiction into nonfiction and surrealism with neorealism to rupture everyday ways of being, seeing, and thinking. Through careful readings of Matsumoto Toshio, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Hani Susumu, and others, Julia Alekseyev...| Lefteast
One of the organizers addressing the strikers after the management failed to show up to negotiations. Photo courtesy of epress.am. LeftEast has kept the author of this article anonymous to protect them. From January 31st to February 10th, workers at the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) in southern Armenia, the country’s largest mining company and its biggest taxpayer, went on a wildcat strike to protest what they described as inhumane and unsafe working conditions and unfairly low ...| Lefteast
Serbia has been shaken in recent months by student-led protests. What began as an isolated demonstration to honour the dead and demand accountability after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad has quickly evolved into a mass movement that is presenting Aleksandar Vučić with his most severe test yet. Cacak, Serbia – January 26, 2025: “We don’t have plan B, but we are destroying plan A”. Photo: Dejan Krsmanovic, Wikimedia Commons. LeftEast thanks the Centre for East European...| Lefteast
January 2025 begins year two of Javier Milei’s four-year presidential term. The first ‘Rothbardian’, ‘paleolibertarian’, ‘anarchocapitalist’ president ever. What do these terms mean and what can this radical Argentine political experiment teach the world? Former Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner and Javier Milei at the latter’s inauguration, 2023. Photo: Prensa del Senado de la Nación Argentina. ‘Rothbardian’? ‘Paleolibertarian’? ‘Anarchocapitalist’? That’...| Lefteast
Eurogroup meeting Arrival of UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves welcomed by President of the Eurogroup Paschal DONOHOE (Eurogroup President). Credit: Wikimedia The UK and European Union Recent opinion polls show an apparent majority preference for UK re entry to the European Union. But after recent history, the UK’s attempts to “reset” its EU relationship are not as straightforward as they seem. For starters, there is a total absence of UK political leadership or strategy on what might be an...| Lefteast
Illustration: Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, Firebird of the Screaming Forest, By the late Iranian-Assyrian Marxist painter Hanibal Alkhas, 1986, Berkeley. In a shocking act that has gone viral, a male monarchist desecrated the grave of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (the pen name: Gohar Morad), the iconic Iranian leftist writer, by urinating on it in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Draped in an Israeli flag, the individual symbolically weaponized Sa’edi’s final resting place—a site sacred to Ira...| Lefteast
Illustration by Maria Farre Originally published in Turkish in Ayrıntı Dergi: a Quarterly of Socialist Politics and Culture, and translated with the help of Tilbe Akan. Since the 1970s, the world left has gradually lost its claim to represent the total liberation of humanity from capitalism and imperialism. At first, the left was drawn into the path of taming the order through “new social movements.” The blocking of this path, as well as the increasing destructiveness of market capitali...| Lefteast
Photo credit:: Ministère de la Défense ukrainien, CC-BY-SA 2.0. Sasha Yaropolskaya and Philippe Alcoy interviewed LeftEast editor Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist who was an activist and participant in several left-wing initiatives in Ukraine before moving to Germany in 2019. Ishchenko currently works at Berlin’s Freie Universität, continuing his research into the Ukrainian revolutions, the left, and the political violence of the far right, which he has been studying for 20 ...| Lefteast
Serbian police beating protesters. Source: Marko Rupena / Kamerades Note from LeftEast editors: In recent years, the Serbian government has grown increasingly repressive, enacting measures aimed at stifling dissent and tightening control over citizens’ rights. Most recently, activist Ivan Bjelić has been detained in Novi Sad during a protest following the deadly accident at the Novi Sad Railway station on 1st of November and is still being kept in custody. In the face of waves of protests...| Lefteast
Caucasus Feminist Anti-War Movement—C-FAM is an emerging movement of feminist and anti-war/peace activists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Unified in our defiance, C-FAM originated from a powerful solidarity action to confront the greenwashing practices at COP29 taking place in Azerbaijan on November 2024, one of the largest events in our region in recent times. Our movement embodies the principles of feminism, anti-militarism, anti-war, anti-authoritarianism, anti-nationalism, and...| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This interview was originally published by Portal Novosti, on September 12, 2024. Translation by Sonja Dragović. Rio Tinto has become a symbol of the influence of foreign corporations on Serbian society, which is indeed enormous, and this can be attributed to the role played by President Aleksandar Vučić and the entire Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). This is literally the story of a company and a ruler ganging up on the people of their country, and it could ser...| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This interview was originally published on Meduza.mk on September 27, 2024. The text has been lightly edited. After re-reading The Partisan Counter-Archives at the start of the summer, I concluded that Kirn’s critical insights on historical revisionism, nationalism in the post-Yugoslav space, historical ruptures, and politics of memory are acutely relevant. At the […]| Lefteast
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Beirut and Belgrade show off their emergence out of war by investing in massive construction projects on their waterfronts. But these modern projects are also sites of gentrification, erasure, and political contestation. Join Adriana and Miloš on their walks as they reflect on how capital from Arab Gulf countries is building new neighbourhoods of glass and steel in both post-war cities.| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This article was originally published on Counterfire on February 4, 2025. On January 28, the ongoing mass protest movement in Serbia brought down the country’s government, inaugurating the biggest challenge to the more than decade-old rule of the authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić. The basic chronology of events is now well-known to […]| Lefteast
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The article was originally published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung here. It is reproduced with permission. In the past decade, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has emerged as one of Europe’s most important — and controversial — politicians: no small feat for the leader of a country whose economic or strategic importance on both European and global […]| Lefteast
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Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 6, 2024. Hungary’s current cycle of industrialization within electric vehicle (EV) and battery production chains may be seen as a typical case for third-country attempts to “hedge” geoeconomic competition (Camba and Epstein, 2023). Attempting to capitalize on its position at the Eastern periphery […]| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 2, 2024. Perhaps more than any other material, lithium has, in recent years, been increasingly presented as the silver bullet for the so-called twin transition—the digital and the green transitions. Lithium is essential to most conventional batteries used in diverse technologies, from phones […]| Lefteast
Since the beginning of March, there has been an unprecedented campaign of violence against refugees and foreigners in Sofia. Polarising and racist statements by politicians and uncritical, sensationalist media coverage have unleashed a wave of attacks. The Bulgarian capital, which is where most institutions and facilities dealing with migrants are located and where most economic […]| Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: The following manifesto was released on March 3 in anticipation of the upcoming Russian election on March 17th. It is the product of a number of Russian leftist academics, politicians, bloggers, and activists. Because true opposition candidates have been kept off the ballot, this manifesto calls on Russian voters to spoil […]| Lefteast
