Seven months after a complicated presidential election, the Republic of Moldova is again in the grip of election fever. This time around, the country will be hosting snap parliamentary elections, but the background, protagonists and stakes are mostly the same. The main battle will be pitting the center-right pro-Western Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), previously led by president Maia Sandu, against the center-left pro-Russian Party of Socialists (PSRM) led by the former president Igor Dodon.
Alternative social networks have also emerged in the problem countries of the EU, Poland and Hungary, where the right and the far right are looking for platforms that do not restrict posting radical content. These networks have emerged as both the Kaczyński regime and the Viktor Orban regime already exercise significant control over the media in their countries.
Sanctions and blacklisting by the US, a wave of resignations, revisions over the spending of the GERB cabinet in the last decade and mismanagement of financial aids: all of these are making headlines in the Bulgarian media as the country prepares for early elections on July 11 - a result of the inconclusive ones from the spring and the inability of any party to form a coalition.
With the early parliamentary election in the Republic of Moldova around the corner, the political and economic chatter is again focusing on the benefits for Chișinău. The matter has again sparked a polemic: would it be better for the Republic of Moldova to head east or west? A persistent question which Moldovan politicians have been juggling with for three decades, while Moldova remains one of Europe’s poorest and most corrupt countries, with one of the largest shares of population migration.
More than a 25 years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, the country is still an "unfinished project", being more corrupt, less stable and less developed than other former Yugoslav countries.
A Pentagon report on UFOs will be presented this month in Congress. The US Army says it has no evidence that UFOs are in fact extraterrestrial aircraft. Nor can it claim they aren’t. The army simply doesn’t know what these “unidentified aerial phenomena” are.
The incident with the forced landing of a Ryanair plane and the detention of Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapieha only forced the European Union and the United States to take more active action against Belarus. However, Russia is also on the trajectory of absorbing Belarus in the autumn of 2021.
The case of Vrbětice – the revelation that explosions of ammunition depots in 2014 were apparently caused by agents of the Russian military intelligence GRU – shook relations between Prague and Moscow in April. In May, there was a quake on the domestic political scene.
The unionist movement in the Republic of Moldova has always benefited from the contribution of some intellectuals and could count on the votes of about 10% of the electorate. This electorate has become increasingly fragmented in recent years, amid differences between unionists, who have split into competing parties. The centrifugal trend has worsened over time and it is very likely that not even for the snap elections of July 11 the unionist forces will be able to coagulate.
Under a conservative AKP regime since November 2002, Turkey has initiated numerous construction projects in the early 2010s, presented obsessively to the public as signs of the country's growth as major regional power. Leaving aside that they contribute massively to the destruction of the environment, they also threaten to become long-term financial "black holes", consuming insatiably taxpayers' money for generations to come.
It is very difficult to talk a dictatorship into behaving nicely. The only way is for the regime to be somehow constrained, to be made aware that there are consequences for its behavior. The most common method is that of sanctions; the problem is that dictatorships can have a fairly high tolerance for them.
The NATO Summit in Brussels, to be held on June 14, has rekindled talks regarding Ukraine’s accession to the North-Atlantic Treaty Alliance. While the accession is being discussed overtly in Kiev, many states remain adamant.
Moldovan citizens often call their country “Wonderland”. Obviously, they do it pejoratively, and the election campaign for the snap parliamentary elections due on July 11th seems to be another reason to call it that. In the past week, there’s been an outcry in the entire Moldovan media about a so-called disclosure made by a controversial police officer.
After 11 days of fighting, Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire agreement that solves nothing: it’s just a short break until the new round of clashes beings.
After tensions in the 1990s and the war in Kosovo, Belgrade's relations with NATO have fundamentally improved, as Serbia has sought to break out of the isolation of the Milosevic era. The partnership with NATO is a constant in Serbia's policy, but the relationship is only partially assumed: the authorities emphasize the country's neutrality, the media focuses on the much weaker cooperation with Russia, and the population sees no gain in a possible NATO integration.
Russian claims that EU and the USA are allegedly interfering in the parliamentary election in Chișinău, scheduled for July 11. On May 13, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said “it is regrettable to see the growing interference of the United States and EU countries in the domestic politics of the Republic of Moldova, something which we firmly condemn”.
Bulgaria braces for new parliamentary elections on July 11 which fuels the unpredictability in the country’s political life and raises several questions - will GERB return stronger or weaker, will popular singer and talk show host Slavi Trifonov continue his political rise after being a runner-up in the April elections, will the far-right see a resurgence after surprisingly low results? While politicians are trying to find some common ground, Bulgaria’s slow vaccination rollout, the still present COVID-19 pandemic, EU’s Green Deal and the previous government’s spending all remain unaddressed.
The concentration of Russian troops near the borders of Ukraine, which began in late March 2021, was accompanied by what seemed to be an information-psychological operation to dehumanize the enemy. Despite the reduction of tensions after a number of events in the international arena, that technology deserves detailed analysis.
Hungary’s plans to become a hub for eastern superpowers were widely mocked after Viktor Orban’s government’s “Eastern Wind” policy had to be renamed “Eastern Opening” after a party official noted that an eastern wind blows things everywhere except to the east. That hilarity turned to anger, however, when it emerged that China plans to build its first ever European university on the banks of the Danube by way of a EUR 1.5bn construction project that will be funded by Hungarian taxpayers.
Making predictions before elections in the Republic of Moldova means hazarding a guess. Such an action requires not only knowledge and intuition, but also a lot of luck and a special flair for anticipating last-minute backstage arrangements. However, the campaign for the snap parliamentary elections due on July 11 has kicked off, and based on current data and trends, we will analyze who the actors are and what chances they stand at the moment. A dirty election campaign is announced from the left wing, which seems ready to bring into play resources that are incomparable to those available to the right.
In the Republic of Moldova, where half the population wants to join the European Union and the other half the Eurasian Union, where the number of supporters of the union with Romania is increasing, but that of the USSR nostalgics does not seem to decrease, where unionist marches would still end in confrontations a few years ago, May 9th could not but be a new bone of contention for politicians, and also a reason for debate in society, especially since much of that society was educated in the Soviet spirit of the significance of this date.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, set to transport Russian gas straight to Germany, seems to have hit a few snags amidst growing opposition. Even if it does get finalized, Nord Stream 2 could prove useless due to Europe’s transition to alternative energy sources.
In a little over four years, Russia has become increasingly belligerent towards the West, hitting a new milestone, which is interesting, to put it mildly: three hundred and eleven (!) Russian diplomats have been expelled from the United States and Europe due to their actions in these states.
The Czech Republic has announced that it is expelling 18 Russian diplomats, following the sabotage of an ammunition depot by Moscow’s agents. The measure seems to have been taken without consulting all the domestic key players or Prague’s Western partners: in the days that followed, both the lack of cohesion of the state authorities and the hesitations of external partners to show solidarity were apparent.
A religious movement in Poland, with ties in Brazil and ramifications within the Warsaw administration, is behind a drive to impose an ultra-conservative agenda in Catholic countries in the EU.
For a brief moment Russia looked like it was going to war with Ukraine, rallying a significant number of forces on the Ukrainian border, in Crimea and the Black Sea. The crisis has passed, momentarily, but the many critical problems in the region remain unsolved.
Former president Igor Dodon, the current leader of the Party of Socialists in the Republic of Moldova (PSRM), the largest party in the Moldovan Parliament, seems determined to cling to power, much like his predecessors. It was only a matter of time before Dodon moved from theory to practice. Therefore, at the end of last week, while on a visit to Moscow, Dodon mounted a fierce attack on the rule of law, namely on the Constitutional Court in Chișinău.
Along with Poland, Romania has always been the most skeptical-of-Russia country in Eastern Europe. This does not mean that the Russian influence is not felt in this country as well.
Russia continues to rally more and more troops on the Ukrainian border, exceeding the level reported in 2014, the year of the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula which eventually triggered the conflict in Donbass. The mobilization is doubled by a massive disinformation campaign depicting Ukraine as the aggressor, killing civilians in Donbass and planning an offensive in the region.
One of the mantras in some political and media circles over the last decades is that the bloc does not have a foreign policy and it is weak in its external relations. This is a rather erroneous judgement.
The surrender or transfer of power have always been the center of attention in Chisinau, which proves that democracy, even after 30 years of independence from the Soviet Union, is still fragile.
The United States and NATO will withdraw from Afghanistan nearly 20 years since their first intervention in this country. President Joe Biden decided all troops must pull back by September 11, four months later than the original deadline set by the Trump administration. The Taliban perceive the Americans’ withdrawal as a win. It remains to be seen if this will suffice or if they try to press their advantage and continue their war against the government in Kabul.
