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Parliamentary elections in Russia are about much more than just window-dressing. They serve to legitimise the authoritarian regime in the eyes of the public as well as verify the efficacy of the state administration machinery. The tangible unease among the Kremlin’s decision-makers, provoked by an unfavourable economic future and a worrisome evolution in the social mood, has accelerated efforts to consolidate authoritarian rule. New repressive laws, passed in 2020, are intended to ultimately suppress civic rights and freedoms and nip any forms of grassroots mobilisation in the bud.
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The political transformations that occurred in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine in the second half of 2020 will have long-lasting consequences on the democratic development of these critical countries in the region. Each of them has made qualitative steps forward, leaving behind more oligarchic-centric rules of the game. In Ukraine, amid the territorial-administrative decentralisation efforts and electoral reform, the local elections brought to the frontline a new generation of locally grown politicians. They obtained more tools to counter-balance the big political parties in charge in Kyiv. Local democracy got a chance to shine, but long-term success depends on how the political newcomers can be protected from being subordinated by the oligarchs.
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Once a frontrunner in democracy in the region, Georgia now faces a crisis of democracy. What was supposed to be the country’s first predominantly proportional parliamentary elections that would strengthen representation and bring in a diverse, pluralistic parliament resulted in the opposite happening. Georgia’s 2020 parliamentary elections became known as “the least democratic and free” in the Georgian Dream’s rule by the country’s leading NGOs and election-watchdogs. With growing evidence and allegations that the elections were rigged, the united opposition has boycotted parliament and most have annulled their mandates. For the first time in the country’s history since independence, a one-party parliament convocated alone on December 11th 2020.
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During the two rounds of elections to the Seimas on October 11th and 25th, 141 parliamentarians were elected to represent Lithuania’s parliament for the next four years. The results of the elections show that the Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats won the elections with the most seats (50) in the Seimas. The previous ruling party, the Lithuanian Peasant Popular Party, won 32 seats while the Social Democrats and the Liberal Movement received 13 mandates each. The Freedom Party, founded in 2019, won 11 seats, and the Labour Party won 10 seats. The new ruling coalition was formed by the Homeland Union, the Liberal Movement and the Freedom Party, which together secured a majority of 74 seats.
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An interview with Henrik Müller, a professor of economic policy journalism at the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Interviewer: Markus Krzoska
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In mid-November of 2020 I participated in a roundtable at the annual conference of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) on the theme, “Polish Solidarity: A Glorious Revolution and its Unexpectedly Tortuous Aftermath.” Joining me virtually were Timothy Garton Ash, Ireneusz Krzeminski, Jan Kubik, and David Ost. We were to reflect on the trajectory of this once enormous social movement in the post-communist reality. I, in particular, was invited to reflect on my work initiated by Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland, which I had published in 2005 and again in 2014. By the time of the academic roundtable, the world was riveted on the third, exhilarating week of wildly audacious, feminist-initiated, grassroots nationwide demonstrations across Poland in support of reproductive rights, democratic rule of law and separation of state and church. The euphoria of revolution was palpable.
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Since the elections in Belarus on August 9th 2020, both the image of this country once portrayed as “the most severe dictatorship in Europe” and its people have significantly changed. International audiences can now see that every weekend – sometimes even on weekdays – large crowds come to the streets of Belarusian cities to express their discontent with the forged election results. The people have been demanding freedom and fair elections, thereby showing their attachment to common European values. Citizens in Belarus have finally awakened and are working towards change.
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The focus of this paper is on the concept of poverty and its implementation into regulations, policies and practices for the protection of the poor during the period in which socialism was the official doctrine in Yugoslavia (1945-1991). The introductory part of the paper is followed by the Marxist explanations of poverty and their adaptation in socialist Yugoslavia. The description and analysis of poverty during the socialist period in Yugoslavia, as well as its ideological and administrative constructions and reconstructions in and through the social welfare system are put forward in the central part of the paper. The objective of the paper is to present the way that the concept of poverty was framed in the policy field, how it was interpreted, as well as how thesepolicies were implemented with a view to guaranteeing “freedom from necessity” in the society of post-war Yugoslavia. The methodological approach deployed is the qualitative analysis.
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Reflecting on the May 2019 European Parliament elections, the EU democratic institutions are in need of efficiently responding to the discrepancies between public agendas and policy-making (as shown in the Macedonia naming dispute), and the threatening dynamics of authoritarian populism, as well as to unpredictable reactions from diverse groups and citizens, especially from the neglected, excluded and marginal ones. These citizens cannot handle complexity and react by voting for protest candidates/movements and supporting radical, yet oversimplified and inadequate, solutions to complex problems. Given the potentiality of crisis cascades and that an over-standardized “one size fits all” approach does not work anymore, the EU policy-making experts should arguably turn their analytic attention to existing drivers of political destabilisation by adopting new knowledge bases and sources. This pertains to a fresh theoretical understanding of nonlinear sociopolitical phenomena (from populist reactions of any kind to social media behaviours), that is, a deeper, complexity-friendly approach drawn from new scientific advancements and coupled with innovative policy designs, aimed to rebalance the system and to defend the European project against further failures.
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Given the current pandemic coronavirus, the paper analyzes the state’s response to the disease caused by the virus (COVID-19) from the standpoint of two neighbouring countries i.e. the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia. Special attention was paid to the states’ response to the pandemic from human rights perspective. The research ws conducted into the patterns of their “struggle”, especially as regards the human rights restrictions they had opted for within their constitutional framework. The starting point of the paper was that human rights often are the victims of the crises and that they are easily restricted for a longer periods. In this respect, the author deals with possible answers to the questions about the quality and content of human rights, and how the protection of human rights was ensured in these exceptional circumstances. This legal framework was linked to current statistics on the number of COVID-19 cases. Having analyzed the response of the two states, it could be noted that both states have constitutional provisions governing the state of emergency, allowing them the rule of law in these exceptional circumstances. Both constitutions recognize a list of human rights that may be derogated in state of emergency. However, in Croatia, the state of emergency was not introduced, and the human rights were restricted in accordance with the given epidemiological situation. In Serbia, the struggle against COVID-19 took place in state of emergency and was marked by an extremely restrictive regime of human rights, which was partly in conflict with the constitutional order. The constitutional concept of absolute protection of human rights, in their broadest sense, had proved unsustainable in practice.
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Polki i Polacy doświadczają głębokiej zbiorowej przemiany, jaką przeżywają też inne nowoczesne zbiorowości. Sytuacja w Polsce jest lokalnym symptomem kryzysu interregnum i wyczerpania modelu cywilizacyjnego. Tych procesów społecznych doświadczamy w Polsce, czyli wszędzie.
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The regional government of the autonomous region of Catalonia and the central government of Spain have started a public conflict in recent years. The situation, originally domestic, has spread internationally in an effort of the regional government to attract external support to their political claims. The EU has become the object of desire of both contenders seeking international legitimacy for their actions. The current research aims to clarify the three-way relations and tries to establish the truth about the different positions held in this conflict.
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In the 2017 German election, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) did exceptionally well among workers. AfD’s electoral success can be attributed to their new focus on social policy, which is inconsistent with the neoliberal programme of the party. They combine social issues with nationalism and advocate privileges for Germans in the distribution of social benefits. This study investigates AfD’s new interest in social issues and the programmatic contradictions which accrue from it. It was found that AfD with its ideological incoherence conforms to Luke March’s definition for social populist parties. AfD turned to social populism because it makes them more attractive to workers, not because of their genuine interest in social issues. The party now has adopted a strategy of ambivalence, representing neoliberal and social populist positions at the same time; and it can be expected that they will play with this ambiguity in the future.
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Throughout the history of the world, one of the attitudes that individuals have been subjected to, and perhaps the most important one, has been discrimination. Discrimination is the prejudice treatment of a person or group due to some of their characteristics. This behavior can be positive or negative. However, discrimination is generally a concept that has a negative tune. Discriminatory thoughts and practices are present in the background of all threats and violations against fundamental human rights. Discrimination in matters such as religion, language, race and gender causes violations of human rights. God defines man as a being that he breathed from His own soul. Regardless of individual’s race, language, color and gender, God gave human beings great values, deemed worthy in the Quran. Everyone who believes or does not believe is equal before the law. In this study, based on the equality in question, it will be tried to mention the discrimination against women in Iran's legal system.
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This article investigates voter behavior in the 2019 Lithuanian presidential elections. Even though they appear as first-order (citizens elect an executive that enjoys considerable powers), Lithuanian academic literature has rather neglected this topic in the recent decades. In this article, I employ data from a post-electoral survey conducted after the most recent presidential elections and investigate what kinds of voters and motives were hiding beneath the results of the first and second round in the 2019 presidential elections. Results show that the cleavages that are relevant in the Seimas elections (ethnic and evaluations of Soviet times) also influence the vote choice in the presidential elections. Analysis shows that a ideological cleavage related to social liberalism may becoming important in Lithuania. Lastly, there are signs of retrospective voting, as the voters that evaluate the economy better were more inclined to vote for the presidential candidate of the governing coalition. However, the overall effect is not strong.
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This paper considers the issue of the influence of social media on politics in Russia. Having emerged in the late 1990s as a tool for informal communication, social media became an important part of Russian socio-political life by the end of the 2010s. The past two decades are a sufficient period of time to draw some intermediate conclusions of the impact of social media on the political development of the country. To do this is the main goal of the paper. Its main body consists of three parts. The first chapter gives a general characterization of Russian social media, its significance in terms of influencing the formation of public opinion, public debate, and the socio-political agenda in the country. The second chapter examines the use of social media by the Russian opposition and protest movements. The third chapter analyses the use of social media by the Russian authorities.
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Interview with Yves Mény by Dominykas Kaminskas
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Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán nearly ship-wrecked the EU’s summit in December 2020. A new state-of-law mechanism, to be introduced in early 2021, had triggered a veto threat by Hungary and Poland, the two most “illiberal” members of the EU. The right-wing populist governments in Budapest and Warsaw framed the state-of-law mechanism as an infringement of their national sovereignty. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as the leader of the member-state presiding over the rotating European Council at the time, succeeded to forge a difficult compromise with Orbán. This contribution examines the sovereignty concept brought up in the argumentation and discourses of the Orbán government. It turns out that Orbán and his strategists heavily rely on the theoretical concepts of the controversial German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. It seems that the autocratic rule of the Orbán government, rhetorically justified by a Schmittian sovereignty claim, only serves one purpose: to rob the country and to enrich his family and a small number of crony capitalists, created by him and dependent on him.
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