‘Sex at last!’ was the headline of an article in the German weekly Die Zeit about the opening of the first sex shop in Leipzig, East Germany in June 1990. These were the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a country whose citizens “were not allowed to show themselves naked or see the naked bodies of others, except at the nudist beach.” “The workers and peasants,” the article went on, “could only practice voyeurism under the covers of the marriage bed.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall, Communism and the impending unification were giving them, at last, the opportunity to make up for lost time, according to the article’s author.
The stunning defeat of Japan by the Qatari national men’s team in the Asian Cup final took the world of football by surprise. After defeating Lebanon, North Korea, South Korea, and regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Maroons went into the final on February 1 with a 16-0 goal differential, and ultimately beat the Japan side 3-1. Japan is a four-time winner of the tournament and placed third in the Asian Football Association (AFC) ranking. Coming into the tournament, Qatar was ranked outside the top 10 in Asia, and at 93 in the FIFA world ranking.
2018 ended on a high note: the gender gap in Romania continues to close. According to new figures from the renowned World Economic Forum, Romania has closed the overall gender gap to slightly more than 71%, which places Romania 63rdin the global ranking, just behind Croatia (59), Kazakhstan (60) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (62) but quite far behind our neighbours Bulgaria (18), Moldova (35) and Serbia (38).
A new report on how EU member states address the legacy of the Holocaust claims that several Central and East European countries are seeing widespread historical revisionism and are downplaying of World War II crimes. The report was published two days before January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered.
Last week, the biggest public rally to date against China’s growing influence in Central Asia took place in Kyrgyzstan’s capital. On Thursday, January 17, police detained more than a dozen people assembled in Bishkek’s central Ala-Too Square, demanding a curb on work permits for Chinese nationals as well as other measures to reduce the Chinese presence in the country. Similar protests took place on January 7and on December 20, 2018, when a crowd of about 150 people gathered near the Chinese Embassy.
On January 9, a coalition of anti-corruption NGOs in Ukraine rejected almost half of the 113 candidates for the country’s new High Anti-Corruption Court as “questionable.” The move came after the Public Council of International Experts vetoed the first eight candidates for the court a week earlier. The court is a high-stakes international effort to reduce corruption in the Ukraine, and a condition for unlocking the next $2 billion in aid to Kiev from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is slated to open by the end of March.
Last Friday, January 4, a long-awaited macro-economic report by the McKinsey consulting firm, was released by the Lebanese government. Originally scheduled to be publicly released after the new cabinet was inaugurated, caretaker Economy Minister Raed Khoury said Monday that delays with government formation, together with Lebanon’s worsening economic situation, had pushed him to publish the report sooner.
On January 1, Romania took over the rotating presidency of the European Union from Austria. The social democratic PSD-ALDE government led by PrimeMinister Viorica Dăncilă, in cooperation with President Klaus Iohannis from the liberal PNL, will take on important European dossiers like migration and the multi-annual EU budget. Romania will also have to facilitate Brexit on March 29.
2018 was yet another year with ups and downs for Eastern Europe & Central Asia, a region that continues to throw off the yoke of authoritarianism, which dominated the region from the 1920s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although on the surface autocrats and kleptocrats seemed to take even more control of democratic institutions this year, the first cracks in these “illiberal democracies” also started appearing – from Moscow to Budapest, Warsaw to Bucharest. The main highlights of 2018, month by month.
According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2018, published yesterday by the World Economic Forum, the world has collectively closed 68% of the overall gender gap, as measured across four key pillars: economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, and health and survival. Stagnation in the proportion of women in the workplace and women’s declining representation in politics, coupled with greater inequality in accessing health and education, offset improvements in wage equality and the number of women in professional positions, leaving the global gender gap only slightly reduced in 2018 compared to 2017.
