Category Archives: Blog

Votes and profits

Incumbent Gabriela Firea (PSD) and mayor hopeful Nicușor Dan (“candidate of the right”) are in a tight race for Bucharest City Hall, currently only separated by two percentage points. If elected, Dan promises to get rid of the capital’s six administrative sectors. Manufacturing is picking up again after the lockdown and other coranavirus measures, with a Norwegian maritime crane company opening up shop in Sfântu Gheorghe and the German Daimler Group increasing production of transmission gearboxes in Sebeș, Alba county. And according to a new study, the average download speed in Romania has tripled since last year, meaning you can read this week’s issue of Romanian Dispatch while simultaneously streaming audio and downloading a whole library in the background…

Romanian Dispatch #5 (September 4-11, 2020)

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Sour loser

PSD leader Marcel Ciolacu gambled and lost. He did not manage to bring down the Orban government due to a low turn out of his own PSD deputies and subsequently blamed pretty much everyone for his failure and the high COVID-19 infection rates. Fortunately, there is lots of EU money coming to Romania to absorb the negative impact of the corona pandemic. And investigators determined the cause of death of the fugitive Iranian judge who was found dead in a Bucharest hotel in June. You will find out about these developments and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch.

Please do not hesitate to forward Romanian Dispatch to others you think might be interested in weekly news and analyses from Romania.

Romanian Dispatch #4 (August 29-September 4, 2020)

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Ciolacu elected PSD leader

With daily coronavirus infection rates continuing to hover around 1,200, no one really knows what September will bring. If it is up to the newly elected PSD’s leader Marcel Ciolacu we will not have a government as of next week. But COVID-19 is unlikely to interfere with the local elections elections on September 27. There is a hotly contested mayoral race in Târgu Mureș. Smart mobility options keep expanding in Romania while new data show that Romanian migrant workers seem to be reluctant to return to Western Europe after they got back to Romania during the lockdown this spring. You will find out about these developments and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch.

Please do not hesitate to forward Romanian Dispatch to others you think might be interested in weekly news and analyses from Romania.

Romanian Dispatch #3 (August 22-28, 2020)

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Intellectual weight for change in Timișoara

Romania is gearing up for local elections on September 24 and mayoral races around the country promise to be full of suspense. Schools are getting ready to re-open too, although the high rate of COVID-19 infections may be a spoiler. That and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch.

Please do not hesitate to forward Romanian Dispatch to others you think might be interested in weekly news and analyses from Romania.

Romanian Dispatch #2 (August 15-21, 2020)

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Is he running or not?

This is the first official issue of Romanian Dispatch, after we launched our zero issue last week. Thank you for all your positive feedback and congratulatory messages!

Romanian Dispatch will arrive in your mailbox each Saturday morning and provides you with a summary of the main news of the week, highlights particularly important developments and provides context and analysis — from politics to pop culture. Starting in September we will also be offering a weekly podcast.

Please do not hesitate to forward Romanian Dispatch to others you think might be interested in weekly news and analyses from Romania.

Romanian Dispatch #1 (August 8-14, 2020)

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“Marxist-liberal alliance”

This is the zero issue of Romanian Dispatch, a weekly English-language newsletter, and soon also a podcast, about developments in Romania — from politics to pop culture.

Every week we plan to compile the main news of the week, highlight particularly important developments and provide context and analysis.

This is an experiment and we very much like to hear from you if this newsletter is useful to you, what is missing, redundant, etc. Please do not hesitate to forward Romanian Dispatch to others you think might be interested in weekly news and analyses from Romania.

Romanian Dispatch #0 (August 1-7, 2020)

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‘We’ll see the best of him from now until the end of the season’: Sheringham on Haller

Former West Ham striker Teddy Sheringham comments on current striker

Sébastien Haller, the Hammer’s £45 million summer transfer, has been criticized much lately by the fans after a reasonably successful start of the season.

Yet speaking to Love Sport Radio, former West Ham forward Teddy Sheringham predicts that under Moyes Haller will find the net again soon. 

“I think the problem with Haller is they haven’t been playing to his strengths, with Moyes coming in – I think he will realise what he’s good at and what kind of service he likes.”

Haller seems to have shared in the rather miserable form of the team in the past months, which is now fighting relegation. He has also been too isolated and hasn’t been serviced good enough.

As TBR wrote, it’s worth noting that Haller has managed to be effective without the help of a strike partner. With six goals and one assist in 23 Premier League appearances he still is West Ham’s top scorer.

At both his previous clubs, the Dutch side FC Utrecht and Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt, Sébastien Haller had a slow start before reaching 29 goals (in 58 appearances) at Frankfurt and 45 at Utrecht (in 87 games).

“He’ll come alive, he’s had that settling in period he hasn’t done great, I think he’ll be alright and we’ll see the best of him from now until the end of the season,” said Sheringham.

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Women to rule a district of Istanbul for first time in history

ISTANBUL— Largely gone unnoticed during the contested mayoral election in Istanbul, for the first time in Turkish history, female candidates managed to win in more neighbourhoods than men in a district, Turkey’s largest administrative unit after a province. The neighbourhoods of Kadıköy, a district of Istanbul with over half a million inhabitants, will now be ruled by 12 female mukhtars and nine male counterparts, reported bianet.

The Kadıköy district on the Asian side of Istanbul already had 10 female mukthars, heads of a neighbourhood, before the March 31 municipal elections but in two of the three neighbourhoods where the mukhtar changed, female candidates took over. In a country in which only 17.4% of MPs are women — the global average is 24% — and barely eight per cent of municipal politicians are women, this is a very significant development. This could well be the beginning of a trend in which women play a bigger role in Turkish politics in Istanbul and other urban centers like Ankara and Izmir.

The cosmopolitan Kadıköy district faces the historic city centre of Istanbul on the European side of the Bosporus. Kadıköy is also the name of the most prominent neighbourhood of the district, a residential and commercial area with numerous bars, cinemas and bookshops, and the cultural centre of the Anatolian side of Istanbul. The centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) is usually successful in Kadıköy in both local and national elections. Since the mid-1990s the mayor has been from the CHP. The CHP traditionally has been much more open to women and women’s political representation than the conservative AKP.

Outside Istanbul women have been successful in the location election too. The left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has won the elections in three metropolitan, five city and 46 district municipalities, according to the latest figures from the state-run Anadolu Agency. Using the co-chairpersonship system, the party nominated both a woman and a man for each of the municipalities that it ran for office. Although only one person can be officially nominated for a municipality, a co-chair can come into office after the elections. In five districts that HDP won in the southeastern province Mardin, all five candidates were women.


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Book Review: Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

Nora Ikstena, a prose writer and essayist, is one of the most influential and widely translated writers in Latvia. After obtaining a degree in philology from the University of Latvia, she studied English literature at Columbia University in New York. Her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories under the title Nieki un izpriecas (Trifles and Joys), appeared in 1995. Ikstena has published a novel almost every year since. In her prose, which is marked by an elaborate style and detailed approach to language, she often reflects on life, death, love, and faith. Her latest novel, Soviet Milk (Mātes piens), has now been published in English.

Soviet Milk depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in Soviet-ruled Latvia between 1944 and 1989, the mother’s life span and also the beginning and ending of the Soviet period. It is also the story of three generations of women – each trying to cope with the Soviet regime in their own way.

Soviet Milk is narrated in alternating sections by the mother and her daughter, both of whom are unnamed. The mother is born in 1944, towards the end of World War II, and shortly before occupied Latvia is liberated from the Nazis. On the eve of Christmas that year, Soviet soldiers, the new occupying force, plunder her parents’ yard, ransack the house, and take the father away. In response, the newborn is quickly whisked away to Riga, Latvia’s capital, in a suitcase.

The daughter, born in 1969, the same year as the author, grows up in Riga, where her grandmother and stepfather have an apartment. With her mother – her father is not in the picture – focused on her medical career, the daughter is mostly left to herself and grows up cared for and supported by her loving grandmother and stepfather. “Throughout my childhood the smell of medicine and disinfectant replaced the fragrances of mother’s milk. These chemicals would hang like a cloud around my mother: there when she returned from exhausting night duty at the maternity hospital; still there when, after long hours of wakefulness, she caught up on sleep at home,” the daughter recalls.

The mother is clearly damaged psychologically by the political repression under Soviet rule. As the title suggests, milk emerges as an underpinning theme. “My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it,” the mother says. This rejection of one of the few commodities that is widely available, and impulse to self-harm, is a symptom of the internalization of political oppression.

While her daughter is in secondary school, the mother, a gynaecologist and fertility specialist, is awarded a prestigious research fellowship in Leningrad. Already known for her critical attitude towards the Soviet rulers, her medical career is destroyed after she molests the abusive husband of one of her patients who has sought her help to get pregnant. She is banned from doing research by the Soviet authorities and returns to Latvia where she is forced to work in a clinic in the country side. There she becomes more and more reclusive, and occasionally suicidal, not being able to copy with life in a totalitarian state – leaving her teenage daughter ever more in the care of her mother and stepfather in the capital Riga, who tell her stories about what life was like in Latvia before the Soviet occupation. The grandmother gives her granddaughter the love that her daughter is unable to provide. The mother subsequently flees in drugs and reading Moby Dick and samizdat literature. The daughter tries to take care of her mother and has a zest for life her mother lacks. She graduates high school and goes on to study medicine. As a student she actively engages in political organizing against the Soviet authorities, which eventually leads to Soviet troops withdrawing in 1990.

Soviet Milk is a beautifully written but also disturbing novel. It reminds us of the tragic reality of life under totalitarian rule and how hard it is to survive in such circumstances for uncompromising souls like the mother in this story. A century has passed since Latvia became an independent nation in 1918. For half of that time it was part of the Soviet Union. In Ikstena’s novel, the longing for freedom finally prevails, as it did in Latvia, which celebrated its centenary and liberation from Soviet occupation last month.

Nora Ikstena. Soviet Milk. London: Peirene Press, 2018. Translated by Margita Gailitis.

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Former Communist States Are Bracing Themselves Against Russia – and Western Europe

U.S. President Donald Trump has been visiting Europe for summits with NATO and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Yet what many forget is that last summer Trump’s first state visit to the European Union was to Poland. In the shadow of a monument to the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, he gave an unusual refined speech, which Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians could watch live via their state TV networks. They did so massively.

“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump said. “On both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles,” he continued, speaking next to the monument of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, CNBC reported. The speech was of an unusually high rhetorical level and contrasted sharply with Trump’s usual reckless style. This must have come from the pen of Steve Bannon, analysts concluded. The former head strategist of the White House is a well-known adherent to the ‘alternative right’ conviction that Europe is falling prey to multiculturalism, advancing Islamism and globalization.

That story, packed in oratorical craftsmanship, was exactly the right sound in the right place. From all over the country, buses with Trump fans came to take part in a ‘patriotic picnic’ in honor of the presidential visit. “Trump! Trump! Trump!,” the frenzied crowd chanted in Warsaw.

Just before his speech, Trump had attended a conference of the Three Seas Initiative, a new economic alliance of the countries between the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas. What did the American president do on a summit of that unknown covenant? Was this the birth of a new geopolitical player in Europe? Historians soon established the link with the Intermarium, a Polish plan from the twenties and thirties to establish a strong Central European federation between fascist Germany and the communist Soviet Union. Certainly now that Poland and Hungary are at odds with the European Commission about the relocation of refugees and the breakdown of the rule of law, possible block formation is being watched with suspicion. According to Professor Andrzej Zybertowicz, advisor of the Polish president, the Three Seas Initiative can become a backbone of a new Central European Union if the EU collapses under the migration or Euro crisis.

The Three Seas Initiative is closely related to two major infrastructure projects in the region: a north-south highway “Via Carpathia” and liquefied natural gas infrastructure, with ocean terminals in Poland and Croatia and a connecting pipeline. Up to now, all major motorways in the region have traveled to the West, to Germany. The route of the Via Carpathia, construction of which has already started in Poland, starts in Lithuania and then goes straight down through the east of Poland, continues through Hungary, Romania (a fork in the south may continue eastwards through Romania to the Black Sea port town of Constanța) and Bulgaria and ends at the port of Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

The third Three Seas Initiative Summit will be held in Bucharest in September. The Via Carpathia will not be ready yet – completion of the Polish stretch of the highway is foreseen for 2023 – but both Poland and Romania continue to be at odds with Brussels over rule of law infringements and the refusal of the Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to accept refugees continues to prevent the EU from developing a coherent and consistent migration and refugee policy. Perhaps a Central European Union may not be that far off in the future. 

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