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Liebe Ungarn
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HUNGARY and Germany are usually the best of friends. So the current diplomatic spat between Budapest and Berlin is raising eyebrows across central Europe.It all started on May 16th, when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, told an annual meeting of...
A gay rights rally under attack
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NOT even Georgia’s bitter election campaign last year saw this level of animosity. To mark the International Day against Homophobia on May 17th, a small number of gay rights activists planned a rally in central Tbilisi. In response, several tho...
Bearer beware
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BEARER shares, an archaic financial instrument in which the only proof of ownership is the physical possession of the shares on paper, will finally be outlawed in the Czech Republic. It is high time. The opaque ownership of companies with such bearer...
Behind bars at last?
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THE arrest of Naser Kelmendi (pictured above), one of the most notorious gangsters in the Balkans, has unleashed a stream of speculation in the region’s press about who is connected to whom in the seamy underworld of Balkan crime and politics.
An inconclusive election at an unhappy time
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THREE months after the resignation of the government of Boyko Borisov (pictured above) on the back of the biggest demonstrations in 16 years, Bulgarians went to the polls on May 12th. The result of the election will do little to give Bulgaria the cle...
The expulsion of Sudeten Germans is still raw
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THOSE who thought that Miloš Zeman (pictured above), the new Czech president, will tone down his provocative statements in his stately office were soon proved wrong. You can't teach new tricks to an old dog.During a visit to Austria last...
Tusk's travails
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FOREIGN POLICY magazine’s new list of the 500 most influential people in the world includes Donald Tusk and Radosław Sikorski. The Polish prime minister and foreign minister are the only Central Europeans to make the cut. Internationally,...
The World Jewish Congress comes to Budapest
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THIS was not how the Hungarian government wanted the week to start. Ferenc Orosz, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, was watching a football match in a stadium with his family when nearby spectators started chanting ‘Mussolini’...
Eastern Europe's Watergate
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A GREY Chrysler Voyager van equipped with antennas called “The Catcher”. A former official of the interior ministry who interrupts his 50th birthday party to destroy data on the ministry’s computers' hard drives with a screw driver.
A deal at last?
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AS SERBIA and Kosovo sign a ground-breaking deal, our correspondents ask whether this marks a new period of optimism for the Balkans...
Slovenia is changing
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SEARCH the archives of this newspaper and you won't find much on Slovenia. Since independence in 1991 not that much has happened here. Slovenes had a reputation of being prim, thrifty and hardworking and they got on with their lives. Their government...
The Czech roots of a town in Texas
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TEXAS is a long way from the Czech Republic. Yet the massive fertilizer plant explosion on April 17th that killed at least four civilians, ten fire fighters and injured some 200 others in the city of West in Texas (pictured above) triggered a hu...
They both start with a C
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CZECHS thought they had less of an international identity problem than people from other small Central European countries, say Slovaks, Latvians or Lithuanians. After all, Václav Havel, Milos Forman, Jaromír Jágr (pictured above)...
Gravely damaged media pluralism
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ONE of the most discussed issues in Bulgarian media is the topic of the deteriorating media freedom in the country. Consistently ranking last among European Union members the country keeps regressing. Bulgaria now ranks 87th in Reporters Withou...
A row about the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes
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PETR NEČAS, the Czech prime minister, is accusing the opposition Social Democrats of a “coup” because of their recent move to displace the director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR). He is being acc...
A breakthrough at last
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“HABEMUS PACTUM!” tweeted Vlora Citaku, Kosovo’s minister for European integration. Serbia and Kosovo had just reached a deal. It came on April 19th after ten grueling rounds of negotiation between the prime ministers of the two cou...
Chechnya and the bombs in Boston
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THE Tsarnaev family, like many families from Chechnya, were part of a diaspora that had scattered all over the globe: Turkey, Syria, Poland, and Austria, and, apparently, suburban Massachusetts. Displaced first by Stalin, who was as distrustful as he...
A Polish-Jewish hero
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THE 19th of April 1943, exactly 70 years ago, saw the first insurrection against the Nazis in occupied Europe: the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The event symbolises both Jewish courage and Jewish suffering. For Poland, its anniversary is also a resonant e...
On with the show
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THE court case against Alexei Navalny (pictured above), the anti-corruption blogger who coined the phrase “the party of crooks and thieves” to describe Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, has been widely described as a show trial. But w...
Conspiracy theories
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AS THE Russian government tightens the screws on NGOs, our correspondents asks how much damage president Vladimir Putin's anti-western mindset will do to the country's economy ...
