Moving Forward: 4/19 Review

This past week hasn't been the flashiest in terms of news, but there has been some movement on the political scene.

Central Europe

Hungary got quite a bit of negative attention this week, and for more than solely-political reasons.  To add to the constitutional changes that Fidesz has put into action, they've decided to annoy Brussels with an ad hoc tax to pay EU fines.  Delightful.  It had one thing going in its favor: the ruling on the violent interrogation was upheld.

Romania made two big decisions this week: 1) they are abandoning their original EU target year and postponing until 2020 and 2) they are proposing a property restitution bill to settle disputes from collectivization during the Soviet era.  A Romanian daily paper is concerned that this will fuel the Romanian real estate bubble.

Germany has a new party emerging: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has an outline of its political stances here (in German - sorry!).  Surprise, surprise, they are not pro-EU/United States of Europe and challenging the CDU/CSU coalition that's been in power since Merkel stepped up the podium.

Baring It All: 4/12 Recap

Welcome to the recap of the week.  There's so much to read and know that I've taken the liberty of condensing it for you.  If you want to see these things as they happen, follow me on Twitter!  You just have to click that button over to the right.  It's not far...  You can also see who I follow; I discovered that Twitter is the best place to find anything on CEE and there are fantastic, smart people to interact with.

Let's get to it.

Friday Round Up - 3/8

I have been all atwitter on twitter this week!  Lots of stuff going on in Europe these days, particularly the southeasterly neighbors in the Balkans.  Europeans be trippin', as they say.  There were so many happenings that this post is all news and very little play.  Scroll through my twitter for some of the fun diversions I found!

Election Season!

It's election season, and how!  As America gears up for its presidential election, let's reflect on elections for our beloved former USSR satellites.

Let's do a quick round-up of recent elections:

Serbia + Kosovo = civil?

You've probably already heard the news.  Serbia and Kosovo struck a deal on the border after a few weeks of Les Misérables-esque car barricades AND after Germany frowned upon Serbia's EU ascendancy publicly.  Am I the only one who's excited?  Who's saying, "WHOA" and refuses to listen to any conversation in the near vicinity because I'm so psyched for some Balkan cooperation?  Maybe.  This does not damper my enthusiasm.

Balkan News

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My RSS feed reader is slowly becoming larger than the newspapers I read.  I recently made it worse by adding Balkan Insights, which will supplement the six I was reading before.  I can't even keep up with some of them, so I simply browse headlines to keep myself sane.  This website is great and a fantastic addition to my feeds because I need some more Balkan news.  I give a full review after the jump.

Kosovo cont'd.

I came across this Eastern Approaches article today.  I found this development arresting considering my recent spotlight on Kosovo and this European Voice announcement last week.  It makes me wonder if perhaps canceling the talks was such a good idea.  The rationale behind canceling seems solid enough, but perhaps they could have made headway on the stamps and avoided a possible border showdown.  I can only speculate from my seat thousands of miles away, but the two events seems suspiciously correlated.  There's a lot of moving pieces in politics, but why has Kosovo taken such an interest in taking over those border controls mere days after the talks were canceled?  Was it to convince Serbia that it may not be the one in power, but rather economically dependent on Kosovo taking their exports?

News Bites

Today I'm looking over 2 news articles and offering my 2 cents.  There's not a whole lot else to explain, so let's get to it!

Kosovo

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Kosovo, while not technically a country yet, does deserve some attention during Country Spotlight Week since I hardly highlight the region, mostly because I find the many Balkan wars befuddling.  As Christine Armbruster beautifully captured in her project, war is not a simple right vs. wrong historical event (her project took her to Sarajevo).  In the wake of Mladić's capture, there will be more international discussion of the Yugosphere and how it's progressing.   The problems of Kosovo are not over even though the age of shrapnel and land mines are (or should be).  I am in the midst of a lengthy queue of books written by Balkan writers, so I may have more insight on the region afterward.  Enough about me, more about Kosovo!