Central & Eastern Europe Archive

The Polish opposition’s month-long occupation of parliament may have come to an end earlier this month, but the deep political divisions behind Poland’s latest political crisis remain. The sit-in began in mid-December, when a lawmaker from the main opposition party, Civic Platform, was expelled from the chamber for using a budget debate to protest the government’s plans to limit media access to parliament and ignoring the speaker’s orders to leave the chamber. That the opposition had to resort to an occupation of the legislature is indicative of its political weakness, and sure enough the controversial populist government led by the […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the major priorities on the global agenda for 2017. For the Report, Matthew Luxmoore talks with Peter Dörrie about how the perceived threat from Russia is fueling tensions in Latvia. Listen:Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant Articles on WPR: The Global Agenda for 2017 Why the U.S. Should Prioritize Iraq and UAE Ties Over Egypt and Saudi Arabia Why Once-Welcoming Countries in Scandinavia Closed Their Borders to Refugees Taking Stock of Progress, and Setbacks, in Central America’s Fight Against Corruption How the ‘Russia Threat’ […]

In 1987, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was loosening the screws on free enterprise, high-school teacher Bronislav Zeltserman opened a new teaching center in Riga, the capital of what was then the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. In a country receptive to new ideas for the first time since the 1950s, Zeltserman hoped to develop academic thinking and rear a new generation of students connected to the West. Tapping into the spirit of the times, he called his project “Experiment.” The Soviet Union collapsed four years later, in 1991. Today, the small Baltic nation […]