Central & Eastern Europe Archive

BRATISLAVA—Slovakia, a NATO member that has called itself part of the “core of the European Union,” may talk positively about its Western orientation, but its actions recently suggest an increasingly closer alignment to Russia and its interests in Europe. Many observers point to the junior partner in its coalition government, the Slovak National Party, or SNS, as the reason why. The party’s nationalist, euroskeptic leader, Andrej Danko, the speaker of the Slovak parliament, has visited Moscow twice in the past eight months. Earlier this month, Slovakia’s Defense Ministry, which is headed by a member of the SNS, postponed a long-awaited […]

What many have long viewed as one of the most ridiculous disputes in international politics may finally come to an end, thanks to an agreement reached last week. Following months of quiet negotiations with neighboring Greece, Macedonia announced it will change its name. If all goes to plan, by the end of the year, the country will cease to be the Republic of Macedonia or the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as it is officially known at the United Nations. Instead, it will become the Republic of North Macedonia. The name issue emerged with the collapse of Yugoslavia in the […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about press freedom and safety in various countries around the world. On May 31, 12 reporters from Slovakia’s public television and radio broadcaster, RTVS, resigned to protest what they called the politicization of news coverage under recently appointed management. The mass resignation followed the March murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, which triggered protests that ultimately brought down the government of then-Prime Minister Robert Fico. In an email interview, Andrej Školkay, director of the School of Communication and Media in Bratislava, discusses the charges of politicization of Slovakia’s public media, […]

With well over a trillion dollars at stake, the next European Union budget has the potential either to strengthen a detente between Poland and Brussels, or become another issue dividing the bloc’s west and east. Further division would undermine Poland’s new prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, whose supposedly technocratic approach has held out the promise of better ties with the EU. Last month, Poland’s minister for European affairs, Konrad Szymanski, called EU plans to link the bloc’s central budgetary payments to the rule of law in member states a “massive power grab.” Earlier in May, the European Commission, the EU’s executive […]

The Slovenia Democratic Party, led by former Prime Minister Janez Jansa, finished first in Slovenia’s parliamentary elections Sunday, with roughly 25 percent of the vote. Jansa, who was supported by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, campaigned on an anti-immigration platform centered on opposition to the European Union’s proposed quota system for redistributing asylum-seekers among member states. But neither Jansa nor the several parties that split the centrist vote will find it easy to assemble a majority coalition. In an email interview, Florian Bieber, a professor of Southeast European history and politics at the University of Graz and director of the […]

The European Commission recently announced that it would step up its efforts to fight disinformation online. Despite the prior reluctance of several commissioners to name any specific foreign governments, the newly published policy document, called a Communication, singles out Russia for practicing information warfare and aims to establish what it calls “a European approach” to tackle these and other forms of hybrid interference. This new approach will focus on improving transparency, promoting media diversity, fostering credible sources of information and devising long-term solutions to tackle disinformation in Europe. The announcement comes at a time when the European Union’s existing in-house […]