So Serbia has finally called for elections.
I admit that I was wrong about this government’s tenacity. I predicted back in July that the government would collapse in October. Not so. It has staggered on, month after month… gasping, retching, coughing blood, but somehow refusing to die. It bought a few weeks [...]

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which looks into these sorts of things from Vancouver to Vladivostok, gave a generally positive assessment of the elections held in the United States on Tuesday, November 7.
“The overall election administration, including the processing of voters on election day, seemed professional and efficiently organized in most polling [...]

Last week we posted about the Presidential elections in Bulgaria, which led to a runoff between incumbent center-left President Parvanov and challenger Volen Siderov, founder and leader of the xenophobic populist-nationalist “Attack” party.
Well, a pleasant surprise: Parvanov won the runoff with a whopping 78.7% of the vote, outpolling Siderov nearly 4 to 1. To [...]

Should he stay or should he go?
(Thanks, MY.)

Hungary, as readers of this blog well know, is struggling with a large budget deficit and a terrible balance of payments problem, which has led to a certain amount of trouble. Specifically the fighting in the streets kind. Now, the Socialist government of Ferenc Gyurcsyany came up with a simple plan to cut the deficit [...]

Bulgaria has a Presidential election this weekend. There’s no question who’s going to win, but there’s still some nail-biting suspense.
Why? Well, the current President is former Socialist Georgi Parvanov. (”Former” Socialist because the Bulgarian President must not be affiliated with any political party.) He seems to be a decent enough fellow. [...]

The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the [...]

As we have noted on Afoe in recent weeks Hungarian society seems badly divided and faces daunting economic adjustments (and here). This weekend’s municipal elections seem to have resolved nothing, with both sides seeming effectively able to claim some sort of victory:
Preliminary results released by the election office, with some nearly all the votes counted, [...]

There seems to be a dangerous crisis in progress between Russia and Georgia. During the past week, the Georgians have surrounded the headquarters of the Russian forces in Georgia with policemen and arrested four officers of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) for allegedly spying and conspiring with opponents of the government, in order (so they [...]

Wish an 876-page biography could be longer? Not often, but definitely with this one. I don’t know the literature well enough to say for sure, but it sure feels like a definitive take on an important figure of 20th century history.

Read more… or [...]