Central & Eastern Europe Archive

In a special end-of-summer episode this week, we look back at three of our most popular Report interviews so far this year: the veil of secrecy over the U.S. military’s growing presence in West Africa; Bolivia’s controversial coca policy, which has been called both a solution to drug trafficking and part of the problem; and the role historical memory plays in Poland’s contentious politics. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers […]

PRAGUE—With xenophobia spiraling across the former communist states of Central Europe, the region’s one sizable non-white and non-Christian immigrant community is unflustered, for now. Constituting around 1 percent of the Czech Republic’s population of 10 million, the country’s decades-old Vietnamese community is largely tolerated and respected, even if integration is limited. That situation remains mostly unchanged by the recent political shift to the right in the Czech Republic. Many Czechs view the Vietnamese community—officially 60,000-strong but estimated to actually number around 100,000—in stark contrast to Muslim immigrants—around 20,000 or so—and the much larger and long-ostracized Roma community. “The Vietnamese community […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about press freedom and safety in various countries around the world. Journalists in Belarus have experienced a wave of harassment, intimidation and criminal prosecution from state authorities in recent months. The crackdown has been severe even by the standards of a country that is routinely cited by watchdogs as one of the worst violators of press freedoms. Conditions are only expected to worsen as new restrictions on web-based communication come into effect later this year. In an email interview with WPR, Andrei Bastunets, chair of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, […]

Immediately after the left-wing Syriza party swept to power in Greece in 2015, officials from the European Union, NATO and the United States all worried about the possibility that the newly minted Greek government was too close with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It wasn’t just the leftists in government in Athens who might have harbored pro-Russian sentiments. Greece and Russia share religious and historical ties, and a significant chunk of the Greek population views Putin favorably. The person who most worried NATO officials at the time was Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, whose past writings and connections with communist organizations marked him […]

After the storm, the calm? A month after Romania’s most powerful man was convicted of abuse of power and sentenced to three and a half years in prison, some Romanians expected a political earthquake. Instead, much of the country is heading to their summer holiday on the beaches of the Black Sea. But the political drama in Bucharest isn’t over. Liviu Dragnea, the head of the ruling Social Democratic Party, or PSD, is appealing his late June conviction, while continuing his bellicose rhetoric about a “deep state” that is out to get him, picking up a line from U.S. President […]

After 13 years of relative stability, a politically weakened German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to endure major upheaval in recent months. Merkel cobbled together a governing coalition after winning re-election last year, but her government is increasingly beholden to the nationalist tendencies of its smallest member, the Christian Social Union, the sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Beyond Germany’s borders, Merkel must confront ongoing divisions within the European Union, lingering questions about how to process migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and the uncertainty created by the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The following 10 WPR […]