Populism

If the political debate between the government and the opposition ends up focusing exclusively on who is the most populist of the two, there is no doubt that the battle will eventually be won by the real populists.

The leader of UDMR senators, Marko Bela said that inviting a new party into a coalition government is possible only with the agreement of all parties and adds that PP-DD is a populist party, with no vision on Romania's future.

The Turkey of today, honestly speaking, is a depressing country. The political scene is madly polarized, and the language of hate and vengeance dominates the public scene. Certain civil liberties are shrinking and there is a visible political tendency to diminish them even more.

The month of May opened and closed violently in Turkey. No doubt it will be so for years to come. We had the May Day demonstrations that were repressed by excessive police force first, and finally the Gezi Park demonstrations that were repressed by police brutality, as the whole world saw over the weekend.

I remember the times when our high school history textbooks changed in the late 1970s, after the nationalist-conservative coalition government came to power. I was going to one of the few private high schools of the time and our teachers preferred to use the old textbooks; nevertheless, we were supposed to buy the new ones.

The crisis is supposed to have made us mature us as a society and turned us into responsible citizens who have learned from the mistakes of the past.

We know that we assigned the job of governance to many people who turned out to be inept or corrupt – in some cases both.

An interview of Novinite.com with Cas Mudde, an assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia (USA), on far-right and anti-establishment parties in the EU and their outlook for the upcoming European elections.

The center-right needs a clear ideological identity. Political instability and the absence of an organized center-left have left it with the task of representing the people who believe in true democracy as well as Greece’s future in the European family.

Independent candidate Andrej Kiska won the presidential elections in Slovakia.

Kiska beat current Prime Minister Robert Fico in the second round of voting by 59.4% to 40.6%, according to reports of the local statistics office. The turnout was 50.5%, according  to Bloomberg.