Vol. 73/No. 4      February 2, 2009

“Eastern Europe is heading for a violent ‘spring of discontent,’” said the British newspaper The Observer, after a string of protests took place in Latvia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria.

In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, 7,000 gathered January 16 to protest government cuts in wages and benefits, and tax increases.

Three days earlier 10,000 people protested in the Latvian capital, Riga, against an austerity package announced in December as part of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union for loans.

Government officials in Lithuania have said they need to impose budget cuts in order to avoid seeking a bailout from the IMF.

Farmers protesting low prices for their produce and government corruption, joined student protests January 14 in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital.

The protests have been met by government repression in all three countries, turning into street battles with dozens injured and arrested by the cops.

Up until the world economic downturn took another dip in the later part of last year, the three countries had registered steady economic growth buoyed by foreign investment and a housing boom.

Latvia’s economy, which had grown at an 11 percent rate in 2007, came to a jarring halt in the third quarter in 2008 as it shrank by 4.2 percent, the sharpest economic contraction in the European Union, said the BBC News. Housing prices have dropped 24 percent in the last three months. Thousands now face layoffs and wage cuts.

According to recent estimates, the economies of some Eastern European countries, after registering double-digit growth for nearly a decade, are expected to contract by up to 5 percent this year, with inflation rates rising by more than 13 percent, reported the Observer.

Krisjanis Karins, a member of the Latvian parliament and leader of the opposition New Era party, told the New York Times that the crisis had injected a “new vehemence into old political complaints.”

Protests in Latvia tended to follow a pattern of “standing, singing and just going home,” said Karins. But now they “seem to think the Greek or French way of expressing anger is better… . Who are these people? Where did they come from?”

In the midst of this brewing social crisis, rightist and incipient fascist forces are playing on the disappointments and resentments of middle-class layers and better-off sections of the working class, fueling chauvinist, antiforeigner, and racist attitudes against national minorities and others.

In the Czech Republic, which has also been badly hit by the economic downturn, a march of 700 members of the far-right Workers’ Party in the town of Litvinov battled police, who succeeded in preventing the rightists from marching into a predominately Roma (Gypsy) area.
 
 
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