Lithuania’s failed social-democracy. Was the 2020 election LSDP’s funeral? 

Something is rotten in the state of Lithuania. Clearly. Not necessarily in a Shakespearean way, but things are serious when the alcoholism and suicides rates have been the highest in Europe for the last years. Poverty risk level in Lithuania is among the highest in the EU, but the politicians seem to be rather careless about it. Instead there’s a lot of anti-Russian right-wing hype, nationalist and identity obsessions, plus rampant anti-communism. Dalia Grybauskaitė, the president of Lithuania until 2019 became one of the symbolic figures of replacing real politics with bombastic propaganda preaching ‘Russian threat’, while failing at literally every level in terms of management of the state and society.
Lithuania’s left does not seem to have been very helpful in providing a substantial alternative. The most recent parliamentary election held at the beginning of this month seems to have ended in a historic defeat of the LSDP, the main social-democratic party. Some have announced it to even be its funeral.
We shall discuss this and more about Lithuania in tomorrow’s edition of ‘On the barricades’ show. Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski will be joined by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat, the Eastern-European affairs expert at the Polish left-wing media outlet Portal STRAJK.
Watch the entire conversation on our YouTube channel and don’t forget to subscribe to and like the video. This will help us make our analysis more popular, and more people will have the chance to get familiar with the political, social and economic problems in Eastern Europe.

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