Join our PiraMMMida scheme!

Launched on 1 July 2020, PiraMMMida.life, an experimental exhibition platform curated by UCL SSEES Lecturer in Critical Area Studies and FRINGE Centre Co-Head Michał Murawski, in collaboration with David Roberts (Bartlett School of Architecture), Masha Mileeva (Courtauld Institute) and Denis Maksimov (Avenir Institute).

PiraMMMida features the work of over 20 contributors: scholars, artists, architects, practitioners and others. SSEES contributors include Lecturer in Eurasian History Philippa Hetherington, Associated Professor in Czech with Slovak Literature Peter Zusi and Professor of Sociology Alena Ledeneva. The first batch of contributions was published on PiraMMMida.life on Wednesday 1 July; while the remaining contributions will continue to drop, like money from the MMM tree, in weekly batches every Wednesday until the end of July 2020. A virtual PiraMMMida conference will take place on 1 September, with the Call for Contributions (open to all) to be circulated in due course.

PiraMMMida.life – the cyber version of the PPV show at the (cancelled) Venice Biennale of Architecture 2020 – is a transmedia, transdisciplinary project exploring the relationship between finance, architecture, art and power. PiraMMMida borrows its name from MMM Bank, a notorious post-Soviet pyramid scheme launched by Sergei Mavrodi in 1991 and persisting in various guises (as MMM Global) until today. PiraMMMida explores Ponzi schemes, such as Mavrodi’s, and other “fake horizontals”: pharaonic edifices of exploitation and fraud masquerading as paragons of grassrootist virtue.

PiraMMMida.life is a project of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East). It is supported by the Bartlett Architectural Research Fund, the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity and the UCL European Institute, carried out in collaboration with S.a.L.E. Docks and the Avenir Institute.

This is an excerpted fragment of an interview with Michał Murawski about PPV first published (in Russian) in Project Russia (www.prorus.com) on 3 July 2020. The interview was carried out by Asya Belousova.

Asya Belousova (AB): Perverting the Power Vertical (PPV) started as a seminar series that Michal Murawski has been running at UCL with some colleagues. Could you get into details and say what the seminar was dedicated to and how it progressed to become a platform for research and projects for Venice biennale? 

Michał Murawski (MM): The art historian Masha Mileeva and I launched PPV as a seminar series at University College London in October 2018. Actually, it was initially called “Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East”. We invited Denis Maksimov, an independent curator, scholar and weirdo, to give one of the first seminars. It turned out he lived in London and we had similar seditious ideas about how to work with institutions, so he joined us as Co-Convener of the seminar series. Actually, he perverted us, and gave us the idea to change our name from PV to PPV

[…]

With regard to the Venice Biennale […] in our first year of operation, we worked with Arts Territory’s Kasia Sobucka’s and the Signum Foundation to put on a small project, called the Palace of Ritual, at Palazzo Dona Brusa. […] This year, we are working with the like-minded S.a.L.E. Docks, an activist initiative which squatted an exhibition hall on Dorsoduro, to realise PiraMMMida at the Architecture Biennale. We hope to realise this project in physical form in Venice in 2021, but we had a hunch that the Biennale would not go ahead this year – despite misleading promises to the contrary – so we decided to go online, with some funding from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL. David Roberts is our comrade and Fellow Traveller from the Bartlett, and he has joined as co-curator of PiraMMMida this year.

PPV #8: The Palace of Ritual, May 2019, photographs by MM

AB: Why are you attracted so much to the pyramid? You are concentrating on the Eastern Europe. Why? What cases are you exploring and dissecting?

MM: Perhaps we can begin with why we are attracted to the “power vertical”. We are interested in ideas, concepts or phenomena that derive from East European or other post-socialist contexts; we are committed to trying to “unanchor” these ideas from their places of origin (while remaining conscious of their origins), and to applying these ideas into the broader world, to try to understand the world through categories derived from the “East”; rather than always trying to understand the East, and the South, and everywhere else, through categories taken from the West or the North, from France or America. Why do we always have to understand Russia or Nigeria “through” Foucault or Agamben? Why can’t we understand things that are happening in the core liberal capitalist countries through categories taken from our own peripheral or semi-peripheral contexts? We are not the only people who think like this – Yevgeny Fiks did a similar thing with this suggestion of “theory of pleshkha” as an alternative to Judith Butler-derived “queer theory”, the anthropologists Doug Rogers and Don Kalb have also written about it, and our colleagues the geographers Elena Trubina and Martin Müller are thinking along the same lines with their understanding of the “Global East” – but we are trying to institutionalise this move of unanchoring or “unbinding” theory from the East in as perverted and relentless a way as possible.

(…)

We were attracted to pyramid schemes for different reasons, I think. As an anthropologist I am really obsessed with the vernacular architecture of the pavilionchiki [temporary retail pavilions], which were demolished by Sergey Semyonovich [Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow] on the so-called “Night of the Long Diggers [9 February 2016]; and generally with the other Las Vegas-esque pyramidal forms that sprouted up all over the post-Soviet world during the 1990s and 2000s. There are so many of them and they are amazing! My favourite one, of the ones I have been to, is the Kazan pyramid. I want to have a big party one day in the restaurant at the tip of the tower. And my other ambition is to one day visit the bus station in Chelyabinsk, which emanates a particularly otherworldly sort of cosmic power. These pyramidal forms are emanations or embodiments of the era of “wild capitalism”, the era of gryby i mutant (mushrooms and mutants), in Dasha Paramonova’s phrase, which – in theory – came to an end on the Night of the Long Diggers. But, as we are trying to point out, this era is far from over.

[…]

3) What are the prerequisites and mechanisms that enable pyramid schemes to come about? 

Pyramid in Kazan, photograph by Michal Murawski

MM: […] Pyramid schemes like MMM come about – and are able to entice vulnerable people in – at times of crisis, systemic transformation and desperation; at the kinds of times when statues fall, inflation goes hyper- and people take to the streets to riot. Various parts of the world are more or less always in this kind of state of normalised crisis, especially the formerly colonized countries, which are kept in this state of crisis by the global monetary system. The most famous pyramid schemes in the West – those of Ponzi and Madoff, for example – also came about at times of global financial meltdown. And the rise of cryptocurrency – in essence, these are get-rich quick schemes, which profited their early investors but which go in and out of cycles of explosion or implosion every four years or so – promised to be a radical new type of “truly horizontal” pyramid scheme, which began to proliferate in the long recession following the sub-prime mortgage crisis; a recession followed by over a decade of brutal austerity, which many people seemed to never get out of. And, of course, our current Covid moment is ripe for these kinds of schemes to develop too: inequalities are sharpened, battle lines are drawn on the lines of class, race, gender and sexuality; statues and monuments are toppled. We are in the middle of this sort of systemic reconfiguration, and we won’t know what the other side looks like for some time yet. We would like it to look less vertical, and more egalitarian, more queer, more black, less white, less hetero, less male.

Of course, we’re not too hopeful that this is possible, but we shall see. We are also very aware, of course, that the more you emphasise how horizontal, how democratic, how transparent something is, the more you of a rhetorical emphasis you place on this horizontality and democracy, the more pyramidal and the more pharaonic and exploitative things actually tend to be in essence. So this is in a sense what PiraMMMida is about. The PiraMMMida project is sort of an exploration of “fake horizontality”, an examination of the ways in which people claim things are horizontal, whereas actually they are as vertical as a vysotka [a Stalin-era skyscraper]. This is what most of the contributions to PiraMMMida explore. Rita Kuleva writes about pyramids in the art world, Philippa Hetherington about pyramids in public health (what does “flattening the curve really mean?). Artworks by Alena Ledeneva illustrate various types of informal political and economic geometries. The text contributions explore these themes very directly, the visual and architectural contributions do so a little more subtly.

A Mavro voucher, photograph by Michał Murawski

Another example is [former Georgian President] Saakashvilli’s all-glass police stations – built, of course, in the form of pyramids. They are supposed to be transparent, so that the police are in theory forced by this transparency to be more polite and less corrupt. But, of course, what happens it that the police just go and beat people up underground, in the dark dungeons beneath the light-filled police station (or this what people in Tbilisi joke, anyway). And what’s happening with the [Russian] constitutional referendum is another crazy manifestation of this kind of fake horizontality. First Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] pretended that the changes to the constitution were all about making the Duma stronger. Then [Valentina] Tereshkova [Russian deputy and cosmonaut, the first woman in space] “forced” him to take upon himself the burden of accepting amendments that would make him President for ever (and who better to descend from on high with such an initiative than somebody with the extraordinary cosmic, otherworldly, divine authority of Tereshkova?) And he modestly accepted this burden. Then – after the whole process was injected with this horrendous, heteronormative patina – the vote happened. And the vote is being carried out in the most democratic way ever! You don’t even have to go to the polling station – the polling station comes to you! And what could be more democratic than a transparent ballot box (if only the boxes were in the shape of pyramids)?

A Perverso voucher, photograph by Michał Murawski

And, to cap it all off, you are rewarded vouchers for voting, which you can redeem in Azbuka Vkusa [a Moscow grocery chain]. You are basically given Mavros [the name of the “vouchers” issued to participants in MMM Bank] for voting! Or Perversos (this is the name of the (crypto-)currency which we [launched] at the virtual vernissage of PiraMMMida.

By Carolin Heilig and Paulina Lenik (FATIGUE Early Stage Researchers)

Introduction

The 2020 presidential elections in Poland have received international attention on how to proceed with election without compromising on the population’s health, while still acting within the provisions of the constitution. These elections, however, are a potential turning point in the illiberal trajectory that Poland has been on for the last five years – they could also be the final step to solidify the country’s illiberal swerve to a proper illiberal turn (Bustikova/Guasti, 2017). That is the expected outcome if incumbent Andrzej Duda consolidates his support winning the second term in office. In this blog, we focus on Duda’s 2015 and 2020 campaign as the his backing party PiS has become the seasoned “the establishment”. To illustrate this shift we collected budgetary statistics, press releases and the 2015 and 2020 election campaign materials.

To compare Duda’s 2015 and 2020 election campaign in the light of populism, we employ Cas Mudde’s ideational approach, understanding populism as a thin ideology that pitches the “pure people” against the “corrupted elites” and can then be thickened with other ideologies such as nativism (Mudde/Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). At the core of the thin ideology of populism are the exaltation of the ‘will of the people’ and the preference of substance over procedure in a democracy (Kubik, 2012) (Kubik, 2012). As such, populism is not at odds with democracy per se but with liberal democracy (Albertazzi/Mueller, 2013). Liberal democracy and populist ideology are clashing most strongly in questions of individual rights, freedom of speech and separation of power (ibid.).

Grim expectations: between a turn and a slide

In their distinction between an illiberal turn from an illiberal swerve, Bustikova and Guasti (2017), name three conditions: 1) executive aggrandisement (Bermeo, 2016), which in Poland took place in the form of the judicial reforms and increased government control over national media , 2) contested sovereignty that increases polarisation, most clearly exemplified by the increasingly exclusionary and heteronormative identity politics and 3) the dominant party winning two consecutive elections. Their argument focuses on parliamentary elections, not presidential ones, but the Polish case underlines the importance to include presidential elections in this calculation. The Law and Justice party (PiS) – united with its two small partners Agreement and United Poland as the “United Right”- has set the scene in the 2019 parliamentary elections. The current quest for power is to assure Duda’s victory in the 2020 elections. An opposition-backed president may be more willing to use a veto power to block further executive aggrandisement and manage to overcome deeply rooted divisions within the Polish society.

Presidential elections: a competence refresher

Poland’s political system is semi-presidential. The President is the representative of the State in foreign affairs, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, appoints the Prime Minister and their cabinet, as well as judges to the Supreme Court, common courts, administrative courts and military courts. As Art. 127 of the Polish Constitution specifies, the President of the Republic of Poland shall be elected in universal, equal, and direct elections, conducted by secret ballot, for a 5-year term of office and may be re-elected only for one more term. To run in the election a candidate requires the support by the signatures of at least 100,000 citizens having the right to vote in the elections. If no candidate receives 50% of the votes in the first round of the elections, the two candidates with the most votes will compete in a second round on the 14^th day after the first vote.

The legislative competences of the Polish president have received increasing attention under Duda’s presidency since 2015. The President has the right to submit a legislative initiative (Constitution), however, the vast majority of debated initiatives in the Sejm are submitted by the Council of Ministers, Sejm committee or groups of at least 15 Members of the Sejm. Following Art. 122 of the Constitution, the President must sign a legislative act adopted by the Sejm for it to enter into force. He furthermore holds considerable veto power: if he has doubts concerning the appropriateness or purposefulness of an adopted act, the President may apply his veto. The Sejm than has the possibility to reject the President’s veto by majority of 3/5 of qualified votes in the presence of half of the MPs – currently, the United Right falls short of such a majority. The President’s veto is not selective; hence they cannot question only some regulations, but rather the act as a whole. If the President doubts the compliance of the act with the Constitution, he can submit it to the Constitutional Tribunal for examination.

Populists, not officeholders: the 2015 campaign

In 2015, Duda was chosen as PiS’s candidate to challenge PO’s Incumbent president Komorowski. Duda was then a PiS MEP with considerable experience but relatively unknown to many Poles. In the presidential elections, Duda was the face of an ambitious campaign that was underestimated by the complacent incumbent Komorowski, who had been leading in polls before the election (Markowski, 2016).). Eventually, Duda secured 51.55% of the votes in the second round, ever since connecting his presidency closely to PiS and its programme to lead Poland out “of ruins” and bring about the “Good Change”.

As corrupted elites, Duda’s campaign framed the governing elite of the then ruling PO as arrogant and detached from ordinary Poles’ lives. Touring around the whole country, meeting with these ordinary Poles, he aimed to distinguish himself from those liberal heirs of the Solidarity movement that sold out Poland’s interests to foreign actors. Duda stressed the historical legacies of Poles, by evoking heroism of older generations, drawing on direct family lines. This wass visualised in his campaign video that shows young scouts at the Warsaw Uprising Memorial, images of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, or people waving Polish flags with the “Polska Walcząca – anchor” at his campaign inauguration – a symbol created in the resistance to Nazi German occupation and nowadays increasingly coopeted by radical right-wing actors in Poland. In his speeches as well as in his official campaign video, Duda stressed his legacy of the late PiS president Lech Kaczyński who lost his life in the 2010 Smolensk tragedy, but this remains the only allusion to recent history. The Polish nation and its heroism are evoked through its resistance and perseverance in the times of Nazi German occupation and the Second World War.

Aside the historical nostalgia, Duda ran as a candidate for all Poles, bringing hope and dignity to those from whom the ruling elites had unjustly withheld prosperity after the hardships of transition after state socialism. The pure people are defined through their belonging to Polish nation and its history, but in contrast to 2020, his 2015 campaign did not highlight the family as the core of the nation.

Populists in the seat: the 2020 campaign 

Duda linked his presidency completely to the PiS party and its government since 2015. This is probably best illustrated by his campaign slogan of 2020 “Obronimy Polski +” (“Let’s defend Poland +”), which is a clear reference to various social welfare programmes paid out by the Polish government since 2015, ranging from child benefit 500+ to a pension increase 300+ and other projects. Additionally, images in his campaign spot of Duda together with PiS prime minister Morawiecki shall illustrate the president’s cooperation skills. In his official appearances during the election campaign, Duda stresses his role in signing the respective laws, directly alluding that an oppositional president would refuse to sign laws passed by the Polish parliament or even threat to strip Poles from existing benefits.

The populist rhetoric has also visibly intensified over the last years and Duda’s definition of the pure Polish people has narrowed down. In the presidential debate held on the 17.06.2020 he cited the constitution defining marriage as a union between man and woman which builds the basis of the family he almost exclusively seems to target in his campaign. Tellingly, this was the only time during the debate that he cited the Constitution to underline his argument, while the Left’s challenger Robert Biedroń brought his own copy to the debate to wave it at the president accusing him of disrespecting the Constitution and the rule of law during his presidency. Duda’s narrow focus on families most recently found yet another peek with his move to sign a Family Charter (Karta Rodziny), reliant on a similar charter promoted by the radical-right conservative law think tank Ordo Iuris (involved in the establishment of so-called LGBT free zones in Poland ) which met with considerable backlash and many universities (among them Duda’s own alma mater the Jagiellonian University in Kraków) issuing supportive statements for their queer students and staff- Duda openly declared LGBT to be a “foreign ideology” and compared it with Soviet indoctrination.

Duda’s recursing to national heroism also increased, which even became a special point in his 2020 programme called “Historical truth and the image of Poland”. Among others it states: “[…] Poland needs a president who will continue to restore national pride. We are a nation of heroes. In our history we have demonstrated courage and steadfastness. Today, Poles can and should be beneficiaries of the attitude of their grandparents, for whom there was no matter more important than honour.” . In line with this, Duda continuously cites in his speeches the Polish national anthem “Poland has not yet perished as long as we still live.” It should not come as a surprise that the Polish national colours red and white become even more dominant and images of Duda commemorating Polish soldiers fallen during the Second World War become even more prominent in his campaign videos, underlined by heroic and epic music. In order to underscore his focus on Polish families, many children and teenagers feature his campaign. In the 2020 campaign they are particularly often dressed in traditional folk dresses (see here).

With PO’s candidate Rafał Trzaskowski rising in the polls , narratives of the arrogant PO neglecting ordinary Poles have made a reappearance in Duda’s framing of the corrupted elites, playing with soft Eurosceptic images and rekindling the old post-Solidarity division, between those who argue that Polish interests were sold out during transition and the years after under PO rule and those who supported a liberal reformist approach to the Polish transition (see Aronoff/Kubik, 2014: 229ff). (Interestingly this narrative is also used, but differently, by the independent candidate Szymon Hołownia, currently polling third, who stresses in his campaign that Poland needs a president independent of both camps and political elites PO and PiS to create a fair and just Poland.)

Good or sizable? Change in the presidential cabinet’s expenses

Every newly elected president appoints the new cabinet (Kancerlaria Prezydenta Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, the KPRP) which manages the daily routine of the head of state. The current organisational structure has undergone substantial changes with a consequently expanding tendency. Arguably, such expansionary red tape goes against the narrative fostered by PiS and Duda in the 2015 elections of the “Good Change” narrative fostered by PiS and Duda in the 2015 elections, that is putting an end to excessive spending under the previous “elitist rule” of the Civic Platform’s (PO) president Bronislaw Komorowski. The particularly astonishing finding is that it is not transparent where and how much resources are devoted to some of KPRP activities, as for instance the two counselling bodies that Andrzej Duda has established in the memory of the late Lech Kaczyński, that is the Narodowa Rada Rozwoju (National Development Council Body, NRR) and Rada Przedsiębiorczości (Entrepreneurial Council, RdsP).

The competence of the cabinet  (KPRP) is specified in the , entirely defined by the newly appointed president. A brief comparison between the previous presidents, Bronisław Komorowski, and the incumbent Andrzej Duda’s, cabinet reveal an interesting bureaucratic trajectory. During Komorowski’s term, the cabinet had 14 offices, 4 secretaries of state and 6 full time advisors (9 supernumerary social advisors) all in accordance with the set up Chancellery status. Duda has expanded the overall office substantially. For the sake of simplicity, we have summed up the current organisational structure in the graph below with enumeration of the most critical individuals (non-repetitive) who are holding these posts as managers, advisors, and secretaries of state. Each of the management offices is led by an independent office director, adding up to 28 management divisions (offices and top management) in the chancellery.

KPRP under Komorowski:

KPRP under Duda

Summed up, the current cabinet has bureaucratically expanded about 30%, that is from 14 offices to 19, from 4 secretaries of state to 6, and from 6 full time advisors to 8. Moreover, the incumbent president has rekindled an initiative already proposed by the late Lech Kaczyński in 2009, the National Development Council Body (Rada Narodowego Rozwoju, in memory of the late president). The body, which has not published any results since 2010 and has only met twice since its establishment, comprises 102 experts subdivided into 6 thematic teams, serving as a presidential council. In a similar manner, President Duda has also set up another body of the same format, the Entrepreneurial Council back in May 2019, with yet too little contribution to assess its usability. The organisational structure of these bodies is shown below. Unfortunately, we have no access to the funding act or whether members are being recompensated in any manner for their participation (our query for it has not been answered at the time of writing).

Setting aside the difficulty to assess the contribution of those council bodies, the little oversight of the legal basis for the body to proceed is a worrying signal. The presidential sources are not transparent with regards to financing of these bodies, and their establishment has not been set up in the KPRP status, which on its own remains a weak legal act reliant majorly on the Art. 143 of the Constitution.

These observations are worrisome, as citizens are not aware of how these experts are being financed, and if expenses are covered by the public budgetbetween the expertise of the councillors, and arguably some of them are a surprising choice for presidential advisory board, as a gynaecology expert.

What we may state clearly is that the work of the Chancellery is fully funded from the public budget. The Ministry of Finance is responsible for budgetary planning, and the Chancellery has to comply with its annual calendar, the overarching deadline falling on every March. Both the planned expenses as well as the executed budget from the previous accounting period are legally required to be available to the public. Worryingly, however, at the time of writing, the presidential cabinet has not made the budgetary expenses available for the past year. That is to say, the administration has not complied with the budgetary requirements and we are unable to verify what were the past year’s budgetary expenses.

The latest document is the Chancellery ex-ante annual expense plan for the 2018/2019 budget. The comparison of these planning documents confirmed that since 2015 the planning has not changed a notch. Every year, the official per planned category budget of the Chancellery is 30 million PLN (€7.5 million) per designated unit. That may be a little surprising given that the budgetary excess has essentially increased as indicated by the total executed expenses. There is some substance to believe, that the financial oversight over the presidential dealings is not particularly exigent as the tables made available to the public are of generic, repetitive character, as shown on the table below.

There are more elaborate ways to complement these figures, either through the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) which is conducting the annual audit of the public budget, or through the Ministry of Finance. To our surprise, the NIK annual report for 2019 has not been issued yet, what indicates that the delay with financial oversight might be of graver nature. The only accessible statistic on how much the incumbent’s cabinet requires to provide for the bureaucratic net, is through the Ministry of Finance. Here, what has been substantiated by the recent press on the matter, we find evidence that Duda’s Chancellery is the most expensive since the transition. The annual operational budget has consecutively increased every year, reaching 200 million PLN in 2019 (€50 million) , that is almost a billion the past five years. We have again, little knowledge on expenses given the very generic nature of the expense categories. However, even brief calculation indicates that the president requires PLN 20 million (€5 million) per month to keep the vast offices he has set up  during his term. The further investigation confirmed that, the presidential palace is spending PLN170 million (€43 million) per annum on the administration offices alone (with additional PLN 30 million (€7.5 million) on residences, security, and promotional activities). To have a relative comparison, the annual cost of Bronisław Komorowski’s Chancellery was PLN 167million total (€43 million), that is roughly PLN 30 million (€ 7.5 million)  less than currently. Clearer oversight of the incumbent president’s spending would also be crucial to understand better how much of the budget is used for PR and campaigns such as #5latPAD (“Five Years President Andrzej Duda”) that seemingly mixes presidential PR with his current re-election campaign .

Conclusion: why it matters?

Duda will most likely continue to further Poland’s illiberal turn: after the judicial reforms which undermined the rule of law as one pillar of liberal democracy, he is now increasingly zooming in on minorities. Poland is already one of the most homophobic countries within the EU. The government is repeatedly promising to keep children safe from “LGBT ideology” and “propaganda”, what is reminding one of Russia’s anti- “gay propaganda” law.

In 2015, Duda’s win under the banner of the “Good Change” started the profound reform of the Polish state following the ideas of Jarosław Kaczyński, it was followed by PiS taking over the government in fall 2015 and defending its majority with the United Right in 2019. The president has gained the nickname by his critiques as “długopis” (pen), for signing most laws presented to him by the Sejm and even when he used his veto power in the judicial it fell short of expectations and has been the subject of continuous clashes with the EU over the rule of law in Poland.

These changes are distressing, because are difficult to reverse. The pressure on judiciary, and overtaken media loosen the traditional oversight over the rule of law. The brief examination of the budgetary dealings of the Chancellery showed that the promise of “Good Change” has been far from materialised. Not only has the incumbent president substantially increased the annual presidential spending (30 million PLN, i.e. €7.5million per annum more), reaching the astounding 880 PLN million in five years, but it has also departed from the legally binding foundation of the office. The set up NRR and RdsP have no officially accessible status, and citizens are in the fog concerning how these bodies are funded. Aside finance, these bodies have dubious results so far, with very few analytic reports (2010 NRR). The transparency concerning how the counselling bodies act is unreachable, the information of their financing is difficult to acquire. Essentially, the populist promise to sever with “corrupt elites” has merely turned the beneficiary wheel to the new incumbent’s own direction.

Albertazzi, Daniele and Sean Mueller, 2013. Populism and Liberal Democracy: Populists in Government in Austria, Italy, Poland and Switzerland. Government and Opposition 48, 343–371.

Aronoff, Myron J. and Jan Kubik, 2014. Anthropology and political science : a convergent approach /. Berghahn Books, New York.

Bermeo, Nancy, 2016. On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy 27, 5–19.

Bustikova, Lenka and Petra Guasti, 2017. The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe? Politics and Governance 5, 166–176.

Kubik, Jan, 2012. Illiberal Challenge to Liberal Democracy: The Case of Poland. Taiwan Journal of Democracy 8, 79–89.

Markowski, Radoslaw, 2016. The Polish parliamentary election of 2015: a free and fair election that results in unfair political consequences. West European Politics 39, 1311–1322

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, New York.

edit. This post has been edited to clarify that it is the ballot that is secretly conducted, not the election itself (4th paragraph).

Teaching Fellow Dr Dogus Simsek, argues “We might not die due to the virus, but we might lose our lives from hunger, poverty, lack of access to medicines and hostile environment. Most of us feel the fear, desperation, stress, anger and anxiety.”

First published on Discover Society on 9th April 2020

An undocumented migrant in Istanbul explains the feelings of undocumented migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic with these words. Emotions are a part of everyday life, however, in the case of undocumented migrants, emotions are often complex, mixed and transnational. Undocumented migrants are in situations of drastic vulnerability. They do not have legal rights to reside in the settlement country, or have access to health care, labour markets and education, and are in danger of becoming scapegoats.

Being undocumented during the pandemic in Europe means being left behind and being among the least protected. Health care is inaccessible to undocumented migrants in most parts of Europe and also in other parts of the world. The living conditions of undocumented migrants do not allow them to follow the World Health Organisation’s health advice, including basic hygiene measures and self-isolation. They are unable to observe the two-metre and other social distancing guidance relating to workplaces and homes as many of them live in close contact and in over-crowded accommodation.

Furthermore, the socio-economic effects of the pandemic are also visible in the everyday lives of undocumented migrants as many of them work in an informal economy without social security, faced with exploitation around the lack of safe working conditions. They are overworked and underpaid, and are more likely to be affected by income loss and reduction of employment. As they are excluded from states’ financial support, losing their source of income put them in a more vulnerable position.

On the one hand, the ones who continue to go to work are faced with a risk of being infected. On the other hand, when they cannot continue to work due to the closure of workplaces or losing their jobs, they rely on NGOs and local associations to provide assistance. However, these organisations are also facing difficulties in providing services during the pandemic, so they more likely to be faced with extreme poverty. It is also more likely that undocumented migrants face everyday and institutional racism even more now than before the pandemic.

These are some of the main struggles and dilemmas that undocumented migrants have been experiencing stronger during the pandemic. I am interested in the emotions of undocumented migrants during the pandemic. What do they feel about these experiences? How does it feel to be invisible especially during the pandemic? What do they fear more – being infected, losing their jobs or being deported? How does it feel to be far away from loved ones during the pandemic?

There is a growing body of research on emotional dimensions of human mobility highlighting that emotions are central aspects of international migration (see, Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015; Svašek, 2010; Wise and Velayutham, 2017). This research sets out the role of structural constraints, such as immigration policies, socio-economic inequalities on the emotions of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, the influence of interactions with the members of the receiving society on their emotions, the feelings about being away from the loved ones and so on. In normal times, these mainly include anger, anxiety, fear, guilt, alongside happiness and hope.

The emotional processes of migrants are more complex than non-migrants due to living across the borders of the country of origin and the country of settlement and encountering emotions that are, on the one hand, shaped by memories related to the country of origin and, on the other hand, by direct interaction with the members of the receiving society and institutions. Migrants can feel hopeful and guilty or happy and anxious at the same time as when they feel guilty due to leaving the loved ones behind, they at the same time feel happy to be able to escape from the conflict in their countries of origin.

I have recently contacted undocumented migrants I know in London and Istanbul to find out how is their health, whether they are in a safe place, how they cope with uncertainty and whether they are able to receive support from local organisations. The undocumented migrants I have contacted both in the UK and Turkey started talking about their emotions during the pandemic that is linked with their migratory status. For example, when I asked, ‘how you are’, an undocumented migrant who lives in London said that “I am more scared… more hopeless… more desperate than before. During this process, I think about what I would do if I will be deported. Then, I think about my family back in my country of origin and worried about their safety. I also remember that I do not have a job anymore and do not know how to survive and what my family will do because I will not be able to send them money.” The emotional experiences related to the pandemic has transnational dimensions as well. The undocumented migrants also feel worried for their families who are in need of financial support the countries of origin. Their sense of vulnerability crosses the borders of nation-states.

Another undocumented migrant living in London I have been in touch with recently said that “I am not scared of being in contact the virus; I am scared of dying from hunger due to losing my job and not being able to receive support from charities during the pandemic. This makes me feel desperate, more worried about my life and hopeless.” According to a report published in November 2019 by the Pew Research Center, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million undocumented migrants lived in the UK in 2017. They are not allowed to work formally as many of them work in informal economy. Many of them supported by charities who provide food parcels, clothing and supermarket vouchers.

However, charities are not able to provide support during the pandemic. The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), a non-governmental organisation that aims to promote respect for the human rights of undocumented migrants within Europe, published a statement on COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on undocumented migrants. The PICUM members call on authorities to provide emergency support, address gaps in public health systems, homelessness and food insecurity, end immigration detention, suspend deportations and prevent further irregularity. However, mental health support is also crucial for undocumented migrants especially during the pandemic.

As stated by an undocumented migrant living in Istanbul, facing mental health problems due to feeling desperation, anxiety and fear during the pandemic are common emotions not only among undocumented migrants but also among their families. Another undocumented migrant in Istanbul said the following: “I am very stressed out because I lost my job due to coronavirus. I cannot send money to my parents who look after my children in Ghana. My parents also feel anxious due to the fact that I cannot send them money. I do not know how I will survive; how they will survive. These are the challenges I am facing at the moment not the virus itself. When I realise that I am not able to provide the needs of my children back home, I feel stressful, anxious, sad and angry. I have had these feelings from time to time, but I knew how to cope with it. Now, realising that not being able to support my children for a long time creates extra stress on me and I have panic symptoms and no way out of this feeling.”

An undocumented migrant, who lives in Istanbul, compares her feelings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said, “I have been living in Istanbul for 5 years without legal rights to reside in Turkey. Living in another country without official permission consists of various emotions. I always fear of being caught and then deported. I also feel anxious because of uncertainty. I sometimes feel hopeful when I believe in myself and think of my achievements. From time to time I feel happy when I look at the photos of my kids. These are the emotions I experience every single day depending on the time of the day. In the evenings, I am happy because it is the time of the day I look at the photos of my kids. During the pandemic, I do not feel hopeful and happy anymore even during the evenings when I look at the photos of my kids, because I know that for a long time I cannot send them money, make them happy. I am not feeling hopeful either because I do not know if I can achieve anything or my life will be better. How I can feel hopeful and happy when I lost my job and do not have any other income; when I do not know if I will be able to pay my rent, buy food; and more importantly, when I am not able to support my kids, when my kids are not happy. I am more worried for my kids than being infected.”

The emotions of undocumented migrants during the pandemic changed, some are doubled, and have transnational dimensions as these feelings are also shared by their families back in the countries of origin who are also affected by the pandemic.

References:
Boccagni, P., & Baldassar, L. (2015). Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 73-80.
Svašek, M. (2010). On the Move: Emotions and Human Mobility, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36:6, 865-880.
Wise, A. & Velayutham, S. (2017) Transnational Affect and Emotion in Migration Research, International Journal of Sociology, 47:2, 116-130.

Dogus Simsek is a Teaching Fellow in Political Sociology in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Twitter: @dogussimsek

Photo: Martin2035 [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Three decades after the fall of communism, Eastern Europe’s democratic development is seen in increasingly gloomy terms. However, we may need to find a more pragmatic, middle way in assessing the region, argues Seán Hanley.

The region termed Central Europe or Central and Eastern Europe – the body of small and medium-sized states between the former USSR and the established democracies of Western Europe – was once seen as the great success story of post-communist democratisation:  rapid and peaceful political transition in 1989-90; a quick return to economic growth; flawed but functional liberal democracy; relatively rapid integration into the EU; political elites who seemed, whether out of conviction or pragmatism, willing and able to imitate West European political, economic and ideological models – although these were (and are) diverse, ranging from Nordic style welfare capitalism to British-style deregulation and neo-liberalism.

Since mid-2000s, however, the intellectual climate  among both commentators and political scientists the agenda has shifted from one of understanding consolidation, integration and consolidation or remedying the flaws of stable, but weakly performing post-communist democracy to one of deep gloom.

Now, compared to early hopes of the liberal project, the narrative has become a pessimistic one. Of democratic decline or even backsliding toward authoritarianism. The rejection by voters and elites in Central and Eastern Europe of Western European models – and the EU status quo – as too socially and economically political for their traditions and societies. And of constitutional liberalism as constraining the democratic will of the people, or holding back the emergence of a capable modernising state.  Economic catch-up with Western Europe, especially in terms of the living standards of poorer, older, less educated, seems a chimera.

Populist critics now decry the locking in of Central and Eastern Europe as, once again, an exploited peripheral Europe (including Mediterranean democracies of Southern Europe and the Balkans) – analogous, but on a much bigger scale to the “left behind” marginalised regions within Western European countries, which have fuelled populist electoral insurgencies.

Given ineffective and cumbersome procedures for enforcing the rule-of-law – in what was supposed to a club of liberal-democratic nations – the EU, as R. Daniel Kelemen has suggested, is becoming a patchwork of  regimes encompassing democracies, semi-democracies and downright authoritarian states, hamstrung by North-South and East-West splits.

What is especially jarring is that some of the supposed frontrunners democratisation in the region – Hungary and Poland – are now the vanguard of “democratic backsliding”, conservative counter-revolution and experiments in liberal governance. Some prominent governance indices, such as Freedom House’s ‘Freedom In the World’, now classify Hungary as having slipped below out of the zone of fully liberal democratic ‘Free’ societies. Poland is rapidly heading the same way.

Worse still, some of the treasured mechanisms of building democracy such as civil society development and grassroots activism have turned out work in ways quite opposite to that  envisaged in 1990s. In Hungary and Poland, the electoral breakthroughs of the Fidesz and Law and Justice (PiS) parties were prefigured years before through the development of networks of conservative civil organisations and right-wing civic initiative at grassroots level.

Moreover, the main vehicles for illiberalism have not been ‘red-brown’ alliances of ex-communists and fringe nationalists, but parties and politicians with often impeccable roots in the anti-communist opposition, accepted by West European centre-right as mainstream conservative parties and political allies.

That said, there are many varieties of populism and democratic decline, ranging from the conservative electoral revolutions of Hungary and Poland, to the longstanding weak, but oddly stable corrupt democracies of Bulgaria and Romania, to the fragmented and feverish political landscapes of  Slovakia and Czechia – and the strange “technocratic populism” of Czechia’s billionaire prime minister Andrej Babiš ,who still unsure if he wants to be the Czech Macron or the Czech Trump.

George Orwell’s dictum that “All revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure” is, unsurprisingly, often quoted these days in relation to East Europe. We could also paraphrase Tolstoy and say that all unhappy democracies are unhappy in their own way. Or we might remember the historians Joseph Rothchild and Nancy  M. Wingfield’s characterisation of the region – made originally after the decline and fall of communism in late 1980s – about Eastern Europe’s “return to diversity”. (more…)

Our evening class student, Carol Griffiths, shares her experience of translating a short story from Slovene into English in the Slovene Advanced Plus course.

Here’s our challenge. In our SSEES UCL Advanced Plus Slovene class we were presented with a short story by the writer and activist Suzana Tratnik. Translating it on the surface seemed pretty simple, but Suzana is herself a translator and I would be reading our class’ translation in front her at the 100^th anniversary of the University of Ljubljana celebrations at the Slovene Embassy. No pressure there then.

Suzana’s story is a beguiling tale about a hen which begins to speak. The writing which had seemed simple at first glance, proved pretty challenging for us to translate. First we had to pick our way through an evocative description of chicken behaviour, a subject on which we had previously not spent much time. Then we hit the name puzzle. The chicken’s name was Bejla – that translator’s nightmare, a play on words. How can you translate this chicken into English where the word for white is actually white? Eventually we decided to call the bird ‘Whitey’, which captured some of the essence of the Slovene name and felt like a credible option.

Having worked this out we then had a vigorous debate about how to render Slovene chicken-speak into English? Some of us felt that as the original had a clear meaning in Slovene the expression would have to make sense in English; others disagreed and wanted to leave it in the Slovene original.

In the end we opted for a transcreation (‘advertising-land speak’ for adapting a message from one language to another).  This went some way to making sense of the bird’s utterance, but only Suzana really knows if we pulled it off or not!

So it was, like so much translation, a puzzle that needed unpicking.  I love this kind of challenge: working through a text in close detail; divining the author’s intention; trying to ensure that every nuance is acknowledged and captured; and delivering all this in correct and fluent English. For me this really detailed work is a relatively painless way of picking up grammar and is one of the most enjoyable aspects of our Slovene class.

Suzana kindly said that she enjoyed the translation, so I breathed a sigh of relief, picked up a glass of the aptly named Krasno (which I’ll translate here as ‘wonderful’) Slovene wine and toasted my co-translators Maria Jansen, Martin Leeburn, Aidan Rush and Izidor Talampoikas, and our krasna teacher Maja Rančigaj Beneš.

Carol Griffiths

Suzana Tratnik

KO SPREGOVORI BELA KURA

Stara mama je kot furija privihrala v kuhinjo. Naslonila se je na podboj vrat, zajela sapo in z žarečimi očmi vernice izdahnila:

»Bejla je spregovorila.«

Trenutek tišine je pretrgal stari oče: »Kaj pa je rekla?«

»Rekla je beee,« je vneto pojasnjevala stara mama. »In potem še nekaj takega kot teee-beee, ampak s človeškim glasom.«

Oče, mama, stari oče, podnajemnik in jaz smo stekli ven na dvorišče in se vsi ustavili pri kurniku. Obraze smo prislonili tesno ob žičnato ograjo in se zastrmeli v Bejlo, ki je živčno premikala glavo, negotovo stopicljala, kakor da bi ji bilo nerodno pred vsemi človeškimi pogledi izza ograje, in slednjič obstala z eno taco v zraku.

»Poslušajte, poslušajte, ljudje!« je rekla stara mama, ki je prihitela za nami, in tedaj se je bela kura s taco, ki jo je prej molela v zrak, popraskala po svoji ušivi glavi.

»A zdaj pa je ne boš zaklala, stara mama?« sem vprašala.

»Molči, sicer je ne bomo slišali govoriti!« mi je ukazala.

In potem smo še dolgo dolgo tiščali obraze ob žičnato ograjo in čakali, da Bejla ponovno spregovori. Kot nalašč se je sprehajala po kurniku in nas gledala postrani, vedno z leve ali z desne, kot so pač k temu primorane vse kokoši, ki imajo oči ob straneh glave. Včasih je kljunila kakšno zrnce ali smet na tleh, včasih kakšno drugo kuro, ki je od presenečenja zafrfotala s perutmi. Vmes je tudi dvakrat zazehala in pokazala trikotni jeziček, toda spregovorila ni več.

»Dober dan!«

Vsi smo se zdrznili od vzklika za našimi hrbti in nekateri smo se prijeli za srce.

Tam za nami je stal poštar in rekel: »Prišel sem vam samo povedat, da tudi danes ni nič pošte za vašo hišo. Da me ne boste zaman čakali.«

Potem je visoko zavihtel desno nogo, se usedel na svoje vedno bleščeče se moško kolo, se v pozdrav s prstom dotaknil svoje poštarske kape in se odpeljal naprej po ulici.

Mi pa smo zrli za njim z vtisnjenimi sledovi žičnate ograje na obrazih.

Suzana Tratnik

WHEN THE WHITE HEN BEGAN TO SPEAK

Grandmother burst into the kitchen like a fury.

She leant on the door frame, took a deep breath and with the blazing eyes of a believer, gasped: “Whitey has spoken”.

Grandfather broke the moment of silence that followed: “So what did she say?”

“She said meheh,” grandmother excitedly explained. “And then something like meheh-beyey but in a human voice.”

Father, mother, grandfather, the tenant and I ran out into the yard and we all stood by the henhouse. We pressed our faces tightly against the wire fence and stared at Whitey, who was nervously moving her head, stepping uncertainly from one leg to the other, as if she were uncomfortable with all these humans looking through the fence, and finally she stopped, with one foot in the air.

“Listen, listen, everyone,” grandmother said, hurrying after us, whereupon the white hen scratched her lice-ridden head with the foot she had previously held off the ground.

“And now you won’t kill her, grandma?” I asked.

“Quiet, or we won’t hear her speak!” she ordered me.

And then we pressed our faces for a long, long time against the chicken wire and waited for Whitey to speak again. As if on purpose she was walking around the henhouse, looking at us askance, always from the right or left, as all chickens are obliged to do, their eyes being on either side of their heads. Sometimes she pecked at a grain or some scrap on the floor, sometimes she pecked at some other hen, which fluttered her wings, out of surprise. Meanwhile she twice yawned and showed the triangle of her tongue, but spoke no more.

“Hello!”

We all jumped at the shout at our backs and some clutched at their hearts.

There behind us stood the postman, who said “I just came to tell you that there’s no post for you again today. Just so you won’t be waiting in vain.”

Then he swung his right leg high, mounted his always-gleaming bicycle, touched his postman’s cap in farewell, and pedalled off up the road.

We just gazed after him with the mark of the chicken wire imprinted on our faces.

Translated in the SSEES UCL Advanced Plus Slovene course by Carol Griffiths, Maria Jansen, Martin Leeburn, Aidan Rush and Izidor Talampoikas

Dr Dogus Simsek is a Teaching Fellow in Political Sociology at UCL SSEES.

This article was first posted in the Crisis Magazine on 1st of October.

Since 2011, Turkey has received more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees. This is almost half of the global Syrian refugee population. In the early phases of the refugee influx, Turkish authorities framed Syrians as ‘guests’ rather than refugees. Under the assumption that the crisis would end quickly – and Syrians would, therefore, return home after short stay – the country adopted an “open door” policy on Syrian migration. While seemingly hospitable, Syrians’ guest status fell outside any legal definition in international refugee policies. Although Turkey signed the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Additional Protocol on the status of refugees, the country applies a geographical limitation that excluded Syria. For Syrians in Turkey today, this means international asylum rights don’t apply.

What does apply to them is the Temporary Protection (TP) regime the Turkish government adopted in October, 2011. This ensured all Syrians humanitarian assistance and the right to a limitless duration of stay in Turkey. It also confirmed adherence to the principle of non-refoulement, the idea that refugees must not be returned to a country where they would be in likely danger of persecution. Given the dangers of return, this Temporary Protection regime gave Syrians registered as refugees in Turkey access to healthcare and protection from forced return. Managing this scheme became the responsibility of the Turkish Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM), a body that works under the authority of The Ministry of Interior. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of August 2019 there were 3,649,750 Syrian refugees registered in Turkey under this protection program. It’s estimated that an additional 500,000 Syrians are living in Turkey, unregistered.

In April, 2014, Turkey adopted a new Law on Foreigners and International Protection that further elaborated the Temporary Protection status of Syrians in Turkey. This law focused on guaranteeing that Syrians could not be returned to Syria until safe conditions and access to fundamental rights there were guaranteed (non-refoulement). In addition, the rights of Syrian nationals in Turkey came to include lawful stay in Turkey until the Syrian conflict was over. Furthermore, access to health care, education, and social assistance were guaranteed. This even included, for example, home care assistance to families with a disabled relative. Under this law, access to the labour market was also granted as a right, and the task of enforcing this was delegated to the Ministry of Social Security and Work. An additional regulation was then issued in 2016, which allowed registered Syrian refugees to apply for work permits, in a step to formalize Syrian labour and enable access to workers’ rights.

However, accessing work permits remained difficult and depended upon employers’ willingness to offer contracts. As a result, the number of work permits granted to Syrian refugees remains low according to the latest figures made available. From the 1st of January, 2016 to the 30th of September, 2018, only 27,930 work permits were issued to Syrian workers, with 25,457 permits going to men and 2,473 to women. The majority of Syrians in Turkey reside in towns and cities rather than in refugee camps, and their populations are primarily concentrated in the governorates bordering Syria and large metropolitan areas. There, they struggle to access adequate accommodation, social services and job opportunities.

The reality for most Syrians in Turkey remains that they work in an informal economy without social security, faced with exploitation and lack safe working conditions. They are overworked and underpaid, with no social security or pension rights. Syrians primarily work in the largely informal agricultural and textile sectors, and with few safety protections. According to figures from the Worker Health and Safety Council (İşçi Sağlığı ve İş Güvenliği Meclisi), 108 refugees lost their lives in work-related accidents in 2018. In turn, Syrians’ low socio-economic status leads to their relative exclusion from wider Turkish society. Syrians who work in the informal market face difficulties building bridges with the Turkish working class, due to competition over employment opportunities.

The Turkish labour market also poses high exploitation risks for children, given the widespread phenomenon of child labour in areas such as agriculture, textile factories, as well as restaurants in various cities of Turkey. According to a United Metalworkers Union report, the textile sector employs approximately 19% of underage workers. 29% of these underage workers are Syrian children under the age of 15. In fact, the majority of school-aged Syrian children are working instead of attending school. As of 2019, 645,000 Syrian children were enrolled to Turkish state schools, while 400,000 Syrian children in Turkey were out of school. In addition to child labor, various other barriers obstruct access to children’s education, including a lack of parents’ knowledge about school registration procedures and the education system, and discrimination in schools. Findings from my own research indicate that many Syrian refugees experience financial hardship due to having limited access to the labour market, which also has a negative effect on Syrian children’s access to education.

In 2016, it was announced that millions of Syrians living in Turkey would be granted Turkish citizenship. As of 2019, 79,820 Syrians were granted citizenship in Turkey. Granting full citizenship is an important development but it remains unclear whether citizenship would be accessible for all Syrians under Temporary Protection. The deputy prime minister has clarified that ‘citizenship will be granted initially based on criteria such as employment, education level, wealth, and urgency of the applicant’s individual situation.’ This has raised concerns that Syrians who lack economic resources and are less skilled will be denied access to citizenship rights. Such concerns seem founded, as Turkey’s refugee integration policy favours those skilled contributors to the economy and those refugees with access to financial capital. This integration processes excludes refugees who are unskilled and have limited economic resources for investment in the receiving country.

Such a policy does not equally support the integration of all Syrians residing in Turkey but is class-based; only ‘selected’ Syrians are deemed worthy of state support. The Turkish government has pursued a neoliberal approach to the integration of Syrian refugees, where their economic utility has come to form the main entry point for accessing rights. Current integration policies, therefore, undermine Syrian refugees’ access to fundamental rights by making such rights directly conditional to Turkey’s economic gain. Social tensions between the Syrians and Turks have risen to peak levels in recent months, as riots occurred in Istanbul in July this year. As these tensions persist, the rights granted to Syrians will likely face further pressures in the future.

Authors: Olena Yermakova (@O_Yermakova) and Michael Cole (@NotTheMikeCole), Early Stage Researchers for the UCL SSEES-led FATIGUE project

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke” – Will Rogers, American actor 1879-1935

It has been almost a century since American actor Will Rogers made that observation about US politics, yet in Ukraine’s 2019 presidential elections such a description has proved to be even more apt. Often referred to off the record as some kind of ‘Wonderland’, in Ukraine the roles of joker and king are now both being performed by just one person. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a popular comedian, who’s been mocking politicians on stage for the past two decades, is the new President of Ukraine.

Virtual Politics

It all started with a TV show, The Servant of the People, where Zelenskiy plays a history teacher, who following  an impassioned rant against corruption which went viral, much to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, becomes President of Ukraine. The real-life Zelenskiy says in the show he was portraying his pipe dream for Ukraine ─ a dream of an honest man becoming President and really changing the country for the better. Then people around him started talking. Why not try and make that dream come true? Imagine all the Ukrainian people, joining him in that dream? And though Zelenskiy may be a dreamer, after gaining over 73% of the votes in the second round of the Presidential elections, it’s clear he’s not the only one.

(more…)

Written by Michael Cole and Olena Yermakova, – Early Stage Researchers for the UCL SSEES-led FATIGUE project
(This post was first published on 21 April 2019.)

Matryoshka Dolls for Sale on Adrivskiy Uzviz, Kyiv. Even here, customers can choose between Darth Vader, a Babushka in National Costume, ‘a Real Politician’ or a comedy character. Photo Credit – Michael Cole 2018

On May 25^th 2014, following the events of Euro Maidan, ‘Chocolate King’ Petro Poroshenko was elected President of Ukraine in the first round of voting. Purely by coincidence, I spent the day visiting the ghost town of Pripyat and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. On the way to our destination we stopped at a service station, which seemed rather busy considering it was at the side of an otherwise deserted highway. The reason for the commotion was a brief visit to use the facilities by another presidential candidate on his way to Kyiv with his death stare firmly set on the main prize. Standing at a urinal next to Darth Vader, leader of the short-lived ‘Internet Party of Ukraine’, was just one of the many times when I realised that every time I start to think I understand, I’m only setting myself up for the next reminder that in Ukraine you really never do know what you’re going to get.

(more…)