I like the approach of a group of young people in Macedonia who have taken to protesting their country’s foibles in song. You can see a story about them here in Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso and videos of their performances here. But I want to know: how popular are they? Is anyone paying attention save a few bemused passers-by? And why did they choose song? Anybody out there know? Is it stating the obvious to say that in some of the countries we cover people feel so frustrated and powerless that they’re struggling to find ways to be heard? At least in those countries where it’s legal to be heard.

The Ukrainian presidential campaign, for all its serious regional implications, sometimes seems designed to offer laughs to those not actually living in Ukraine (in which case you might well feel more like crying). In my new task of putting together the daily News Filter for the TOL’s revamped site (which makes Web-surfing a professional necessity rather than a way of putting off real work) I’ve spotted several stories lately that seem to crystallize the main narratives leading up to the first round of voting on 17 January in a way calculated to draw a mix of guffaws and tears.

First and foremost in both categories was The New Republic’s Yulia Tymoshenko profile, which opens with the revelation that the prime minister considers herself to be, quite literally, the reincarnation of Eva Peron. Author Julia Ioffe goes on to recount the erstwhile “gas princess’s” rise to power and posit that she of the blonde braids and peasant blouses might represent the most serious threat of Ukraine sliding into autocracy.

Competition on that score comes from front-runner Viktor Yanukovych, who came pretty close in a recent AP interview to asserting that democracy doesn’t work. “So what did this Orange Revolution give us?” he asked. “Freedom of speech? That’s very good. But what price did the Ukrainian people pay for this? For the development of this democratic principle in our country, the price was too great.” For Yanukovych the comedy parts comes from speaking Ukrainian, by doing which he drew hearty laughs from a crowd of 2,000 on a campaign swing through the largely Russian-speaking Crimea.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that President Viktor Yushchenko is playing the Russia card in a last-ditch effort to rescue his doomed candidacy, deriding Tymoshenko and Yanukovych as a “single Kremlin coalition” intent on wrecking Ukraine’s European aspirations. Given the apparent public loathing for the NATO- and EU-looking Yushchenko - according to the latest Angus Reid poll he’s currently riding at 3.8 percent, just ahead of Communist Petro Symonenko - the question seems to be less whether the next president is a tool of Moscow than whether many people in Ukraine care.

Keep an eye on TOL over the next couple of weeks for regular headline updates from the campaign trail and analysis of the election and its potential aftermath, including an interview with the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Ukraine expert, Andrew Wilson.

The Washington Post has a nice profile today of the Belarus Free Theatre, an underground and highly political Minsk company that performs at Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center tonight and tomorrow night.

I write “Minsk company”  in that the four-year-old theater is nominally based in the Belarusan capital; as the Post notes, “officially the Belarus Free Theatre does not exist” in the state-run landscape of Minsk stagecraft. The Free Theatre’s “actors perform in tiny apartments, texting their location at the last minute to avoid harassment by government officials. They perform in bars and tell the authorities the gathering is a holiday party; they perform in the woods and say it’s a wedding.” The performers have lost jobs; venues that host them have lost their licenses.

Tomorrow night’s performance will be the U.S. premiere of Discover Love, based on the true story of human rights activist Irina Krasovskaya, whose husband, businessman and pro-democracy figure Anatoly Krasovsky, was kidnapped and killed in Belarus in 1999. Now based in Washington, Krasovskaya has become one of the leading voices calling on Europe  to take a tougher line with the Lukashenaka regime. She developed the play with Free Theatre chiefs Natalia Kolyada and Nikolai Khalezin, and will host a reception following the performance, which comes 10 years to the day after her husband’s disappearance.

To learn more about this remarkable troupe, watch the documentary below, which aired last month on the Al Jazeera series Witness.

Ukraine’s parliament has set 17 January 2010 as the country’s presidential election date, setting the stage for six more months of the kind of backbiting and paralysis that, per a recent New York Times headline, has given Orange Revolution heroes and serial feuders Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko a “black eye.”

While covering the usual ground - IMF bailout; gas sparring with Russia; possible loss of Euro 2012; tripartite sniping among President Yuschenko, Prime Minister Tymoshenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich as they jockey for poll position - the 22 June Times piece offers a nice little nugget of zeitgeist, contextualizing the country’s political mood via a YouTube clip of Tymoshenko preparing to give a televised speech.

In a moment reminiscent of the 1992 U.S. political documentary Feed, Tymoshenko loses her teleprompter feed and snaps, “It’s all gone.” The video, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times since it was posted on 7 June (not exactly Susan Boyle territory, but about a thousand times more popular than the typical clip of the Ukrainian PM), has come to be seen in some circles “as something of an epitaph for [Tymoshenko's] political movement,” the Times’ Clifford J. Levy reports, dryly noting that her words can also be translated as, “Everything’s fallen apart.” How much further things can fall part in Ukraine before the presidential campaign slogs to a close remains to be seen.

As the results from the European parliament (EP) elections started coming in a week ago pundits faced two worrying phenomena: the low turnout, and the comparatively big vote for the extreme right. Holland was the first to announce its results, prematurely by European law, and served the first extremist surprise: second place for Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party with 16.9 % of the vote. The UK topped up: for the first time since the 1930s a neo-fascist group in Britain, the British National Party, received enough votes to enter a legislative body, winning two seats in the EP.

In total about 30 of the 736 seats in the new parliament went to extreme right formations, up from 23 in 2004. The Extreme right scored the highest in Austria with 18% of the vote split between the two far right parties (FPO and BZO) , where the FPO has 34 seats in the local parliament and it has twice been a junior partner in coalition governments. The largest single far right vote came from Hungary however: a big surprise from a new member-state. The Jobbik party won 15% of the Hungarian vote, sending three far right deputies to the EP. The newest members - Romania and Bulgaria - again sent in extreme right representatives, along with Finland. (source: european elections.eu)

All parties ran on a nationalist and economic platform, ranging from the British National Party’s anti-Turkish (”British jobs for British workers”) message warning against the “dangerous drive…to give 80 million low-wage Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain”  to the anti-gypsy campaigns of the Hungarian Jobbik, the Bulgarian Ataka, and the Romanian Greater Romania (”Christians and patriots to rid this country of thieves”). The Czeck National Party even employed Nazi rhetoric in evoking a “final solution of the Gypsy question” in television adverts. (EU Business, May 24)

Anti-semitism also became an issue, with the Austrian far right campaigning with the slightly ignorant “veto for Turkey and Israel in the EU”, and Hungarian Krisztina Morvai’s reportedly anti-Semitic stances. Nevertheless, the scandal surrounding the Jobbik deputee (who is not actually a Jobbik member) is a balloon of hot and unconfirmed air.

Analysts compare the performance of the extreme right in the conditions of the global economic crisis to the Great Depression and the ascent of the far right and the far left in 1930s Europe: in Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai’s words “The lesson from the 1930s is that an economic and social crisis, if it is not contained, not controlled, can give ground to a significant strengthening of radical movements.” Brussels political analyst Pascal Delwit also remarks “As long as there is a complicated and tense economic, financial and hence social situation, we may expect violent reactions and an impact on voters’ behaviour.” (AFP)

On a Europe-wide level EU member candidates in the West Balkans are becoming restless. Most far right parties target Turkey, but Holland’s Geert Wilders also demands that Bulgaria and Romania be thrown out of the European Union. (RFI, June 5). Serbian analysts, however, are not worried yet. According to Nikola Jovanovic, editor of the Challenges of EU Integration magazine in Belgrade “there is no dispute about Balkan countries right now. We could say that the results of these elections are of no major concern for us. The important thing is that the big parties won, there was no major breakthrough of either extreme left or right”(Radio Belgrade, Jun 8). Jovanovic admits that the big conservative parties are not too set on enlargement, but fears are nevertheless premature.

On the positive side the  far right failed to garner almost any support in Germany, France, the Czech Republic and Poland. Moreover, analysts cannot agree if the ascent of the far right amid record-low turnout of 43 percent (of 388 million eligible voters) is a message to European institutions that worries over immigration and anger over failed domestic policies take precedence over any pan-European agenda, or that the results fail to reflect a disaffected but not extremist majority.
For West Balkan analysts, the show must go on.

On December 14 1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina became a nation-state on paper.  It took a bloody three-year long war, a NATO bombing campaign, and the signatures of all the great powers apart form Japan, assembled in Paris, to end the war and create a legal framework for the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina - the Dayton Accords. The constitution of the state can be found in Annex 4: the former sworn enemies are now called “the entities” of Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a bicameral governemnt in a 1:2 representative ratio. The international consensus solution to the Balkan problem was James Madison’s “federal principle.”

Fourteen years later the Prime Minister of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, is claiming that the international community, in the face of High Representative of the European Union Valentin Inzko, is compromising the federal principle in an effort to centralize, or in Dodik’s words to “unitarize” Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Dodik’s statement came out on June 5th in response to Inzko’s visit to the UN Security Council, where he explicitly identified Republika Srpska’s government and Milorad Dodik as “obstacles on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s road to Europe”(Dani, June 5). These two statements are part of a long-standing tension between Dodik’s government and the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The problem can be summed up by former High Representative Miroslav Lajak’s bold statement that the international bodies in Bosnia-Hercegovina are a “dead horse,” doing nothing while the rival local leaders hold the country back(Balkan Insight, feb 2).

In an effort to break this impasse Valentin Inzko, who has been the European Union Special Representative (EUSR) since late March, in late May set 11 June as a deadline for the RS regional parliament to rescind its 14 May decision to annul the transfer of 68 powers to state-level authorities (European Voice, June 10). The transfer was seen as part of the implementation of the Dayton accords, and as a step towards constitutional reform, which the EU considers necessary for the better functioning of the Bosnian state.

Dodik, however, also grounds his protest on the Dayton accords and the federal principle. It remains to be seen if he can legally challenge the Institution of the Special Representative. Toby Vogel of European voice recalls a similar confrontation between Dodik and Miroslav Lajcak in the autumn of 2007, in which Lajcak allowed himself to be dragged into long negotiations ending in concessions to the Bosnian Serbs. Vogel sees a parallel with the present situation, where Dodik is protesting Inzko’s sacking of a Bosnian Serb official at Bosnia’s Internal Intelligence Service (SIPA) for spying on international officials.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s  constiutional set-up and its European future are put under question from another direction as well. The presidential make-up of Bosnia-Herzegovina envisions a three-member system for Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats, in other words Orthodox, Muslims and Catholics. Jewish and Roma entities are left out. In response Jakob Finci, Bosnia’s ambassador to Switzerland and the leader of Sarajevo’s Jewish community, and Dervo Sejdić, a member of the Roma Council of Bosnia, told a hearing at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg last Wednesday (3 June) that the provisions in the Bosnian constitution constituted discrimination. (European Voice, June 10)

The Former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe were a tough bite for the European Union with their economic and corruption issues. Bosnia-Herzegovina now adds a constitutional challenge to the list. If the federal versus national principle clash Dodik is  decrying is little more than an anti-reformist theatre, the line between the sovereignty and interventionist principle the OHR is toeing, is not a joke.

What happened to the Albanian gangsters? Those same whose notoriety won them a mention in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale in the character of the chief villain Le Chiffre? Throughout the 1990s they stood out even in the eyes of Italian prosecutors as especially motivated and violent, while in New York the Polish mafia, who were willing to do business with just about anybody, avoided the Albanians for their unpredictability.

The Albanian mafia, unlike other Balkan organized crime groups, has a history stretching over five centuries: beginning with the traditional family-based clans called Fis which operated under their own code or kanun. The kanun, still observed today, impedes infiltration by law enforcement. The Kosovo War was the Albanian mafia’s ticket to power: when the traditional heroin route from Turkey to Western Europe via Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia was interrupted, the Albanian facilitators stepped in. They quickly became high-ranking players, and spread worldwide once Kosovar Albanians (indistinguishable from Albanians proper) began to qualify for refugee status.

According to US Drug Enforcement Agency estimates the “Balkan Connection” [heroin route] might have been moving 15 to 40% of the US heroin supply around 1985. According to the East European office of the Brussels-based Customs Cooperation Council - an international customs authority - a quarter of the heroin sold in West Europe passed through East Europe in the 1990s, with just 10 percent of the drug destined for West European markets being seized. In 1993, police in East Europe seized 5,000 pounds of heroin, 4,000 pounds of cocaine, and 50,000 pounds of cannabis. (Srpska mreza)

Almost twenty years later the EU is commending Albanian progress in fighting organized crime. According to General Director of the State Police Ahmet Prenci every paragraph of the 2009 EU Porgress Report on Albania mentions the strides that Albania has made in fighting organized crime, border management, guaranteeing public order and fight against drug smuggling (ATA, Tirana, 05/06/09).  The report, which can be found here says that drug-related prosecutions have increased, but seizures of heroin at border crossings have fallen by 50%, and Albania remains a source country for cannabis. The report is tacit at best: whether the EU and the Albanian authorities are speaking the same language remains to be seen. Albania will have to tackle its drug trafficking and organized crime problems, because those can prove to be the main obstacles to EU entry.

Mikalaj Autuchovic is dying in a Belarusian prison. It is the EU’s approach to the Belarusian regime that that may silence him to death.

Mikalaj Autuchovic, Jury Lavonau and Uladzimier Asipienka have been in custody since February 8, 2009. They were accused of “destroying property” in 2005 in a case which had already been investigated in the proper manner and on which the sentence had been passed. The injured party hasn’t filed any official claims on any of the three.

Mikalaj Autuchovic and Jury Lavonau already served sentences passed in a case  widely believed to have a political background and have been recognized as prisoners of conscience by ‘Amnesty International’.

There have been almost no investigative actions conducted. Until recently the case investigator denied meetings with their family members.

Mikalaj Autuchovic is on a hunger strike since April 16 demanding that either his case is sent to court or he is released. On June 2, however the prosecutor extended the investigation on his criminal case until July 3.

He has lost nearly 30 kilos after 7 weeks on his hunger strike.

Until now, he has received no support from the EU. In his May 26 report on  Belarus for PACE, Mr. Rigoni did not mention a word about Mr Autuchovic’s hunger strike, which had lasted for 1,5 months at that point. Based on that report, PACE came out unanimously in favour of restoring the special guest status of the Belarusian Parliament at PACE.

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Welcome to Transitions Online’s Next In Line Blog, a resource devoted to spotlighting issues concerning prospective EU members in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. With support from the Czech Foreign Ministry, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and the Open Society Institute’s East East Program, TOL has, since 2004, implemented projects aimed at assisting professional journalists from the region acquire skills necessary for covering EU affairs.

The participants of these projects have taken part in a number of seminars and online courses on covering EU affairs and many have written articles on EU-related issues. Many will take advantage of the opportunities offered by this blog.

Whether you are a journalist, academic or student or simply someone with keen interest in, and knowledge of, EU issues, you should feel at home at this blog. It will provide you with that crucial little bit of extra information and color you rarely find in traditional reporting. And if you have something interesting to say on issues related to the region’s relations with Brussels, why not consider sharing your information and views on this blog as others may be keen to hear your thoughts and insights.

If you are a journalist, tell others about stories you have worked on or those you are about to start researching. Share anecdotes that don’t make it to your published copy. Feature full-length interviews with your sources or blog photos, video, or audio you didn’t use. Tell others about articles and books you read or public and social gatherings you attended.

Above all, we hope this blog will create a vivid impression of the mood in the prospective member states toward enlargement, whether positive or negative or somewhere in between.

We welcome debate, so feel free to express your opinions, but, please, base them on fact and refrain from offensive language.

Thanks for checking out EU Next in Line, TOL’s blog on the accession candidates and partnership states along the European Union’s southern and eastern borders, from the Balkans to Belarus. This blog is still in development, but we’ll start posting soon.