Eastern approaches

THREE months after the resignation of the government of Boyko Borisov (pictured above) on the back of the biggest demonstrations in 16 years, Bulgarians went to the polls on May 12th. The result of the election will do little to give Bulgaria the clear leadership and stability the poorest member state of the European Union so badly needs.

After a campaign marred by wiretapping scandals and accusations of vote-rigging, Mr Borisov’s centre-right GERB party won 31% of the vote against the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), which got 27% of the vote, according to preliminary official results. The Turkish minority party, DPS, came third with about 11%.

FOREIGN POLICY magazine’s new list of the 500 most influential people in the world includes Donald Tusk and Radosław Sikorski. The Polish prime minister and foreign minister are the only Central Europeans to make the cut. Internationally, they have earned Poland a reputation as a rock of economic stability in a troubled Europe, and a diplomatic heavyweight.

Poles do not see things quite the same way. Though still in comparatively better economic shape than much of the European Union, Poland is suffering a slowdown and unemployment is high. The government is accused of inaction.

A GREY Chrysler Voyager van equipped with antennas called “The Catcher”. A former official of the interior ministry who interrupts his 50th birthday party to destroy data on the ministry’s computers' hard drives with a screw driver. A former minister of agriculture wired with recording equipment, presumably attached to his chest with scotch tape, who visits the home of the former prime minister. These are all scenes from the “Bulgarian Watergate”, a wiretapping scandal that could have profound implications for the elections on May 12th.

SEARCH the archives of this newspaper and you won't find much on Slovenia. Since independence in 1991 not that much has happened here. Slovenes had a reputation of being prim, thrifty and hardworking and they got on with their lives. Their governments worked hard to get them into NATO, the European Union and the euro. Slovenia seemed to be a rather sleepy, if happily boring, kind of place.

Admittedly a small group of people at the top appeared to get very rich quickly. But as everyone else was relatively well off too, no one seemed to mind too much. As the years rolled on the Slovene economy prospered.

CZECHS thought they had less of an international identity problem than people from other small Central European countries, say Slovaks, Latvians or Lithuanians. After all, Václav Havel, Milos Forman, Jaromír Jágr (pictured above) and other famous Czechs must have put their country on the map.

They were in for a surprise. The aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing proved that not even Mr Jágr, a popular ice-hockey player who was traded to the Boston Bruins from Dallas only weeks before the attack, managed to make his country known to many Americans.

PETR NEČAS, the Czech prime minister, is accusing the opposition Social Democrats of a “coup” because of their recent move to displace the director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR). He is being accused of “rightist Bolshevism” in return.

What may appear to the casual observer as a staid research institute has been a hotbed of ideological struggle since its founding in 2008. The ÚSTR is charged with researching not only the 20th century Communist era (1948-1989), but also the time of Nazi occupation (1939-1945) in what was then Czechoslovakia.

THE Tsarnaev family, like many families from Chechnya, were part of a diaspora that had scattered all over the globe: Turkey, Syria, Poland, and Austria, and, apparently, suburban Massachusetts. Displaced first by Stalin, who was as distrustful as he was vengeful, and then driven out by the indiscriminate violence of two wars since the fall of the Soviet Union, modern-day Chechens are a people that live outside their homeland as much as inside it.