Europe

A feminist approach is transforming the system much more than traditional foreign policy has, says Swedish Ambassador for Gender Equality and Coordinator of Feminist Foreign Policy, ANN BERNES. According to her, in the beginning the concept of feminism in politics surprised even the Swedes themselves. ”The giggle effect is there no more, because our experience is that change is possible,“ she claims.

Some are complaining about quotas, but those complaints are the best indicator that we need them, says German MEP Hannah Neumann. She confirms that it was partially a stroke of luck to “sneak the F-word” into the European Parliament Report on Gender Equality in EU Foreign and Security Policy that she co-authored, calling on EU Member States to adopt a Feminist Foreign Policy.

After the Croatian election, significant novelties have appeared on both sides of the spectrum, including emergence of sizeable green force in parliament.

February 2020 will be written into the modern political history of Slovakia as a month with a great turning point which combined in a special way two dramatic themes in the internal political development of the country. The first area was a two-year civil society effort to make a major social change after the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were murdered in February 2018 by order of the mafia. The second area was the overwhelming victory of the opposition over the dominant party, Smer-SD, in the parliamentary elections of 2020.

Slovak political landscape is exceptionally fragmented ahead of February 29 general elections. One of the last opinion polls published before the election polls moratorium foresees eight parties to be represented in the parliament. However, conceivable scenarios include 6 to 12 parties possibly entering the parliament.  This pre-election analysis was published by EuroPolicy in cooperation with the Prague office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.