Rather than renewal, these moves suggest elite realignment as the resource pool shrinks.

The elections to Estonia's Riigikogu wrapped up an unprecedented few months for the political representation of women in the country. The aftermath proved there is still a long road ahead.

In this episode, Maciek Makulski sits down with Oktawian Milewski – a Moldovan political analyst based in Warsaw.

"Many of the dimensions you can see at the European level or even global one are present also in Estonia. I would say that the main leitmotif here is a macro clash between closeness and openness," says Stefano Braghiroli in an interview for New Eastern Europe.

A recent forum of democratic forces in Kyiv may have finally started the formation of a broad pro-reform coalition of largely untainted Ukrainian anti-corruption fighters.

Nikol Pashinyan took it all. After months of struggling to serve as prime minister without parliamentary support, he finally got the majority he needed. The landslide victory provides Pashinyan a strong mandate to continue the revolutionary changes. The society has hope as well as significant expectations. However, the consequences and evaluations are now legitimate as well. There are no more excuses, so the real challenge begins. 

The next presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine, which will take place in spring and autumn 2019 respectively, are likely to be the most brutal and emotional in the country’s history. Both the stakes and the level of popular discontent are higher than ever.

This weekend the citizens of Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had the chance to influence the direction of their countries.

The case of mayoral candidate Andrei Nastase, who was blocked from assuming office in the Moldovan capital, is a warning to the whole region. Democracies are increasingly threatened by powerful oligarchs and their interests.

In the latest episode of the "In Between Europe" podcast, the hosts speak with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, an independent MP in the outgoing Hungarian parliament to make sense of Fidesz’s third supermajority and explore the future trajectory of Hungary’s politics. History Minute: Gramsci and the Rural Vote in Hungarian History

Having turned the law into an instrument of state policy and private vendetta and having turned the legislature into a caricature without power of independence, can Vladimir Putin afford to become an ex-president? Conventional wisdom would say that he cannot. Without being at the top of the system, he is at best vulnerable and at worst dead, and he knows it.

In March Vladimir Putin will, it is safe to predict, win re-election. The real questions relate to what happens after the election, with some predicting a thaw, while others expect even more authoritarian policies. Will Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev be replaced? Will there be renewed overtures to the West? In many ways, though, this may betray our own biases, as Kremlinologists from democratic nations naturally assume that an election represents a boundary point from one state to another. Yet in a system such as Putin’s, sometimes described as a managed democracy, it is much more clearly managed than democratic. Indeed, of late it has come to feel as if the Kremlin regards the various trappings of democracy – not just elections but also press conferences, legislative sessions and consultations – as an increasingly irritating burden.

The Kremlin has nothing to offer Russian citizens except stability without economic growth and no clear perspective. This will eventually bring down Vladimir Putin’s regime. The opposition, however, is not yet fully ready to take power when that happens.

“Yes, Putin has many shortcomings, but there is no alternative to him.” I have heard this phrase in Russia countless times, from shopkeepers and artists, to professors of physics and retirees. I read it in Russian (mostly) state-controlled media. Nevertheless, I am surprised every time I hear it. “Well, of course not,” I usually reply. “After all, Putin takes all necessary steps so that no alternative will arise.” It is the main goal that the giant state propaganda machine, special services, heads of Russian regions and ordinary officials pursue 24 hours a day. Nineteen years after Vladimir Putin was first elected as president, the argument that there is no alternative illustrates only one thing: the absence of democracy in Russia. For many years, the country has been stuck with an authoritarian regime that has all but eliminated political competition and blocked any attempts to change the system. This is the regime’s strength as well as its weakness. Using an expression coined by leading Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova, the increasingly authoritarian regime needs a democratic form of legitimisation – this is the main political contradiction of the current regime in Moscow.