A New Generation of East European Women Continue to Lead Political Change

Photo Credit: Laura Boushnak for The New York Time

The New York Times has an article (In a Land Dominated by Ex-Rebels, Kosovo Women Find Power at the Ballot Box) on a new generation of women political leaders in Kosovo.  It continues the theme in two of my last posts that Eastern Europe is seeing a renaissance in women stepping up to challenge corruption and poor governance in their countries, from Maia Sandu in Moldova to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Belarus and also in Kosovo and elsewhere.  The key, as Andrew Higgins writes about Kosovo and I wrote earlier of elsewhere in Eastern Europe, is "discontent with the endemic corruption and bullying ways of a postwar order dominated by swaggering male veterans..."

Women leading political change reflects not only dissatisfaction with existing political and social conditions characteristic of the immediate post-Soviet period from 1991 and the 2000 noughts but also the cultural emergence of Eastern Europe in its own right, independent and self-reliant from Russian overbearance.  The transformation will accelerate.  The risk is not so much Russia now but homegrown conservative authoritarianism as seen recently in Poland and Hungary.

The Women Leading Change in Eastern Europe

More on Women Leading Change in Eastern Europe