Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites
Civil unrest is spreading in eastern Europe as the economic crisis hits the region harder than western states, with anti-government riots kicking off in Lithuania and Bulgaria in recent days and with Estonia and Hungary at risk, reports EUObserver.
The riots are not isolated events but a wave of predictable reactions to the economic crisis, Dorothee Bohle, a political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest told the EUObserver. “After a few years of relatively high growth and social advancement, it’s all come to an abrupt end and they’ve been slapped with a very harsh austerity package,” she said. “This is essentially a return of the ‘IMF riots’ we were used to from Latin America in the eighties and nineties.”
