Week in Review: In Search of Direction
A country adrift, critics supressed and an investment project with an explosive side are just some of the highlights of our selection of Premium stories this week.
Ilie Bolojan during a confidence vote on his cabinet in parliament assembly in Bucharest, June 2025. Photo: EPA/ROBERT GHEMENT.
The collapse of Romania’s government at the beginning of the month has left a dangerous political vacuum. The country’s wider (geo)political orientation is not in dispute, but who will lead it in the direction it needs to go is an open question.
In his opinion piece for Balkan Insight, Bjorn Anseeuw asks: is Romania becoming like a car that no one wants to drive? However much broad agreement there might be over the direction the country needs to take, if no one wants to jump into the driving seat, the risk of drift looms.
Read more: Romania Risks Becoming a Car No One Wants to Drive (May 15, 2026)
In 2022, Turkey adopted a law criminalising “the public dissemination of misleading information”. Efforts to combat disinformation exist in many countries, though few have turned it into a criminal offence.
The Turkish law was controversial from the start, as its vague wording, raised concerns that is could be applied arbitrarily to independent media and government critics. Four years later, there is growing evidence that this is precisely what was intended all along. Our analysis looks at how the law is being used to silence critical voices, together with a new social media law.
Read more: ‘Controlling the Narrative’: Turkish Govt’s Disinformation Law Becomes a Weapon (May 19, 2026)
Ethnic Albanian students from the Faculty of Law wave Albanian flags during a protest in Skopje, demanding to sit the bar exam in the Albanian language, April 2026. Photo: EPA/GEORGI LICOVSKI.
The issue of language rights is once again on the political agenda in North Macedonia. Ethnic Albanian law students are demanding the right to take their bar exams in their mother tongue, rather than in Macedonian, as is the case now.
Not surprisingly, the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party and many ethnic Macedonian officials are resisting this, arguing that knowledge of Macedonian is necessary to take part in court cases. Ethnic Albanian students counter that the bar exam is a knowledge test, not a language test. At the heart of the dispute is – arguably – the wider issue of unfulfilled language rights.
Read more: North Macedonia Bar Exam Protest Revives Albanian Language Debate (May 15, 2026)
Victory Day military parade in Moscow, 9 May 2026. Photo: EPA/ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/POOL.
The Victory Day public holiday, which kicks off the month, is a central event in Russian public life. The military parade on Moscow’s Red Square celebrates the capitulation of Nazi Germany in 1945 and remembers the Soviet Union’s fallen soldiers.
In past decades, the parade would have been attended by leaders and officials from near and afar. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its fourth year, however, foreign guests this May were few. In his opinion piece for Balkan Insight, Maksim Samorukov takes a look at which Balkan leaders came to Moscow’s rescue, as well as the changing fortunes of Moscow’s Balkan relationships.
Read more: Russian Despatch: Bosnian Serbs Come Through for Red Square Parade (May 20, 2026)
Last month, Romania introduced a scheme to legalise the status of migrant workers stuck in a legal limbo. But there seems more to the scheme than meets the eye.
Activists and volunteers working with migrants in Romania have spotted a catch. If a deportation order has already been issued against a migrant worker, the person who applies to the scheme will end up being deported rather than being allowed to legalise their status. Such a system, they say, could end up doing migrants more harm than good. Our analysis scrutinises the issue.
Read more: ‘Like a Trap’: Romanian Pledge to Regulate Migrants’ Status Stirs Suspicion (May 20, 2026)
Could a sizeable investment in high-end tourism in Albania by a company linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, soon get off the ground? Albanian authorities have greenlighted the construction project, with the investment valued at 1.4 billion euros.
There is just one problem – reportedly, strewn underwater all around Sazan island are large quantities of explosives, artillery shells and anti-submarine mines. Might this get in the way of what seemed like a good investment?
