If you are a French-speaking trucker happy to be based 80km from the Belarus border with a minimum monthly wage of US$290, then Irena Grabaliskiene would be pleased to hear from you.
Grabaliskiene is director of the job center of Marijampole, a city of 50,000 in a bleak corner of farmland and forest in southern Lithuania, and the truck driver’s post is the only one of eight available at noon last Thursday that she cannot fill. So for the vast majority of the 3,000 registered job seekers in Marijampole, the outlook is bleak indeed.
“I try to be optimistic. Doing what I do, you need to be,” Grabaliskiene said with a wan smile.
Optimism is thin on the ground in Marijampole — as it is across eastern and central Europe. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the global economic downturn is striking hard. The latest predictions are that Lithuania’s economy will shrink by 6 percent this year, that of neighboring Latvia by 10 percent. Next year will not be much better.
For such states, which broke free from Soviet rule in 1991 and survived a rocky period of economic transformation in the years after, the shock of the crisis is far greater than in Western Europe. The last half decade has seen an extraordinary boom. Year after year, growth rates have hit double figures. That boom has now come to a shuddering halt. Latvia, which only months ago was top of the EU growth charts, now has the fastest shrinking economy in the EU. Lithuania is not far behind.
“We were growing, growing, growing and then ... bam!” Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said. “For us this has not been an easy period. People are upset, emotional, nervous. The problem is how to survive the next two years.”
For Kubilius, leader of Lithuania’s main conservative party, the crisis means change.
“A crisis brings opportunity for really significant change,” he said. “If you don’t change, you just suffer.”
The question now is what form that change will take. Already the economic crisis has fueled tension across the region — there were unprecedented riots in Lithuania and Latvia last month. Many in Western Europe are predicting outbreaks of populist nationalism, demagoguery and civic unrest.
Local politicians and analysts say that Western fears of a wave of street violence or even collapsing states are exaggerated, but agree that the economic crisis is provoking new soul-searching about which economic and social model to pursue when the dust settles.
“It will make a big difference to us, the first post-communist generation,” said Agne Nacivkaite, 27, a language lecturer at Vilnius university, who has recently had her wages cut and works longer hours to make ends meet.
Some of her friends have lost their jobs, after taking out huge mortgages to pay for flats whose value has gone up six times in as many years.
“People are turning away from materialism and back to human values,” she said.
The crisis reached Marijampole, 145km of rolling hills, iced lakes, fields and woods southwest of the capital, Vilnius, late last year. By last month new applicants for jobs had reached 3,435, twice October’s figure. And the city is far from the worst affected in Lithuania.
Grabaliskiene said no companies were hiring and many of the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians who had been working overseas were heading home.
One is Odetta Sizvinskaite, 25, who recently returned to Marijampole from the Czech Republic, having left her job in a car parts factory. But her home town has nothing to offer.
“I’m not very optimistic,” she said.
At the local dairy factory, director Raimondas Karpavicius sees the crisis as an opportunity to “get closer to God.”
“Our bodies got fat, we got lazy on EU subsidies, our souls got crushed. This crisis will do us good,” said Karpavicius, 51, who has recently laid off one-fifth of his 520-strong workforce.
He is not alone: Observers report rising church attendance in Lithuania in recent months.
Few in Marijampole regret the ending of the days of communist rule, however. Vitas, 42, a driver, laughed at the idea of nostalgia for the Soviet era, a sentiment increasingly widespread in eastern Europe.
“You’ve got to be joking,” he said. “Perhaps a few of the very poor, but no one else.”
Mistrust of today’s Russia and memories of decades of brutal, incompetent rule mean that Lithuania, the first of the Soviet republics to declare independence, remains profoundly pro-American, whatever the origins of the economic crisis. Faith in the EU, which the three Baltic states — Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia — joined in 2004, remains solid too.
“The reaction against consumerism and the materialism of the last few years can be exaggerated,” said Virginijus Savukynas, a prominent journalist. “Very few people are fundamentally questioning the package of capitalism and liberal democracy.”
In Marijampole, Sizvinskaite said she still felt that “capitalism like in America” was the best means for her to realize her dream of a car, a flat and a job.
This disappoints Algirdas Paleckis, of the Frontas party, a new group which favors “state capitalism,” a “strong state ... which defends Lithuanian national interests rather than just following the EU or the US,” and reluctantly omits socialism from its name because it has “heavy negative connotations.”
Though Kubilius insists that, after a millennium of often troubled history, Lithuania can survive two difficult years, it is clear that, as throughout the region, faith in political leadership has been badly damaged.
“It’s pretty difficult to think of anyone worth voting for,” Arturas, 43, a construction worker laid off last month, said as he stood with 100 others outside parliament to protest last week. “Everyone just makes promises and doesn’t deliver. And it’s going to get much worse.”
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017