Before a media gaggle inside Poland’s parliament, this January 12 representatives of six organizations announced the creation of a new Central-Eastern European Green Left Alliance (CEEGLA). For its organizers — Poland’s Razem, Hungary’s Szikra Movement, Romania’s Demos, Ukraine’s Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Czech Republic’s Budoucnost, and Lithuania’s Kartu — the event represented the expression of a modern left in the region.

Already following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many Eastern European left-wingers began to vocalize a separate identity from their comrades in Western Europe — complaining that these latter failed to recognize what was really at stake in the war. The creation of CEELGA seemed designed to concretize this reality.

“We realized that we live in different worlds and that the left-wing world — Western, South, and Northern — they have different views [on the war],” Claudiu Crăciun, spokesperson for Romania’s Demos, told me. “And we feel that we have a world here. It’s a European periphery that had independence and sovereignty as major stakes during the nineteenth and the twentieth century, and we know a bit something about . . . Russian influence in every form.”