A conference this month aims to unite European far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán in a continentwide alliance. What would once have been a fringe grouping can now rely on the support of several EU governments.
Despite the pandemic’s impact, China has a long road to travel before it can surpass US economic power. Inter-capitalist rivalry is driving tensions between Washington and Beijing, not the personalities of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.
In Australia, where the per capita rates of COVID are now among the worst in the world, the government has handed the health care crisis over to the free market to handle. The results are predictably catastrophic.
Nairobi, Kenya’s police took the COVID-19 lockdown as an opportunity to increase violent harassment of the city’s citizens. Since 2020, police have killed more than 326 people. Among them: 13-year-old Yassin Moyo.
If everything is political, then nothing is political.
After twelve years of Tory rule, Britain’s public services are crumbling and its cost-of-living crisis is dire. Labour’s narrow focus on Boris Johnson’s lack of integrity is letting the Tories’ free market dogmas go unchallenged.
Throughout the country, transit workers have kept cities and towns moving despite unsafe working conditions, angry passengers refusing to wear masks, and over 200 dying. They deserve hazard pay — and much more.
Alberta’s United Conservative Party is using the health care crisis caused by the pandemic to its ideological advantage. Citing backlogs in surgeries — resulting from overrun hospitals — the party is seeking to privatize the province’s health care system.
Several tensions run deep in Russian society: Politics are decided by elections without democracy. A growing number of Russian billionaires have outlandish wealth but no political power. And Putin is a populist without the people.
Emmanuel Macron famously spoke of “people who are nothing” — the working-class France who didn’t fit his neoliberal fantasy of a “start-up nation.” But social struggles throughout his term showed that the people he derided weren’t prepared to be ignored.
Emmanuel Macron claimed that France was missing a “king figure” — then spent five years ruling it like a monarch. His record has fueled Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pledge to get rid of the presidency entirely and rebuild French democracy from the bottom up.
New legislation in Spain will ensure free, publicly provided abortions and allow menstrual leave from work. The raft of measures shows left-wing party Unidas Podemos’s strong feminist stance — but faces obstruction from the country’s hard-right judiciary.
Britain’s prime minister intends to scrap his own Brexit deal and provoke a crisis in Northern Irish politics. Everyone who assisted Boris Johnson’s rise to power to block a left-wing government now shares responsibility for his criminal recklessness.
Canada’s highly precarious housing market has long been perched on the edge of disaster. As the country’s central bank pushes up interest rates to fight inflation, that perch is looking more dangerous than ever.
In recent decades, Spain has often been painted as the only European country without a far right. But even in the 1990s, violent street movements were building their forces — and now they’re entering the country’s political institutions, too.
British writer Ian McEwan wanted to deliver a literary manifesto for liberal centrism with his new book Lessons. But the result is an aimless, meandering novel that reveals his creative exhaustion and bewilderment at the state of the world.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.
After months without a contract, faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago went on strike this week. We spoke to workers about the strike and their demands, including mental health resources for students and greater job security for contingent faculty.
Before their illiberal turn, Poland and Hungary were lauded as postcommunist poster children. Both nations have combined moderately redistributive welfare states with attacks on civil liberties — but inflation is putting their growth model to the test.
The last year has witnessed the highest level of strike action by British workers for the last thirty years. Workers are getting a taste of their collective strength: now they need to convert that strength into tangible victories.