IVP603 - April 2025

Africa today stands at a crossroads, caught between internal crises, shifting global power dynamics, and the slow unraveling of the post-liberation political order. Across the continent, ruling parties that once commanded legitimacy as national liberators are losing their grip; yet the opposition remains fragmented, offering little in the way of alternative governance.

The mass democratic movement in Turkey following the arrest of Ekrem Imamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul and candidate of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), is a major social and political event on the doorstep of the European Union. Rallies and demonstrations are taking place throughout the country, with very large turnouts, particularly in Saraçhane Square in Istanbul in front of the town hall.

On 16 March 2025 the Hungarian parliament, dominated by prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, voted to ban the Budapest Pride March. Already, in 2021, under the pretext of “child protection”, any propaganda for homosexuality (which can be holding hands for a couple, or having a “look” identified as queer) was banned and punished with a 500 euro fine.

Millions of people in all 50 states, joined 1,600 demonstrations in large cities and small towns to protest against President Donald Trump and his henchman billionaire Elon Musk on April 5, with a number of small solidarity demonstrations in European cities. The “Hands Off” demonstrations, the largest anti-Trump protests yet, demanded that Trump keep his hands off democracy, human rights, reproductive rights, Social Security, Medicaid, public schools, immigrants, and LGBT people.

The 25% tariffs imposed on exports from Canada and Mexico by the US administration of Donald Trump effective March 4 (with an exception of 10% tariffs for Canadian oil and gas and potash) constitutes an aggressive attack on the livelihoods of Canadian working people and a threat to the survival of key industries in Canada. Trump postponed some of the auto and other tariffs in sectors covered by the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade treaty between the three countries (about 40% of Canadian exports to the US), with auto tariffs planned for April 2nd but has threatened to continue with others. Further tariffs on aluminum and steel (over the 25% level) were threatened to be as high as 50%, with Trump also threatening to “shut down” the Canadian auto industry.

A multi-front attack is in full swing — not only on supporters of Palestinian freedom, but on everyone’s First Amendment and civil rights. The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, the peremptory deportation of Brown Medicine Dr. Rasha Alawieh, the attempt to detain and deport Columbia University Ph.D student Ranjani Srinivasan who’s fled to seek asylum in Canada, and the seizure of Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri — none of these, and many more cases that haven’t attracted public attention, are happening in isolation.

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte gained international notoriety with his violent ‘war on drugs’ – a campaign of violence targeting the country’s poor that claimed thousands of lives. He is now in a cell in The Hague, awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the Philippines.

It’s not April Fools day (1 April). But it might as well be as later today US President Donald Trump announces another barrage of tariffs on imports into the US in what Trump calls ‘Liberation Day’ and what America’s voice of big business and finance, the Wall Street journal, has called “the dumbest trade war in history.”

Ivanna Vynna, a member of the Ukrainian feminist group Bilkis, took part on 27 March 2025 in the workshop on feminist struggles in Ukraine at the Brussels conference organised by the European Solidarity Network with Ukraine. The text of her speech is published below.

Accused of crimes against humanity, Rodrigo Duterte was taken to The Hague (Netherlands) on March 11, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) is located. The charges are the tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings committed under his rule in the name of his "war on drugs."