IVP619 - August 2026

Every year people in Italy moan about the way the ‘spiaggia libera’ (free access beach) is becoming smaller and smaller. At the same time the private lidos, where you have to pay for a sun umbrella and a couple of loungers, defend their privatised territory with all sorts of barriers and walls to prevent people from moving across their beach. The law says that 5 metres of the foreshore has to remain open to anybody – the privateers cannot put their sun loungers right up to the water. So often they make it difficult to walk from the free beach to the paying beach.

Since the autumn of 2025, the Moroccan regime has considerably hardened its repressive policy, which simultaneously hits the GenZ movement, rappers, journalists, content creators, the student movement, the world of work, unemployed graduates as well as local mobilizations for access to basic public resources and services.

Tunisia has recently seen a wave of protests resulting from the difficult living conditions the country’s inhabitants have endured for several decades, which have gradually worsened. The situation became particularly unsustainable during the month of July, with residents regularly confronted with the policy of recurrent water cuts during the summer in the central regions (governorates of Kairouan, Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia). These four governorates have experienced 31 demonstrations and road blockades in 2024, then 15 demonstrations and blockades in 2025.

In Serbia, the connivance between politicians and multinational capital has fed a sustained protest movement. Current protests in Albania, resisting a luxury development project backed by Jared Kushner, target a similar cronyish capitalism.

Gabriel Vera Lopes spoke to Argentine socialist and Revista Jacobin editor-in-chief Martín Mosquera to analyse the emotional and political origins of the campaign, discuss the reality of racism in Argentina and question the role played by some of the global progressive intelligentsia.

“Ultimately, the great absence in the Spanish revolution was the existence of a revolutionary organisation with the necessary strength to lead the seizure of power.”

The first year of Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency has accelerated an ongoing transformation: the disintegration of US-led neoliberal globalisation. From the 1990s through the post-2008 period, global capitalism was organised through a structured hierarchy, with US financial dominance, global value chains, and multilateral institutions that secured the conditions for capital accumulation. That architecture is now visibly fraying.

“Every 19 July, the same debate returns. The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship insists on presenting itself as heir to the Sandinista Popular Revolution. At the same time, part of the opposition accepts that narrative and ends up reinforcing it by asserting that the current regime is nothing more than the logical consequence of the 1979 revolution.”

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1776.

The countries of the Arabic-speaking region experienced floods last winter (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia). Six months later, the region is experiencing extreme temperatures: from 40° to 50° in the Maghreb and 50° and more in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, with an average of 35° in Gaza (meaning 50° in tents). Deaths due to the heatwave are estimated to be in the hundreds in Tunisia.