IVP621 - October 2026

In the closing weeks and days of the November US “midterm election” campaigns, the likelihood that the Democratic party will win enough local elections to give them a majority in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, has significantly increased as the Republicans find themselves on the defensive in several formerly “safe” electoral districts including some which have not seen a Democratic victory in decades.

October was a month of the streets, and this issue follows a wave of youth and housing protest across southern and western Europe while three elections went against the right. In France, Léon Crémieux traces the groundswell that threatens Macron, from the secondary-school blockades to 17 October, "a historic day of mobilization" comparable to the pension protests of 2023; Olivier Besancenot finds reasons to believe, Antoine Larrache judges the movement stronger from the outset than the 2006 fight against the CPE, and NPA-l’Anticapitaliste demands the resignation of the ministers Nuñez and Geffray over the repression of pupils. Crémieux’s second piece asks where class-struggle trade unionism stands as 2027 approaches.

Given the massive turnout (including a multitude of young people) at the few demonstrations that were able to take place on the weekend of October 24-25 in France (some authorized, others not, such as in Bordeaux and Marseille), as well as the one organized against the National Rally congress in Orléans (20,000 demonstrators), it is clear that the social protest movement that began in September reached a turning point on October 17. With the next major event scheduled for November 5, with the call for strikes and demonstrations against all the anti-social measures of the Lecornu government, tensions continue to rise in France.

“The Student List has achieved a result that, until recently, seemed almost unimaginable. The nature of this victory and Serbia’s political future are difficult to grasp through conventional categories—such as government versus opposition, liberalism versus conservatism, or European integration versus national sovereignty.”

For the last two years, President Donald Trump’s Republican Party controlled not only the presidency, but also both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as many state governments. Trump appeared to be politically omnipotent. Now the American people have turned against Trump and it seems likely that the Republican Party will face defeat in the midterm elections on November 3, breaking Trump’s hold on Congress. It is a remarkable reversal of fortune brought about by Trump’s own hubris.

The French trade union movement, and more particularly the trade unionism of social transformation, with which the CGT, the FSU and Solidaires explicitly identify, is today confronted with several important strategic questions.

This is the most important defeat for the far right we have seen anywhere in the world in recent times, and its impact will be felt worldwide. Seeing those millions and millions of people pour onto the streets across this vast country to celebrate was enough to make you weep.

“For eight years, Pedro Sánchez has survived practically everything: motions of no confidence, pandemics, wars, lawfare, media onslaughts, right-wing mobilisations, corruption scandals, electoral defeats, and an opposition that has spent years predicting the government’s imminent collapse on a daily basis. None of that managed to cut the legislative term short. Maricarmen did.”

On 17 October 2026, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across France. Starting with young people and secondary school pupils, the mobilisation brought together other sections of society around the issue of the cost of living, outside the traditional trade union and political structures.
The Macronist government responded with repression on an unprecedented scale: a number of people taken into police custody not seen since the start of the secondary school pupils’ movement, (…)

“Today, it’s a race to see who can be the strongest against a Palestinian state.”