Version imprimableBrazil goes to the polls on 4 October in what Luís Leiria calls "the greatest crisis of the bourgeois-democratic regime" since the 1988 Constitution, a Supreme Court divided against itself; Israel Dutra argues the elections are crucial to curbing the far right, and Movimento Esquerda Socialista calls for confronting Bolsonaro’s supporters "in the streets and at the polls." In Germany Helmut Born reports the AfD just short of an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt, while Thies Gleiss argues against Die Linke joining an all-party front with the CDU. The news is better further north: Håkan Blomqvist on a setback for the Sweden Democrats and the Left Party’s "biggest score for a quarter of a century," and the SAP Executive Committee on the Red-Green Alliance’s impressive commitments in Denmark’s new government, "but now it’s time to fight!"
Trump’s America is taken apart from several angles. Dan La Botz writes four times: on protesters rallying against the "mass murderers" speaking at the UN General Assembly, on Trump bribing voters ahead of the midterms, on the battle over AI creating new political allies and enemies, and with an obituary of Gloria Steinem, who once said "the guts of the movement is the working woman." Dianne Feeley documents a reign of anti-immigrant terror, from Springfield’s Haitian community to deportations to "third party" countries. Gilbert Achcar looks back on 9/11 and a quarter century of imperial war, Marc Becker charts the patterns and pendulum of Latin American politics since the US seizure of Venezuela, and Toshizo Omori opposes the Takaichi administration’s military expansion and constitutional revision in Japan.
Édouard Soulier writes twice from Palestine, on Israel’s continuing ethnic cleansing as its election campaign is fought "on the backs of the Palestinians," and on rebuilding hope after a catastrophic summer of famine in Gaza. Babak Kia describes an acute crisis in Iran under blockade and rising repression, Uraz Aydin reports the Turkish regime’s crackdown on LGBTI+ people, and Paul Martial covers Tshisekedi’s constitutional tampering in DRC ("a classic sleight of hand") and the militia law Trump has approved in Libya.
Ukraine appears twice, with the NPA-A Ukraine Solidarity Intervention Group on civil and military resistance to Putin and on a summer of intensified Russian shelling. Two interviews from Against the Current, conducted by Ivan Drury Zarin, look at Russia itself: Mikhail Lobanov on preparing the left for Russia’s future crisis, and Kseniia Kagarlitskaya on the campaign to free her father, Boris Kagarlitsky. Geoff Ryan marks the death of Ratko Mladic by remembering Srebrenica, Aude Martenot shows how the EU’s migration pact hardens "Fortress Europe," Frank Prouhet names fossil-fuel capitalism "the number one threat to global public health" after a summer of fires, floods and glacier collapse, and Anticapitalistas call for a hot autumn as the housing movement sweeps the Spanish state. The longest piece in the issue is Kyle Barrett’s study of Aotearoa, the Alliance and the question of working-class independence beyond the Labour machine.
The Features section turns to the Fourth International’s own history: Gregor Benton’s tribute to Livio Maitan, "The Inventor of Big Things," sits beside Maitan’s own argument that Stalinism’s failures vindicate Trotsky’s critique, while Can Koçak and Ian Parker discuss creeping fascism in Turkey, where "nobody announces that democracy ends now."
News from around the world carries two items: Slovenian trade unions proposing a referendum to overturn the new government’s anti-social policies, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of India’s statement against the Pakistani state’s attack on the free media outlet Jeddojehad.
