IV537 - October 2019

It is still early to interpret fully the results of Canada’s October 21 federal election. But behind the immediate results some trends are clear.
Canada’s Federal Election, 2019

Much of the world at this moment is a laboratory searching for the cure for capitalism, and the social scientists running the experiments are in the streets.

As current international pushes for Syrian refugee returns take hold, European solidarity efforts must understand that the danger of return is not simply war but corrupt and brutal state repression.

Bolivians went to the polls on Sunday, October 20, 2019. According to the country’s electoral system, in order to avoid a second round in presidential elections the leading candidate must secure 51 percent of the vote, or more than 40 percent of the vote and a lead of 10 percent over the second place candidate.

Donald Trump is the first modern politician who’s used the U.S. presidency — as everyone knows, since the liberal media, punditry and presidential historians repeat it on a daily basis — to brazenly solicit a foreign regime’s intervention for his personal benefit in electoral politics. It’s a damning indictment of the “big twit” in the White House. It also happens to be false. The notorious precedents aren’t even secret anymore: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, in their election campaigns, pulled the kind of tricks that Trump did with Russia in 2016.

The biggest popular mobilizations since the coming to power in 2013 of the dictator Sissi shook Egypt at the end of September, against a backdrop of political protest by the regime and an ever more difficult socio - economic situation. After protests began in Cairo and several Egyptian cities on September 20, the authorities reacted by mass repression and a wave of arrests of over 3,000 people.

Massive new mass mobilizations are shaking Iraq. The protesters are denouncing economic and social difficulties, corruption and the ruling bourgeois and confessional political parties.

The streets of Lebanon are ringing with protest chants as the country witnesses its largest popular movement in decades. Their target: a political and economic system that impoverishes the many while enriching the few.

The alleged jubilation at the start of the First World War in Germany is called Spirit of 1914 by some people. If we use the same example we can call current public sentiment about war in Turkey Spirit of 2019.

The Hong Kong government, in the face of the massive opposition movement since early June, finally made the promise to withdraw the China Extradition bill altogether in early September. However, the people have refused to put a halt to the movement. They continue pressing their five demands, formulated in July. The first four are related to the immediate situation (the complete withdrawal of the bill; establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into police conduct; retraction of the designation of “riot” to describe the protests; amnesty for arrested protesters), and the fifth is universal suffrage – something that Beijing promised in the (1997) Basic Law. They have kept up their protests because the three-month struggle has revealed one simple fact: Beijing’s hidden agenda is to finish off Hong Kong’s autonomy altogether. This understanding has prompted them to continue the struggle, which has escalated into a great battle to save Hong Kong autonomy.