IV596-September 2024

Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s (AKD) victory on 21 September as the candidate of the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons. His predecessors have been from the social and political elite that has mis-ruled Sri Lanka since independence from Britain in 1948. Some were born into that elite, while a couple (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Maithripala Sirisena) made their way into it through the business of politics before they occupied the presidency. In contrast, Dissanayaka’s political life has been as an outsider and critic of that elite.

The French publishing house Editions Amsterdam has just published the first book from the La Boétie Institute , entitled Extrême droite: la résistible ascension. Coordinated by Ugo Palheta , with a preface by the historian Johann Chapoutot and an afterword by Clémence Guetté, this work aims to provide intellectual weapons, rooted in contemporary research ,on the far right, in order to understand and combat the rise of the FN/RN (National Front/National Rally).

Since the fall of President Yanukovych in 2014, all Russian interventions in Ukraine - from the annexation of Crimea and the hybrid war in the Donbass to the February 2022 invasion - have been presented by Putin as responses to an ‘anti-Russian, NATO-backed fascist coup’. A part of the international left has embraced this narrative, unlike the small Ukrainian left in the making.

The need is greater than ever for a consolidated voice of the working class and the poor. On the one hand, daily community protests seem to indicate a population that is not by any means apathetic. But when it comes to elections, the majority don’t participate. No political party has been able to capture the imagination of the mass of people who experience unemployment, sewage in the street, erratic water supply, unaffordable electricity and intolerable levels of gender-based violence. Yet enough of those people are desperate and sufficiently concerned to protest.

There are a number of candidates vying to capture this imagination. The field is becoming crowded. But they are by no means genuine supporters of the interests of the working class and the poor.

Not even an hour had passed after I wrote my article of a week ago (“Lebanon and the Israeli Strategy of Intimidation”) when the Israeli intelligence agencies launched a mass terror operation in Lebanon by blowing up individual communication devices in two successive waves over two days, killing more than 40 people and wounding more than 3,500.

The 2024 cycle of German regional elections finished with the elections to the Brandenburg Landtag on 21 September. As was the case on 1 September in Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party achieved historic results and can feel a winner. Co-president Alice Weidel can be jubilant: ‘The East is blue’ (the AfD’s colour scheme).

We know racism stands at the center of Donald Trump’s politics, but one recent absurd story shows just how dangerous it is. And it reveals just how profoundly sick is our society, that he still has the support of half of the electorate.

Seven people have died and 118 have been injured in the fires that have been raging since September 15 in the north and centre of the country. In just three days, 2024 has become the year with the fourth-largest area burned in the last decade.

China aims to strengthen its economic and political influence on the African continent by promoting its methods of government.

On 10 September 2024 348 MPs (overwhelmingly Labour MPs) voted through regulations to cut the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners except those in receipt of means-tested benefits such as pension credit. In this article Liz Lawrence explores what this suggests for the direction of the Labour government and what remains of the Labour Left. She also discusses pensioners’ poverty and resistance and how ecosocialists respond.