IVP601- February 2025

While various human rights reports show that annually between one and four million Brazilian women have abortions, the right to women’s bodily autonomy remains a major battle. Currently the law allows abortion only in the case of rape or to save the woman’s life. This means millons of women are forced to seek underground abortions.

For the past few weeks, and even more so in recent days, a state of paralysis seems to have gripped the European political landscape. Yet, Trump, Putin, and other far-right leaders have never hidden their ambitions. They have openly stated them for years, without pretense. It must be said plainly: their project is a fascist one.

President Donald Trump and his henchman billionaire Elon Musk have been dismantling the American welfare state, closing agencies and firing tens of thousands of federal employees. Their demolition operation is leaving workers without income, and taking support and services from children, the disable, and the elderly. Trump’s and Musk’s actions appear to be unconstitutional or illegal and have faced legal challenges from state governments, citizens’ organizations, and labor union. And the last two weeks have also seen the first large-scale, national protests.

On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States under the Trump administration is now pushing negotiations for a “peace” settlement. The Ukraine Solidarity Network-U.S. (USN) opposes any attempt to impose a settlement that is not acceptable to the Ukrainian people.

The sadistic savagery of the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide, and Donald Trump’s executive coup-in-progress in the United States, intersect at Trump’s proclamation of intent to take over, “develop” and ethnically cleanse Gaza of its two million Palestinian residents.

The United Nations has drawn up a new death toll following the capture of Goma, the regional capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), by the M23 armed group supported by Rwandan troops. Nearly 3,000 deaths have already been recorded. The Tanzania summit bringing together the countries of the region was held on Saturday 8 February. It called for a ceasefire, which appears highly hypothetical.

That Washington and Moscow have chosen the Saudi kingdom as the venue for a meeting between their delegations to discuss the prospects of the war that has been ongoing in Ukraine since Russian forces invaded that country three years ago, is evidence of the profound changes occurring in international affairs before our eyes. The manner of the meeting itself is entirely consistent with the venue: Donald Trump’s neofascist administration did not seek to promote peace between the warring parties within the framework of international law and the United Nations, as China has been calling for since the beginning of the conflict, but is rather seeking to conclude a direct agreement with the equally neofascist regime of Vladimir Putin, at the expense of the Ukrainian people. It is therefore only natural that the two parties did not choose a neutral arena consistent with international law, such as the United Nations, but one consistent with their nature, even if its despotic regime is of the traditional type.

After three motions of no confidence on 6 and 10 February, the French national assembly approved the state budget and the social security budget, which were hardly different from those presented by the then prime minister Barnier in the autumn of 2024. The current government, led by François Bayrou, which wants to reduce the public deficit to 5.4% of GDP by 2025, has cut the budgets of several ministries: public development aid, ecology, culture, agriculture, research and higher education. A few gestures on natural disaster prevention, the Green Fund and the budget for the French Overseas Territories. Local authorities continue to lose 2.2 billion euros.

President Donald Trump is fundamentally altering U.S. foreign policy and transforming global alliances that have been in place for eighty years. Trump has chosen Vladimir Putin over NATO. Trump and Putin apparently plan to impose a treaty that will force Ukraine to give up 20 percent of its territory and prohibit its membership in NATO. Trump points out that president Volodymyr Zelensky’s low poll numbers, suggesting that he has no right to speak for Ukraine. The United States and Russia have long been imperial powers, and now they are cooperating and isolating from peace negotiations the European powers who fear that if Russia gains territory in Ukraine, Putin’s next move will be to take Transnistria, Moldova, Estonia or Poland.

On Saturday 1 February, huge demonstrations took place across Argentina in response to President Javier Milei’s speech at the Davos forum the previous week. In a half-hour speech to the cream of the capitalist world, Milei, in a significant mimicry of Trump, unrolled the catalogue of his hatreds: feminists, ‘wokism’, gay couples (whom he accused of paedophilia), progressivism, the left and ‘leftists’ (who must be ‘driven out’). Hundreds of thousands of people across the country rose up not only against Milei and his ideology, but to assert their determination to fight for all democratic and social rights and to stop the wave of fascism sweeping the world.