Portside

Three weeks after appearing to lose her re-election bid, Barcelona's leftist mayor Ada Colau won another four-year term Saturday. Barcelona was not the only city that had elected a "municipalist" government.

Post-Election Pandemonium! EU, India, South Africa, Israel, Iraq - and national strike in Sudan, suppression of Marxists in China, climate kids call on adults, Yellow Vests' inside baseball, and the workers of the world!

With the hard right running left and the center-left abdicating, Euroskeptics could accelerate a continent-wide crisis. Global migration is on the rise as climate change drowns coastlines, river deltas and drought drives people out of arid climates.

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Left parties and movements have a huge role to play to respond to the call and despair of ordinary people in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Mideast. We need to build a movement for social and climate justice, democratic participation, peace and socialism to oppose austerity, oppression, militarization and a lack of democracy.

The rise of authoritarian right wing movements is intensifying the inequality and exploitation of neoliberalism. Key to resistance is building unity around substantive alternatives. This was the theme of a seminar organized by the Forum of Sao Paulo (FSP) and the European Left brought together parties and movements from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean to discuss visions and strategies for the left.

The problems facing the Spanish left mirror the crisis engulfing Europe.

The left has been in disarray since 1991 - it never fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite widespread opposition to Stalinism and -authoritarianism. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a major spasm of global capitalism that has triggered a long deflationary period across the United States and Europe. Just as the Great Depression did in the 1930s, this has created a breeding ground for xenophobia, racism and scapegoating.

How then do we navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, between a naïve pro-Europeanism and assimilation to nationalism? The EU must be democratised or it will be discredited; it will be peaceful or it will perish. We have to dare not to break with the idea off European unity but with the neoliberal and authoritarian framework of the institutions and treaties through which this idea has been actualised.

In the past year two referenda shook up both the European Union and Europe's Left: the Greek OXI in July 2015 and Brexit in June 2016. Exasperated by the EU's mixture of authoritarianism and economic failure, a segment of Europe's Left is calling for a 'break with the EU',[2] a stance that has come to be associated with the term Lexit.[3] DiEM25, the transnational Democracy in Europe Movement, rejects that logic and offers an alternative Progressive Agenda for Europe.