These Are the Elections That Will Decide Europe's Fate

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

Tidbits - January 19, 2017 - Reader Comments: Rearming Germany; Now Commute Leonard Peltier Sentence; Obama's Farewell Address; Meryl Streep; Privatization Articles; Rodrigo Duterte; Announcements; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Rearming Germany; Martin Luther King Today; Obama Commutes Sentences of Oscar Lopez Rivera and Chelsea Manning - Now Commute Leonard Peltier Sentence; Obama's Farewell Address; Meryl Streep; Cuban Medical Internationalism; Privatization Articles; Puzder Confirmation as Labor Secretary Pushed Back; Rodrigo Duterte - Readers Disagree; Announcements: Whitney Museum - Free Inauguration Day `Diversity' Show; Trumpism: How Should the Left Respond?; more...

"The Yanks Are Coming!" - Obama Orders Greatest Redeployment to Germany in a Quarter Century

Victor Grossman Portside
Hit that old song again, loud and clear! "Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word, That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming." Yes, sirree! Shades of 1918 and the Battle of the Marne! Shades of 1944 and the beaches of Normandy! But no, not just shades and not just words have already been sent. The U.S. is sending significant military assets to Germany, and to countries bordering Russia.

The German Left isn’t Buried Yet, says Linke Leader

Jacopo Rosatelli il manifesto
“Left-wing populism” makes clear that boundaries that create and represent identities do not run between people of different geographical origin, but among those at the bottom and at the top of society. This is a useful and appropriate populism. It has nothing to do with right-wing populism: the Others on the other side of the fence are not foreigners, but the richest 10 percent of society.

From Germany: Horror and Sorrow

Victor Grossman Portside
Victor Grossman reports from Berlin on causes of the spate of violence striking Germany and across Europe. We need not look too far to find possible causes of such hatred or, frequently, of distorted despair. I think of what so many have gone through. War-torn home towns, shootings, explosions and bombings in their native Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, a terrifying flight to get away, to find some haven, where they can escape and perhaps even realize their hopes and wishes.

After “Brexit”: A Social-Democratic Re-Founding of Europe?

Ingar Solty Socialist Project
Without massive mobilizations that question the policies of austerity and the budget rights of the European Parliament, there can be no democratization of the European Union. Instead there is only catchy phrases and a "post-democratic" reality.

How Far Is Europe Swinging to the Right?

Gregor Aisch, Adam Pearce and Bryant Rousseau The New York Times
Across Europe, voters are turning to far-right parties, won over by nationalism, anti-immigrant hysteria and failed economic policies of austerity. In Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and Sweden, far right parties have made gains. Left political parties in these countries have not been as successful as those in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

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Stefan Zweig's Messages From a Lost World

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
In the period between the world wars, Stefan Zweig was among the world's best-known authors. His books would soon fuel Nazi bonfires. Zweig held that humanity could no longer afford the belligerent nationalism that had led them into the Great War. Yet Zweig was struck dumb by post 1933 events. That failure, the reviewer says, was of imagination, not nerve. Against the Nazis' depredations, all the consummate writer and speaker could muster was nostalgia for a lost world.

Germany: What Die Linke Should Do

Bernd Riexinger Jacobin
The German right made stunning gains in this month's regional elections. The Left must rise to the challenge. We spend too much time speaking to people instead of with them, we make too many promises to do something for others instead of inviting them to get active themselves, to fight and organize with us.

Right and Left in Germany

Victor Grossman Portside
With Bernie in the USA, Corbyn in Britain and various kinds of leftist opposition in Ireland, Spain and Portugal, resistance to billionaire-led governments has been growing, most dramatically last year in Greece until German "austerity" smashed it (though perhaps not permanently). Germany already has the LINKE party, with 64 seats in the Bundestag (out of 630). But it has failed to fill that gap of anger, worry and distrust among working people...
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