Global Left Midweek — September 16, 2026
- 21st Century Anti-Imperialism
- How Sweden Voted
- India: The Class Approach to Caste
- South Africa: Xenophobia Gets Political
- State of Emergency in the Amazon
- Wolfgang Streeck on the AfD Threat
- Vanuatu’s Fight for Sovereignty
- From Africa: Decolonizing Our Homes
- A Peace Policy for the Left
- Salvador Allende, Democracy’s Martyr
Joseph Daher and Siyavash Shahabi / Zamaneh Media (Amsterdam)
Is a political force’s relationship with the United States and Israel enough to define what it is? How can we defend the right of Palestinians and Lebanese people to resist, while at the same time criticising Hamas and Hezbollah? And in Iran, how can we oppose war by the United States and Israel without turning defence of Iran against foreign attack into defence of the Islamic Republic?
Duroyan Fertl / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)
The centre-left opposition led by former Social Democratic prime minister Magdalena Andersson holds a razor-thin 0.2 percent lead over the outgoing government. The Social Democrats at around 28% have fallen to their weakest result in more than a century, with four years of right-wing rule under the sway of the far-right Sweden Democrats, with strong gains for the Left Party and the Greens.
India: The Class Approach to Caste
Dr Anand Teltumbde / Crosscurrents (Kottayam, Kerala)
While each struggle is vital in its own right, fighting them in isolation allows the overarching, unified system of exploitation to remain intact and unchallenged. The objective, then, is to integrate all these elements fighting against the dominant system into a class and to build a shared historical understanding that links them together as interconnected fronts against the same underlying system.
South Africa: Xenophobia Gets Political
Koketso Moeti / Amandla! (Johannesburg)
For centuries, South Africa’s politics drew a sharp line between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, determining who belonged and who was left behind. The habit of a social order based on sorting who belongs and who doesn’t, who deserves and who doesn’t, remains deeply entrenched. The target is not only migrant people, but also democracy itself.
State of Emergency in the Amazon
Katie Surma / Inside Climate News (Brooklyn)
The 12th Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, known as FOSPA, brought together Indigenous leaders, Afro-descendent communities, women, youth and other environmental defenders and social-movement members from across the Amazon and Andes for six days of debate in August about how to protect the region from the forces reshaping it.
Wolfgang Streeck on the AfD Threat
Wolfgang Streeck / New Left Review (London)
Neither mass demonstrations, party-conference boycotts, firewalls, nor assessments by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (‘confirmed as right-wing extremist’) have done anything to halt the AfD’s rise to the top spot in the latest opinion polls – or their recent victory. They do nothing to solve the issues that the political class would like to conceal behind the AfD problem.
Vanuatu’s Fight for Sovereignty
Géraldine Giraudeau / East Asia Forum (Canberra)
Vanuatu is turning to international law in its decades-long sovereignty dispute with France over the Matthew and Hunter Islands. Its approach reflects a broader Pacific strategy of using international law to protect sovereign rights, strengthen small states’ international standing and push for stronger climate action.
From Africa: Decolonizing Our Homes
Tafahri Munjatta / Pambazuka News (Nairobi)
To reclaim care as a commons is first to insist that the reproduction of life is a public and political responsibility. This requires rebuilding public institutions capable of sustaining collective wellbeing — not as acts of charity, but as expressions of democratic obligation.
Harald Wolf / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Foreign policy and peace policy are not the sole responsibility of states and governments. Without international solidarity among liberation movements and resistance against militarization, fascization, and imperialist ambitions, a new and different world order oriented around peace, cooperation, social equilibrium, and environmental justice and security is inconceivable.
Salvador Allende, Democracy’s Martyr