By Nilotpal Basu
The overall atmosphere of gloom that characterised the last more than three decades is giving way to a fresh breath of air. This encapsulates Dickens’ famous description, ‘It is the worst of times, it is the best of times. It is the winter of discontent; it is the spring of hope.’
Obviously, the situation is underlined by the most significant electoral reverses suffered by the ultra-right since the beginning of the 1990s. It would be simplistic to deduce that the balance has decisively tilted. But it would be equally naive not to recognise the new tone of urgency and hope emerging from the Serbian creative student movement, which stunned the authoritarian regime of Aleksandar Vučić, which had ruled with an iron fist for 15 years. The magnificent rally of incumbent President Lula and the Left in the Brazilian elections, the stunning setback suffered by Donald Trump’s Republican administration in the midterm elections, and the shattering of the often-imagined invincibility of Benjamin Netanyahu are all indicative of this shift. If we trivialise these changes across continents, we will fail to be objective.
The resurgence of the ultra-right was obviously powered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unbridled drive towards a unipolar world. The ultra-right advance, driven by imperialist globalisation, was sweeping far and wide. Of course, the trajectory was not uniform but was conditioned by the specific course of neoliberalism in each country. The complete domination of imperialism, spearheaded by US imperialism, was ushering in an environment that was typically described by Francis Fukuyama as the ‘end of history’.
Imperialism and capitalism are historically and inherently crisis-prone systems. The extreme concentration and centralisation of finance capital, and its coalescing into international finance capital, were bound to face a major roadblock. Extreme inequality and the astronomical growth of unemployment hurt the working class and the underprivileged the most, but eventually made the long-term, uninterrupted advance of contemporary capitalism also untenable. The 2008 financial meltdown, resulting from growth led by a credit boom, was a disaster that very few of the neoliberal pundits anticipated.
The aftermath was sought to be sorted out by the conversion of private debt to sovereign debt, further accentuating inequality. It also became clear that the political regime could not carry on as usual. This economic strangulation of the working people could not be sustained while affording them the usual democratic space. Right-wing authoritarian regimes and extreme, vitriolic politics of hate and othering based on identity politics emerged as significant features.
The last almost two decades have been witness to this new ultra-right paradigm. Orbán in Hungary, Vučić in Serbia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel, Modi in India and, of course, Donald Trump in the US had emerged as the flag-bearers of this extreme, retrograde phase of contemporary history.
But there is now a disruption, both in the polls and on the streets. The tempo was building up across Europe. Students raised the banner of revolt in France. The tunes of the International and Bella Ciao echoed across the streets of Paris and other major cities. They started with the issue of education reforms and affordability, and access to employment and empowerment. In fact, what the French students articulated was only an expression of a wider crisis faced by workers and other working people. Therefore, the French mass movement has now reached a stage where it refuses to draw to a close.
As if this were the cue, across Europe, from Iceland to Albania, from Spain to Belgium, and from Italy to Holland, the spark appears to have started a prairie fire. At the heart of all these developments are unsustainable levels of inequality and the affordability crisis. Interestingly, the politics of hate associated with the ultra-right resurgence, the vicious campaign against immigrants across Europe and US, and the genocide in Gaza by Israel, backed by the US, particularly under the Trump administration, have provided the major impetus for a creative counter-narrative through spirited solidarity with Gaza and Palestine. This has also cemented the growing unity of people, especially young people, across identities.
This added a new global dimension to the vibrant activism of young people, now commonly referred to as GenZ. This broad backdrop has been reflected in the Serbian elections, where Vučić was stunned by the student movement, which had remained unrelenting over the previous two years, raising not only issues of education and opportunity but also challenging corruption and authoritarianism, the conditions that had fuelled the movement. The student movement self-organisation, using new methods of democratic mobilisation, enabled it to present a political alternative to the retrograde Vučić regime. The regime was defeated by candidates on the Student List, who were not entrenched politicians but intellectuals and professionals.
The Israeli election underlined the limits of Zionist politics. Great damage has been done to Israeli society itself, where the substitution of Judaism by Zionism has engulfed large sections of society. But the vulgarity of this process, which has pushed the entire region into perpetual conflict, is taking its toll on society, its people and their livelihoods. On the other hand, the Palestinians, under the leadership of the two Arab political forces, fought with determination and managed to secure electoral support to such an extent that no government in Israel is viable without some understanding with them.
The broad and large-scale reversal of Trump and his MAGA politics was virtually waiting to happen. The fact that Republicans have lost their majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives makes Trumpian unilateralism more tenuous. The absolutely unnecessary and unprovoked war against Iran, which remains in suspended animation, and the resulting rise in gas and fuel prices, which has further aggravated the affordability crisis, have compounded Republican distress at the polls.
Has the ‘spectre’ come back to haunt our contemporary world! That would be too much of an ask. But what cannot be overlooked is that the struggles against the ultra-right everywhere have become intertwined. The struggle over livelihood issues, often referred to as the affordability crisis, is becoming intertwined with the demand for unity across identities and for an inclusive future. This is reflected in each of the electoral outcomes. Be it Lula or Bernie Sanders, both are emphatic in asserting that electoral advances cannot remain unhinged from peoples’ struggle for equality, employment, justice and an inclusive future. (IPA Service)
