Europe
March 15, 2013 -- Irish Left Review -- The following questions [in bold] and answers took place after a talk SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras gave to SYRIZA’s London branch in Friend’s House in Euston on March 15. The speech itself can be found here. Some of the questions have been condensed to remove lengthy preambles and/or tangents but they remain an accurate reflection of the query posed by the audience member.
Could you give us a few reflections on what we can learn from the left in Latin America and particularly the legacy of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?
Britain: Encouraging left regroupment/left unity initiatives
Ken Loach has called for a new left party in Britain.
Eastern Europe: Mass protests topple Bulgarian government, zombie uprising in Slovenia
Mass protest in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, February 17, 2013.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Die Linke salute Hugo Chavez's socialist vision
Above: March 6 press conference by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Front de Gauche, Left Front) on the death of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez Frias.
l’Humanité interview with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, spokesperson Front de Gauche (Left Front), France, translated by Dick Nichols
March 7, 2013 -- You have always supported the revolutionary process in the Venezuela, why?
We need to place the Bolivarian Revolution in its continental and historical context. The collapse of state communism was presented to the whole world as the end of history for communist and socialist sentiment and aspiration. But the flame flared up again in South America because the new age of capitalism had made that continent its proving ground. Neoliberalism was tried out there by military dictatorships on the one hand and by Operation Condor and CIA acts of violence on the other. The policies which then got applied were the same everywhere: free and unbridled competition, monetarism and deregulation, leading the whole continent to disaster. It is in this context that the revolutionary flame flared up again. Bolivarian Venezuela has occupied a special place: not only has been it been built on democratic foundations, but it has outmaneuvered the criminal plans of the opponent by peaceful and popular action.
Left Bloc: 'Portugal’s left must respond to a rising tide of rebellion' (updated March 14)
According to rally coordinators, some 500,000 protesters filled the Lisbon boulevard leading to the Finance Minis
Sortu and Basque left nationalism’s strategic relaunch
For more coverage of the Basque struggle, click HERE. For more on Spain, click HERE.
By Dick Nichols
March 5, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Nearly 10 years after the Spanish high court outlawed its previous political organisations, Basque left nationalism has finally given birth to a new legal party—Sortu (“to create” or “to be born” in Basque). The new arrival is a powerful progressive force for Basque independence—socialist, feminist, ecologically aware and staunchly internationalist.
Its goal is an independent socialist Basque-speaking state that unites the three northern Basque regions in the French department of Pyrenees Atlantiques with the four southern Basque regions covering Navarra and Euskadi (the Basque Autonomous Community) in the Spanish state.
France: New Anti-Capitalist Party congress wrestles with challenge of the Left Front
[Click HERE for more analysis and discussion of French politics.]
By Dick Nichols
February 15, 2013 – Links international Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The four years since the founding of France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) have been a roller coaster rise and fall for the organisation, which was created in 2009 on the initiative of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the former French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International.
The party’s rapid early growth seemed to confirm the premise on which it was founded — tens of thousands of France's workers and young people wanted to get active against capitalism’s crises and crimes, but were wary of existing left organisations and looking for a new sort of political home.
Basque Country: Movement for sovereignty and socialism on the rise
For more coverage of the Basque struggle, click HERE.
France: As Hollande takes the social-liberal road, what prospects for the left?
France's Socialist Party President Francois Hollande with the Left Front's Jean-Luc Melenchon.
Catalonia: Fight over right to decide political future intensifies
[For more coverage of Catalonia, click HERE, and
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