Who are you prepared to vote for to stop a DUP candidate being elected? |
HAVE left-wing and progressive political parties finally learnt something from history? Results in recent elections, particularly in France and Italy, suggest they have.
In the 1930s in Germany and France, socialist and communist parties hated each other so intensely that they couldn’t unite against the fascist threat, notably from the Nazis.
It’s also true that until 1935, Stalin’s directives to Comintern forbade European communist parties to cooperate with social democrats or ‘bourgeois revisionist’ socialists.
However, after the victory of the Nazis in 1933, in Spain and France left-wing parties sank their differences (though never completely) and cooperated in what came to be known as the Popular Front.
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The Spanish and French Popular Fronts won elections in both countries in 1936 against right-wing coalitions, though the Spanish victory was overturned by a fascist military coup and civil war.
Fast forward to June 2024 and, faced with growing support for right-wing parties across Europe, like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), or Viktor Orban’s Fidesz, parties of far-left, left and centre-left in France came together in an uneasy arrangement consciously copying the 1930s. They called themselves the New Popular Front.
The arrangement seems to have........