crisis

Right in the middle of this second wave of the pandemic, just ahead of the presentation of Italy’s recovery plan, a political crisis inside the government majority has deepened the current uncertainty. While it is hard to understand at first sight, there are reasons for the political crisis – and there is already a winner.   Long-standing tensions inside the majority Ultimately, the cracks in the governing majority broke wide open. Tensions had been high in the government majority for months. The political crisis ...
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Gianmarco Rescigno

Social protests in times of pandemic

Bethan Bowet-Jones, Francesco Pontarelli, Giuliano Granato, Maurizio Coppola
The health and social crisis is worsening in Italy. The government is threatening a new lockdown, but supporting measures for workers remain insufficient. Meanwhile, social protests are spreading all over the country and caused a public debate going far beyond national borders. At the beginning of July of this year the Italian interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, in an interview on Italian state TV, expressed fears that the country was headed towards crisis: “I think there’s a real risk of a new 'hot autumn' because in September we will start to see ...
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Social Democrats win elections amidst parliamentary fragmentation

Vera Bartolomé y Amelia Martínez Lobo
Neither bloc, left or right secures a majority. The far-right Vox party, which had no MPs just six months ago, emerges as a third political force. The spectre of a third election appears to be a possible political scenario, although the possibility of an investiture agreement and European-style grand coalition seems to be the option preferred by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has already made it clear that he will not govern with Unidas Podemos. The election campaign was marked by the Catalonia issue, the court ...
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© European Union 2019 – Source: EP
© European Union 2019 – Source: EP
It is August 21, 2019, and at 15.09 in the afternoon the news of the day in Italy are the undocumented migrants who jump into the water near the island of Lampedusa out of the Open Arms ship that rescued them. The Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs and deputy Prime Minister, as well as head of the governmental party of the Northern League, Matteo Salvini, forbid the entry of the NGO boat into the harbor of Lampedusa. This was possible thanks to the law voted by the yellow-green alliance (5 Stars Movement and Northern ...
read more "The “Ursula” affair splits Italian populism (and the left)"
The romanticisation of the Swedish welfare system and its positive effects on gender equality persists, notwithstanding the substantial dismantling of the welfare state in recent decades and Sweden’s drop in gender equality rankings. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, this development reflects an impact not so much of the last economic crisis when the government did not pursue the politics of austerity seen across much of the continent. Rather it is the effect of a long-term policy response ...
read more "Call for Tenders: Report/Study on “The effects of the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state on women”"
This book is the result of a collective effort. In fact, it has been written by many contributors from all over the world – women, men, activists, and scholars from very different socio-cultural contexts and political horizons, who give testimony to an even greater scope of social change. Their common concern is to show not only that alternatives do exist, despite the neoliberal mantra of the “end of history”, but that many of these alternatives are currently unfolding – even if in many cases they remain invisible to us. This book brings...
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About the Global Working Group The Global Working Group Beyond Development is hosted by the Brussels Office of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung since 2016. It includes around thirty engaged researchers, activists and popular educators from all five continents which bring together knowledge and experience around the different relations of domination which we confront in actual times – class, race, gender, caste, coloniality and depredatory relations with Nature – and also from processes of alternative transformations towards greater equity, ...
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to promote a critical dialogue on democracyGlobal Working Group Beyond Development Under the auspices of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Brussels Office, the Global Working Group Beyond Development wants to exchange experiences of and generate knowledge about alternatives to the currently dominant hegemonic ways of life. Background and Objectives Contemporary way of life is defined by substantial and rapid transformations of human impact on our social, ecological and political environments: commodification of nature and accelerated ecological destruction of livelihoods ...
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Narrative ReportIntroduction The Global working group Beyond Development realized its third meeting in May 2018 in Barcelona to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the defense, expansion, articulation and building of urban alternatives in the contemporary world. In our meeting in 2017 in Quito, Ecuador we established a common political and analytical framework to guide our collective work, and also identified crucial strategic issues and challenges that needed to be engaged (Lang 2018). We chose Barcelona as the place to take on the discussion on radical ...
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There are myriad Brexit blogs, yet few from a left position. Our intention is not to add just one more opinion, but to create debate and engender political education and exchange on selected issues. It is time to link new and existing struggles and harness them towards a more effective left strategy for building a people’s Europe. With this blog, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Brussels aims to support this process. Over the next months we will be inviting activists, journalists, and thinkers and others to contribute to this discussion in the form of analysis as well as ...
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