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zondag 3 mei 2026
WORLD WORLDWIDE INFORMATION - ACTIVISM - A-infos-index24 - Latest Headlines - 40 posts - News in all languages. Sunday 3 May 2026.
WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Lamouette Enragee: Debate on the strikes and the social situation in Belgium with Belgian comrades (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
The comrades from Lille and Boulogne-sur-Mer of the OCL invite you to a debate on Saturday, March 21st, at 3 pm at Anamorphose, 48 rue du Long Pot in Lille. Spread the word! ---- Belgium is experiencing a large-scale social movement, considered by many to be the most significant in 40 years. In just a few months of the "Arizona" coalition government (1) led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever, Belgians have been subjected to a full-scale attack on their social "achievements," which we in France have endured for several decades now. The rhetoric is always the same: the emergence of the "problem" of public debt; the need to make savings, initially 20 billion euros; massive neoliberal attacks on labor such as: limiting unemployment benefits; eliminating special pension schemes; and aligning the public sector with the private sector. The lengthening of working days and weeks (up to 12 hours/day and 50 hours/week) while wage indexation is capped, etc.
On the union side, things are getting organized to fight against this austerity plan. Large days of mobilization have already taken place: on October 14th with more than 100,000 people in Brussels, from November 23rd to 26th with three days of strikes that paralyzed the country, and even today, a mobilization plan that is still underway with demonstrations planned for the 13th of each month and a massive demonstration scheduled for March 12th. All of this seems well (too?) well-rehearsed, which is why unions in Belgium occupy an important place within the public administration (2), unlike in France, because, for example, it is the unions that partially pay unemployment benefits, help with job searches, etc.
To discuss all this and more, three Belgian comrades will join us to help us gain a clearer understanding of the current social situation, the socio-political characteristics of Belgium, and above all, it will be a moment of solidarity among workers to fight against capitalism, which promises us ever more misery and war.
This discussion is organized by the OCL - Libertarian Communist Organization - as part of the Journal Commission, which will produce the May issue of the journal Courant Alternatif.
Lille-Boulogne-sur-Mer, March 4, 2026
Notes:
1 - Right-wing alliance whose party colors are reminiscent of the American flag. Here is a more precise description of this diverse political alliance: N-VA, CD&V, Vooruit, MR, and Les Engagés.
2 - The major Belgian trade unions are the FGTB/ABVV, the CSC/ACV, and the CGSLB/ACLVB.
https://lamouetteenragee.noblogs.org/post/2026/03/04/4229/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, UCADI, #205 - DIFFERENTLY LIBERAL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
A man goes to the doctor. He tells him he's depressed, that life seems harsh and cruel. He tells him he feels alone in a threatening world. The doctor says, "The cure is simple. The great clown Vannacci is in town. Go see him. He should cheer you up." The man bursts into tears. "But, doctor, he says, 'I'm Vannacci.'"
(free paraphrase of the joke told by Rorschach in the pages of Watchmen, Alan Moore's comic book, and in the eponymous film based on the comic book)The Italian right has gone through two important and decisive moments, one before the rise of fascism and one afterward. Until fascism, the right was a predominantly conservative and elitist force, within which we can easily include a good part of the liberal camp "that created Italy." A right that, after the First World War, was no longer capable, like the entire liberal state, of connecting with the Italian population.
Well, truth be told, this harmony had never existed, given that the nation-building process was entirely minority-based and even annexationist. But until the masses emerged, not only on the trade union scene but also in the electoral arena, the Italian state could afford to be both meritocratic and elitist.
Mussolini understood before anyone else that the masses could no longer be dispensed with; after all, he had been a compelling rabble-rouser and a capable journalist.
With the invention of fascism, he managed to bring together "popular-populist" and, at the same time, classist and reactionary demands. The previous Bonapartists had certainly been models, but fascism emerged as something absolutely new because it managed to construct, borrowing from the model of the Socialist Party, an unprecedented statist/liberal structure with a single party and based on the passive "consensus" of the masses.
This total confusion, which Mussolini created without a true underlying plan (here is one of the substantial differences from socialism: fascist ideology continually changes and adapts, even reversing its own demands), was not understood by the socialist and communist forces, and only a few realized that this hircocervus was a truly dangerous being.
The liberal right and the so-called "historical right" were completely flattened by this innovation, so much so that, after the Second World War, the only true right that reconstituted itself (leaving aside the insignificant liberal patrols, almost always in the literal pay of Atlanticism) was the fascist one, whose definition of "post" has been completely misunderstood. "Post" not because it was not and is not fascist, but simply because it was reborn after the end of the fascist regime.
But let's come to today and the current right-wing camp. The governing coalition comprises a triad composed of:
Forza Italia: a classic right-wing force that, under the guise of an unlikely "moderation," represents the most blatantly liberal wing. Its self-promotion as "liberal" (a term seemingly innocuous according to a now-dominant propaganda) manages to partially attract even those from the "liberal left" (an oxymoron in times gone by, but today, unfortunately, a dystopian reality).
Fratelli d'Italia: direct heirs of the MSI and the PNF, unlike the MSI, which claimed affiliation with the Salò Fascism, Meloni's fascists hark back to the twenty-year period. Within this political system, therefore, there are not the fascist "movement" that saw great internal conflicts in the 1960s, but the fascist regime itself. No longer "rebels" but hierarchs. Meloni navigates ordoliberal capitalism well. While, on the one hand, it follows, with the usual scruple of all Italian governments since Maastricht, the ordoliberal and Atlanticist diktats, on the other, it fills the void left by the impossibility of making meaningful choices with the arsenal of the staleest right: visceral anti-communism, internal enemies, repression, racism, etc.-in short, a right that, compared to previous decades, appears frankly reactionary, almost a DC in augmented reality.
The Northern League: The Northern League, born in the late 1970s from the rebellion of the lower and lower middle classes of northeastern Italy, to the right of the DC and then orphaned, composed of tax evaders, and all the corollaries of the average Italian of those years, has long since ceased to exist. Salvini's shift has transformed a party that used to "wipe its ass with the tricolor flag" into a far-right organization with a national focus and instrumental ties to the subversive right. The problem is that Salvini is as deceitful as Monopoly money; that is, he doesn't even believe in it himself, and it's clear to see. Furthermore, the League, which has long governed entire territories, doesn't seem to be very fond of him. As for the rest, the grassroots (assuming it still exists), folklore aside, have no use for "national" discourse.
Salvini, among other things, is the one who jettisoned a government with the Five Star Movement, where, as Interior Minister, he essentially acted as Prime Minister. We could call him a real and qualified idiot.
It's frankly difficult to understand how militants and members could have entrusted leadership to such an emeritus. But I believe it's part of the decades-long precipice of the global, or at least European, ruling classes.
So let's turn to the Vannacci case, who, for now, seems to have disappeared from the news. A nobody, a writer of trivialities passed off as right-wing thinking, interviewed and made famous by the bourgeoisie outraged by his lack of etiquette (the same bourgeoisie that ignores the 18,000 children killed in Gaza), and who has risen to prominence. And what does Salvini do? Without even being a member of the League, he "appoints" him deputy secretary.
Vannacci looks around; he may be a peasant but not a fool, but he realizes this is an excellent springboard, and he founds a new party, free from the "Nordic" constraints of the League. It embraces the most extreme segment of the right, which is now feeling cramped both within the FdI (which has become Zionist, something literally unthinkable for a right-wing militant until recently, not because the ideology was different but because the Jewish/cosmopolitan/capitalist/Bolshevik approach always works) and within the League, which is unconvincing from a "social-national" perspective.
Now, if Sparta is mourning Athens, he shouldn't laugh. In other times, a Vannacci would have been at best a character from a coup plotting folklore. But in the current phase, the former soldier seems to be retaking, with much greater freedom of movement, some issues that the League had attempted to embrace (overcoming the Fornero law, saying no to weapons in Ukraine) but which are incompatible with any EU government.
But on the left, except for a few sporadic groups, the gap with the sentiments of the Italian population on war issues is very marked.
Vannacci fits into this wedge, replacing an increasingly awkward and sluggish Salvini, who must nevertheless remain within the government coalition.
The problem is that on Ukraine, the former soldier has more cards to play than the left. And, despite starting from an obviously reactionary ideology (women, blacks, immigration, admiration for Putin's machismo), like a stopped clock, he manages, in this chaos, at least twice a day, to utter banal truths.
Banal truths, but ones that within the "official" left, not only can they utter, but they can't even think. And between Picierno, Fiano, and company, and Vannacci, the latter no longer seems to be, or at least not the only, idiot of the bunch.
The left's ideological shift has taken on pathological characteristics since the Russo-Ukrainian war, so much so that it now seems irremediable (assuming there was anything left to remedy). The timidity-to be kind-on Gaza, an open genocide-due to an internalized pro-Zionism combined with the fear of being seen as anti-Semitic, and the inability to understand, or even study, the complexity of the international scene-have meant that the ball of peace has passed into the hands of a National Socialist who is not afraid to exploit it.
"There is great confusion under the sun," someone said. Vannacci currently seems to have disappeared from the scene, and it's not certain he'll truly gain a following on his avowedly radical and extremist path, but he could have much better chances and more flexibility than the pompous government coalition, which perhaps would ultimately have to support him to avoid losing voter turnout.
Andrea Bellucci
https://www.ucadi.org/2026/03/01/diversamente-liberali/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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