by B. R. GOWANI

Hindu Rashtra (Nation)

RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), is a Hindu paramilitary organization, celebrating it’s centenary (1925 – 2025) in year long celebratory events.

The current RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat absurdly proclaimed India to be a “Hindu Nation” thus:

“The Sun rises in the east; we don’t know since when this has been happening. So, do we need constitutional approval for that too? Hindustan is a Hindu nation. Whoever considers India their motherland appreciates Indian culture. As long as there is even one person alive on the land of Hindustan who believes in and cherishes the glory of Indian ancestors, India is a Hindu nation. This is the ideology of the Sangh.”

Yes, the Sun rises in the east and has been doing so since 4.5 billion years.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says:

“The Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars all rise in the east and set in the west. And that’s because Earth spins — toward the east.”

No, the Sun doesn’t need any constitutional approval for its natural working because any verdict to permit or restrict its movement is neither going to be obeyed by the Sun nor do humans have any technology to control it. The Sun is not a human being, but is a natural phenom and unlike humans, it can’t be threatened to follow Bhagwat’s or Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s dictates. Humans can be dictated to act in a certain manner — but not the Sun.

This nonsense of labeling people as Hindu, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Shinto, Sikh, and so on, are created by humans. “Hindustan is a Hindu nation” is a creepy statement. No doubt, with force you can convert any person into any ideology you want, or assign any labels to anyone.

Poet Sahir Ludhianvi once wrote:

each one of the human beings, Lord created
out of that Hindu or Muslim, we created
nature had blessed us with just one land
but here India and there Iran, we created

This is the truth — all else is politics, to keep the followers within the Hindu fold while attempting to convert non-Hindus to Hinduism, and stopping Hindus from embracing another religion. Christians in India, like Muslims, are targeted often and the priests are arrested on false accusations of conversion.

Vishwaguru (universe or world teacher)

On December 28, 2025, Bhagwat churned out more rubbish:

“We will have to do the work of becoming a ‘Vishwaguru’ again. It is not our ambition to become a ‘Vishwaguru’. It is the need of the world that we become ‘Vishwaguru’. But it is not made like this. One has to work hard for that. This hard work is going on from many streams. One of them is also the Sangh.”

This is colonial/imperial language where the colonial or imperial power portrays itself as a benevolent parent who wants to take care of the children (or “half devil and half child“) by colonizing or imperializing. Europe and then, the US did the same thing. Poet/writer Rudyard Kipling wrote the infamous poem The White Man’s Burden urging the US to take over Philippines and start an empire. Many writers and poets countered Kipling with their versions: one such version was Black clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson’s “The Black Man’s Burden.”

Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is on the mark when he writes:

The slogan “Vishwaguru” is even more distinctive. American exceptionalism invokes power; Chinese nationalism invokes rejuvenation; Russian nationalism invokes restoration; even religious states like Iran or Saudi Arabia define themselves by regional authority or theological guardianship. Only India frames itself as the world’s teacher, the bearer of knowledge the rest of humanity supposedly lacks. This is not the language of partnership or even leadership – it is hierarchical, didactic, and civilisationally patronising. It positions India as the enlightened instructor and the world as its classroom.

What lessons the self-proclaimed universal teacher want to impart to the world?

1. The Indian caste system?

The Indian caste system consists of four castes:

• Brahmins,
• Kshatriyas,
• Vaishyas, and
• Shudras,

in that order.

Then there are untouchables or outcasts whom Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi called “Harijans” or God’s Children. But untouchables didn’t like this patronizing term and call themselves Dalits which means “broken/scattered.”

(Factoid: Gandhi believed in the caste system and went on a hunger strike when Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar demanded separate electorates for Dalits. India’s colonial rulers, the British, were willing to award separate electorates but Ambedkar had to bitterly retreat because Gandhi’s death would have unleashed uncontrollable wrath on untouchables.)

The Hindu extremist leaders never miss an opportunity to blame the minorities, especially Muslims. On the occasion of Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, RSS joint general secretary Krishna Gopal blamed the beginning of untouchability on Muslims even though untouchability was introduced in India when Islam was not yet born!

The “Vishwaguru” doesn’t have to worry about teaching the world about caste system — it’s well and is functioning in many countries.

In February 2023, the city of Seattle in Washington state became the first to pass a law outside South Asia banning caste-based discrimination, thanks to the brave and bold then councilmember Kshama Sawant.

Yogesh Mane, a Seattle resident, originally from India with Dalit background had this to say:

“I’m emotional because this is the first time such an ordinance has been passed anywhere in the world outside of South Asia,” he said. “It’s a historic moment.”

2. Love jihad or Romeo jihad?

Hindu zealots target Muslim men charging them with seducing Hindu women whom they marry in order to convert them to Islam. Many official investigations were conducted, but none of them found anything substantial to report. Love jihad is pure Islamophobia which Bhagwat and company don’t need to teach to the world because it’s all over the globe, thanks to India, Israel, the US, the Western Europe, and their news media and social media.

3. Abysmal Development, Gender Equality, and Hunger?

• United Nations Human Development Index rankings for 2023 lists India at 130 out of 193 countries.
• On the Gender Inequality Index, India stands at 102nd position.
• On the Global Hunger Index, it’ much worst: 102nd out of 127 countries.

4. Other Toxicities:

Bhagwat, Modi, and other Hindu nationalist leaders who are dreaming of dominating the world should instead concentrate on India with myriad of problems.

BBC outlines some pressing problems facing India in its report: “Toxic air, broken roads and unpicked rubbish – why India’s big cities are becoming unlivable.”

Major problems exist in India, including the falling rupee. So, India should instead concentrate on making India livable for its citizens, rather than turning it into a Hindu theocracy. These leaders should try to feed, clothe, educate, and provide Indians a decent life rather than fantasizing about Hindu global domination because the world does not need atrocities listed above, to be imported from her, as it has been moving towards multipolarity.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

Rewriting a Martyr: The Hindutva Push to Recast Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Legacy in Today’s India

by J. D. EMMANUEL

The rewriting of Sikh history has long been one of the Sangh Parivar’s key tools of assimilation, and Guru Tegh Bahadur’s shaheedi has become a focal point, with state-led commemorative politics serving as a major site of historical revisionism.

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 stands as one of the central moments in Sikh history and collective memory: a moral stand against coercion and a testament to freedom of conscience and pluralism. Over the centuries, his sacrifice has inspired generations of Sikhs to stand against injustice and oppression, from anti-colonial struggles to the recent farmers protest and ongoing mobilisation for minority rights.

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 stands as one of the central moments in Sikh history and collective memory: a moral stand against coercion and a testament to freedom of conscience and pluralism. Over the centuries, his sacrifice has inspired generations of Sikhs to stand against injustice and oppression, from anti-colonial struggles to the recent farmers protest and ongoing mobilisation for minority rights.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a programme organised to mark the 350th martyrdom anniversary of Guru Tegh Bahadur in Kurukshetra district, Haryana. Photo: PMO via PTI.

The month-long large-scale commemorations marking the 350th anniversary of his ultimate sacrifice have just ended with a three-day Gurmat Samagan, including a light and laser show, organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) Delhi government in the Red Fort, near the site of his execution. Meanwhile, the BJP-led Haryana government has been holding its own grand celebration in Kurukshetra, with the prime minister attending an event on November 25.

The Wire for more

Why Guru Tegh Bahadur Is Not the Anti-Muslim Icon BJP-RSS Claims He Is

by KUSUM ARORA

Sikh scholars have expressed misgivings with the BJP government’s efforts to portray the Sikh Guru as a symbol against Muslims, with several of them insisting he died protecting the ethos of religious freedom.

Jalandhar: Hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation on the 400th birth anniversary of Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru of the Sikhs on April 21, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee issued a statement.

In it, the SGPC called for “everybody’s religious freedom” to be “established and protected” following the ideology of the freedom fighter, Guru Tegh Bahadur.

In his address from Red Fort on April 21, Modi said, “In front of Aurangzeb’s tyrannical thinking, Guru Tegh Bahadur became ‘Hindi di Chadar’ and stood like a rock. This Red Fort is a witness that even though Aurangzeb severed many heads, but could not shake our faith.”

PM Modi also released a commemorative coin and a postage stamp dedicated to Guru Tegh Bahadur on this occasion.

Delhi’s Red Fort faces the historic Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, where Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in November 1675.

Though Akal Takth acting chief Giani Harpreet Singh and SGPC chief Harinder Singh Dhami thanked Modi for celebrating the occasion at the national level, the fact that they did not shy away from raising minorities’ rights is significant.

What the statement said

The SGPC had organised a large congregation at Gurdwara Manji Sahib Diwan Hall, Amritsar on the 401st Parkash Parv of Guru Teg Bahadur.

In its statement, the SGPC stated that everyone’s religious freedom should be established and protected as per the ideology of the ninth Guru – including Sikhs, who made great contributions in the freedom struggle of the country.

“If excesses are committed against anyone, then it would be understood that the government at Delhi is not sincere,” the statement read.

In his address, Akal Takth Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh said, “The motive of martyrdom of Sri Guru Teg Bahadur was so that the right to practice faith and religion was given to everyone. But today in India, going against the ideology of the Guru Sahib, the religious beliefs of minorities are being suppressed.”

The Wire for more

A Portrait of Aurangzeb More Complex than Hindutva’s Political Project Will Admit

by HARBANS MUKHIA

In ‘Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth’, Audrey Truschke sifts popular imagination on the ruler’s personal and political life from historical realities.

“The Aurangzeb of popular memory bears only a faint resemblance to the historical emperor,” observes Audrey Truschke near the concluding section of Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth. This indeed is her book’s central theme. In the slim volume, Truschke seeks to sift the man from the myth that has grown around him, especially in popular imagination, over the past couple of centuries.

Truschke burst onto the horizon of medieval Indian history studies just a year ago with her major work, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court,in which she argues that the Mughal court generally, but especially between 1560 and 1660 (comprising the reigns of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan), greatly patronised not only the Sanskrit language but Sanskrit culture as part of their vision of governance. She bases her argument on an immense amount of in-depth research. The book is clearly meant for the professional medievalist.

The book under review here, on the other hand, is not only half the size of the first but is equally clearly meant for the lay reader, lighter to read with no footnotes and no complex arguments. As a historian, she is disturbed by the distance between professional knowledge and popular image of the man and the emperor, and intervenes to minimise that distance without being an apologist for either the man or the emperor. “The multifaceted king had a complex relationship with Islam, but even so he is not reducible to his religion. In fact, little is simple about Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb was an emperor devoted to power, his vision of justice, and expansion. He was an administrator with streaks of brilliance and scores of faults. He grew the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent and may also have positioned it to break apart. No single characteristic or action can encapsulate Aurangzeb Alamgir…”

The Wire for more

The tragic death of 37-year-old Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot, Wing Commander Namansh Syal, who lost his life on Friday, November 21 when a Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA Mk-1) crashed during a demonstration at the Dubai air show, brought this moving response from Pakistani Air Commodore Pervez Akhtar Khan from across the border

When an Indian Air Force pilot, recently killed in a crash during an air show over Dubai, a Pakistani Air Commodore penned this poetic tribute. The original Urdu version is below the English one.

A Salute across the skies

The news of an Indian Air Force Tejas falling silent during an aerobatic display at the Dubai Air Show breaks something deeper than headlines can capture.

Aerobatics are poetry written in vapour trails at the far edge of physics—where skill becomes prayer, courage becomes offering, and precision exists in margins thinner than breath.

These are not performances for cameras; they are testimonies of human mastery, flown by souls who accept the unforgiving contract between gravity and grace in service of a flag they would die defending.

To the Indian Air Force, to the family now navigating an ocean of absence:

I offer what words can never carry—condolence wrapped in understanding that only those who’ve worn wings can truly know. A pilot has not merely fallen. A guardian of impossible altitudes has been summoned home. Somewhere tonight, a uniform hangs unworn. Somewhere, a child asks when father returns. Somewhere, the sky itself feels emptier.

But what wounds me beyond the crash, beyond the loss, is the poison of mockery seeping from voices on our side of a border that should never divide the brotherhood of those who fly.

This is not patriotism—it is the bankruptcy of the soul. One may question doctrines, challenge strategies, even condemn policies with righteous fury—but never, not in a universe governed by honour, does one mock the courage of a warrior doing his duty in the cathedral of sky.

He flew not for applause but for love of country, just as our finest do. That demands reverence, not ridicule wrapped in nationalist pride gone rancid.

Sabrang for more

In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, historian Rashid Khalidi breaks down the political landscape of Palestine today — from the legacy of the Oslo Accords and the failures of the PA to the rise of Hamas, the nature of armed resistance, and the meaning of Oct 7 (Al-Aqsa Flood).

Khalidi explains how he understands Trump’s new plan, comparing aspects of it to the British Mandate era, where promises of statehood were made without any real intention of delivering them. He argues that the Israeli cabinet has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, so Washington’s talk of “moving toward statehood” has no grounding in political reality.

We also explore the plan’s claims about reconstruction in Gaza. Khalidi questions whether Trump is serious about reconstruction at all — insisting that governance and security must be addressed first, otherwise reconstruction is impossible. The discussion examines:

• Hamas as a form of resistance, and how Palestinians perceive different forms of resistance
• Hamas governance, its community networks and its political evolution

• How the PA relates to resistance, and why it has lost legitimacy • Why Arafat and the Tunis leadership misread the Oslo Accords

• Why Russia and China abstained at the UN Security Council

• The shift in U.S. public opinion on Israel–Gaza — and why political change will still be slow

• The role of Arab states, their focus on regime stability, and their complicity in Israel’s actions

• How Khalidi now assesses Oct 7, its causes, and its consequences

This is one of Khalidi’s most comprehensive analyses on Palestinian resistance, global geopolitics, and the future of statehood.

Youtube for more (Thanks to Razi Azmi)

How we lost the argument on Britain’s relationship with the European Union forever? What is the point in our nuclear weapons if Donald Trump’s America has such power over whether we can use them or not? What has the left learned from the formation of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party?

Zack Polanski speaks to Greek political party leader Yanis Varoufakis about playing a role in the formation of Corbyn and Sultana’s new party, how our nuclear weapons actually function and why we’re approaching artificial intelligence through completely the wrong lens.

Youtube for more

by ANNA CIAUNICA

Contemplating the world requires a body, and a body requires an immune system: the rungs of life create the stuff of thought

One can easily imagine Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904) tortured by deep philosophical questions such as ‘Who am I? What is the meaning of all this, what is life? Why am I here, given that I haven’t signed a consent form to be alive here and now, so what’s this all about, really?’

I too was tortured by these deep questions as a young student in philosophy, and used to ponder them standing in front of a cast of Rodin’s statue in the grounds of the Hôtel Biron in Paris. I guess I was looking for something, the meaning of all this. Since then, and after drinking so much coffee that I could flood a city with it, I still haven’t got an answer. And yet, one day, something happened: a breakthrough, or perhaps an epiphany.

A couple of years ago, I went back to The Thinker as I had so many times when younger: he was still there, still thinking, holding his head as if all those deep, heavy thoughts had transformed his skull to stone.

While searching for the right angle to take a selfie, a miracle happened: I got hungry. Partly because of the heat, partly because I’d had just one black coffee in the morning, the head of Rodin’s Thinker started tilting and melting, and the massive weight of his body became visible to my mind. It was as if the statue was slowly liquefying and transforming into a vegetal living thing, something like a salad, or perhaps a cucumber? Something fresh anyway, something that I could have eaten on the spot. And then some questions popped into my head: did the Thinker like cucumber salad? Where did he grow up? Did he prefer summer or winter? White wine or red? Where was he from?

And in that moment I realised I had got it all wrong. I was so obsessed with his thinking brain that I had ignored his toes – not to mention the rest of him.

Aeon for more

by JASON HICKEL

A crucial strategy for transformation in the 21st century.

The concept of delinking has gained traction recently among some political movements in the global South, including with an international conference in Mexico on this topic that took place last month.

What is delinking, and how can it be achieved?

Delinking was best described by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin. He started from the observation that the capitalist world economy is characterised by a stark division of labour between the imperial core (often glossed as the global North) and the periphery (the global South).

In this system, the core states seek to monopolise the most profitable forms of production and establish control over global commodity chains, while preventing sovereign development in the periphery to maintain it as a subordinate supplier of cheap labour. Southern labour and resources are roped into producing things like sweatshop goods and plantation commodities for the core, at compressed market prices, rather than producing for local human needs and national development.

Amin pointed out that this system is characterised by large core-periphery price disparities and therefore unequal exchange in international trade. The South is made dependent on imports of technologies and producer goods from the core at monopoly prices, and to pay for this they have to export massive quantities of artificially cheapened commodities and manufactured goods, thus generating a net-transfer of value from the periphery to the core. This enriches the core but drains the periphery of resources necessary for development.

This system produces and perpetuates poverty and underdevelopment in the South. There is nothing inevitable about poverty; it is an effect of imperialist dynamics in the world economy. The global South has extraordinary productive capacities; massive labour power, land, factories and resources. The problem is they do not have sovereign control over production.

To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:

1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.

2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.

How can delinking be achieved in the 21^st century? Some basic principles include the following:

A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.

Z Network for more

by MICHELLE STARR

Dust from the far side of the Moon has yielded an unexpected microscopic treasure we’ve never seen before.

A close examination of lunar material collected during the China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-6 mission revealed specks of dust from a kind of water-bearing meteorite so fragile it seldom survives the trip through Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s the first confirmed debris of a type of meteorite known as Ivuna-type carbonaceous chondrite – or CI chondrite – ever to be found on the Moon, demonstrating that fragile, water-bearing asteroids can leave microscopic traces embedded in the lunar regolith.

CI chondrites are the most water- and volatile-rich of meteorites, with compositions similar to space rocks like Ryugu and Bennu. They are very porous and ‘wet’, with up to 20 percent of their weight bound up in water as hydrated minerals.

Because of this, they’re also unusually soft and crumbly compared to other space rocks, which means they’re particularly susceptible to destruction on atmospheric entry and impact. This means that fewer than one percent of meteorites found on Earth are CI chondrites. They are extremely rare.

They’re not expected to survive on the Moon, either; although the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere in which meteorites can burn and explode, the velocity with which objects collide with the lunar surface is so high that material is expected to either vaporize, melt, or be flung back into space.

Led by geochemists Jintuan Wang and Zhiming Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers sifted through more than 5,000 fragments of Chang’e-6 material in the hope of finding impact material, even if it had been altered.

The sample was collected from a crater-within-a-crater – the Apollo Basin inside the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin, which covers nearly a quarter of the lunar surface. That made it a prime site for ancient impact debris.

The researchers focused on olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate mineral commonly found in volcanic rock, impact melts, and meteorites. They isolated several olivine-bearing fragments – or clasts – mounting and polishing them to perform scanning electron microscopy, electron probe microanalysis, and secondary ion mass spectrometry.

Science Alert for more

by AJAMU BARAKA

By approving a U.S. “peace plan” that legitimizes genocide and ends the right to resist, the United Nations Security Council has not just failed Palestine—it has actively consolidated a new era of global fascism.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy 

A few days into the massive revenge attack by Israel on the Palestinian population in Gaza after the October 7th military action of the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, the Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned that the Israeli-led and U.S.-supported genocidal attack on Gaza represented the global rise of fascism. “Gaza,” he alerted, “is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable” and in bringing in a “might-makes-right era.”  

Two years later, the morally obscene and legally dubious vote by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on November 18 approved the Trump Administration’s pseudo-peace plan that effectively transfers the administration and occupation responsibilities of colonized and occupied Palestine to the U.S. and Israel, can only be understood as a corruption of the United Nations Charter and the concrete manifestation of the successful consolidation of U.S. led fascist power internationally.

On a vote of thirteen in favor with two abstentions from China and Russia, the UNSC continued the fiction that the so-called Trump peace plan advanced by the U.S., a nation that at minimum is guilty of complicity with genocide, represented a serious and credible attempt to bring about a resolution of the Palestinian national question.   

 In reality, however, the UNSC resolution firmly places the UN on the side of the Israeli/U.S. colonial project, violating all preceding resolutions, actions and legal interpretations that delegitimized colonialism in general but also specifically supported the legitimate right of Palestinians to resist colonization, including with arms.   

The right to engage in anti-colonial struggle and for national self-determination are theoretically prescribed rights under international law, and various United Nations resolutions from both the General Assembly and the Security Council. Those rights are not negotiable and cannot be redefined or surrendered as a result of a vote by the UNSC. Yet, that is precisely what happened.

The plan requires that Palestinians in Gaza surrender their right to resist colonial domination and self-determination. Objectively, it amounts to a declaration of war on Palestinian nationhood and a physical war against the Palestinian resistance. But even more ominously for the peoples of the global South, the resolution legitimizes and normalizes genocide as an acceptable response to anti-colonial resistance.

According to this “peace plan,” two million Palestinians are supposed to submit to living in concentration camps on less than half the land mass they were originally confined to in Gaza before the Israeli attack. Moreover, they are also supposed to submit to the indignity of a foreign-imposed occupation force with the Orwellian nomenclature of an “International Stabilization Force” under the joint domination of the white supremacist U.S. and Israel settler-colonial states.

Compounding the moral and legal outrageousness of this “peace plan” is the fact that it was advanced by the U.S., which is clearly complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Despite the claim by the U.S. president that his plan is supposed to bring peace and eventually a Palestinian state, the reality is that the intercession of the UNSC resolution legitimizing the UN’s alignment with the continuation of the oppression and colonial occupation of Palestine and its people, only re-normalized colonial genocidal practices. These same practices created all the white supremacist settler states and the European colonial projects in general.

The historical analogy of this vote would be if the UNSC had come down on the side of the white colonialist Afrikaners in South Africa, legitimized an interventionist force to suppress the Africans, and conferred a colonial mandate to rule over the colonized African indigenous majority.

So, is it really hyperbole to argue that the US-Israeli plan has nullified the Genocide Convention, the Apartheid Convention, the Geneva Conventions, opinions of the International Court of Justice and all the UN resolutions on Palestine? I don’t think so.

BAR for more

by RUNE MOLLER STAHL

Around Europe, old labor parties have alienated their base by forming grand coalitions with center-right forces. In Denmark, Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats have pursued this same strategy with the same dismal results.

Copenhagen saw a historic shift last Tuesday night, following the elections held in the Danish capital and across Denmark. After more than a century of holding power in Copenhagen, the Social Democrats finally lost the mayoralty.

Sisse Marie Welling, from the left-wing Socialist People’s Party (SF) instead claimed the lord mayor’s post within a broad coalition dominated by left-wingers. While the more moderate socialists in SF claimed the top job, the radical left Red-Green Alliance under leader Line Barfod emerged as the largest party with 22.1 percent of the vote. Together, the two socialist parties, supported by a smaller green party, almost secured an outright majority.

Following the election, these left-wing forces managed to create a coalition that did without virtually every other party in city hall. The Social Democrats were excluded even from a role in negotiations. This also saw the once-dominant party stripped of powerful board posts in important municipally led construction and public transport companies, historically central to the development of the city’s infrastructure.

The defeat came after an extremely negative — by Danish standards — campaign attacking the Red-Greens’ Barfod for her background in communist youth politics and denouncing the alliance’s Marxist foundations as a “corrosive, antidemocratic ideology.” Such accusations were remarkable coming from the Social Democrats, a party historically founded on Marxist principles.

This loss is both a substantial and symbolic shift. Copenhagen has been the center of the Danish labor movement since its rise in the 1870s. While other Scandinavian capitals like Oslo and Stockholm have moved rightward politically, Copenhagen has remained a historic bastion of left-wing politics.

Jacobin for more