Democracy

Franco’s youth wing, Ciudadanos (Citizens), prevailed in the Catalan elections called after the Spanish government dissolved the autonomous government after its unilateral declaration of independence. With a very high turnout of almost 82% of the electorate, Citizens obtained 25.48% of…

“Don’t expect this bloc to be stuck in parliament.  We will have both feet and all our soul on the streets”.  With these words by Deputy Pamela Jiles, the first press gathering with the Humanist Party bloc took place in…

By George Monbiot for The Guardian Public projects such as the NHS, BBC and social security define us as a nation. Without that cohesion, authoritarianism could flourish.  So what is this country we are asked to love? This might once…

Few times I felt when reading the works of a philosopher the ire and venom distilled by Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols. Here we have a very angry thinker, I mused. My mistake was, of course, to assume…

By Ada Colau [1] Talking so much about the train crash on conditional or in the future, it is hard to assimilate that today is the day. A decade of neglect of the Popular Party in Catalonia ends up today…

On Saturday, 9th of September, the week before the official speech by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, on the State of the European Union, DiEM25[1] was in BOZAR theatre, Brussels, to show another vision of the European…

By Roberto Savio* Politicians are so busy fighting for their jobs, they hardly seem to notice that they risk going out of business. Democracy is on the wane, yet the problem is nowhere in Parliaments. Common to all is a…

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison. Lula, widely considered one of Brazil’s most popular political figures, is the front-runner in the 2018 elections. We look…

The second round of the French legislative elections seemed like a given. Everything indicated that Emmanuel Macron, the new president would obtain the backing of an overwhelming majority in parliament. 361 deputies out of 577 gives him a very large…

By George Monbiot for The Guardian We urgently need new rules to prevent the capture of our politics by billionaires and corporations and their secretive funding How is this acceptable? A multimillionaire City asset manager has pledged to spend up…