How long this constellation will last is another matter. Sanders’s campaign as such will end with the Democratic convention in July. Tsipras’s swift passage from leader of the Eurozone opposition to sulky factotum for the Troika is indication enough of how fragile and fast-changing their fortunes may be. Many on the Italian left would deny that Beppe Grillo deserves a place in their ranks; not without reason. Corbyn faces obsessive Blairite plotting for his overthrow. Mélenchon’s Parti de gauche has suffered damaging losses. At the time of writing—four months after Spain’s inconclusive elections—Podemos’s future is subject to so many countervailing factors that it is impossible to say where the party will be a year from now. Bearing this in mind, any characterization of these forces can only be provisional—a snapshot of how things look in the spring of 2016. Nor can this handful of countries represent the whole advanced-capitalist region: a fuller picture would include both Canada and Germany, where there has been no renewal of the left, as well as the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, Ireland and Portugal. All the same, a comparative assessment of these new lefts’ strengths and weaknesses may produce results whose relevance could be tested elsewhere. What contexts have shaped the emergence of these oppositions? What political forms have they taken? What positions do they champion? What stances have they taken towards the mainstream parties?

But only in the last few years have left oppositions started to produce national political projects with an impact at state level—flanked, and sometimes outflanked, by the radical right. Again, Greece was in the lead: the Syriza coalition took 27 per cent in June 2012; it constituted itself as a political party the following summer. In France, Front de gauche candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon got 4 million votes in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections. A year later, Italy’s Five Star Movement won 26 per cent of the vote, the highest score in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2014 Podemos was launched in Spain, overlapping with a mass independence movement in Catalonia, while Scotland’s referendum saw an unprecedented mobilization around national autonomy. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was swept to the head of the British Labour Party by a groundswell of revolt against New Labour itself. Six months later, Bernie Sanders’s run for the 2016 Democratic nomination is chalking up some 7 million votes for a democratic-socialist ‘political revolution’ in the United States.

Oppositions were slow to materialize in the advanced economies after the crash of 2008; understandably so. Labour movements had long been neutered; erstwhile social-democratic parties had become cheerleaders for financial deregulation. Rump lefts had failed to grow in thirty years; late-90s alter-globo movements seemed to have been wrong-footed by the harsher international climate of the war on terror. It was not until 2010 that protesters took to the streets in any numbers, with Greece, the country worst hit by the crisis, leading the way. In 2011, hundreds of thousands more joined their ranks, from Madrid to Zuccotti Park and Oakland, in the movement of the squares. In the us, amid renewed feminist ferment on the campuses, the first protests began that would grow into Black Lives Matter.

Opposition forces naturally fare better under the proportional-representation systems of Italy, Greece and Spain, where left parties have long had a parliamentary presence; but here too the rules are skewed against outsiders. In Italy Renzi, himself unelected, used a confidence vote to ram through a ‘jackpot’ system, coming into effect this year, which automatically gives 340 seats to a winning party while the ‘losers’ divide the remaining 278 seats between them, on a party-list basis; promoted in the name of ‘strong government’, the new law has been bitterly opposed for shifting power from parliament to the executive. Greece, too, caps its pr system by handing a bonus of fifty unearned seats to whichever party wins a plurality. Spain’s party-list d’Hondt system grossly over-represents small, de-populated rural constituencies; even more so in the Senate, which has a lock on constitutional change and has long been run by the pp.

Finally, the shape these oppositions have taken has been over-determined by the electoral systems within which they operate. All are rigged in one way or another, typically with the aim of preserving a two-party oligopoly against any new entrant; but the degree of closure varies significantly. The American system is the most exclusionary of all: a first-past-the-post process, further buttressed by high bars for ballot access, even at state level, and by the vast sums necessary to get in the game at all; in addition, the two governing parties—effectively, two factions of the same party—have proved highly effective in extending their hegemony over their respective sides of the political field, absorbing radical energies and transforming them into ballot fodder. Sanders has occupied an ambivalent position as Congress’s solitary ‘independent’, caucusing with the Democrats. At Westminster, too, first-past-the post constituencies grossly misrepresent the popular will, though cracks are appearing at the edges, where a form of pr has allowed Greens and Socialists to be elected to the Scottish Assembly at Holyrood and Plaid Cymru to the Welsh Senedd. The French double tour offers nominal proportionality in the first round, only to stamp it out with winner-takes-all in the second.

In the us, on the other hand, successive protests—students in 2010, Occupy in 2011, state-level trade-union revolts, Black Lives Matter—have begun to generate a momentum far greater than the 1999 Seattle or 2003 anti-war demonstrations. Strengthened by cross-sectoral solidarities—public-sector unions coming out for Occupy, white and Latino allies for blm—this wave has been buoyed up, not deterred, by right-wing expressions of working-class discontent; it has given the Sanders campaign a markedly more militant edge than Obama’s. In Spain, too, 2011’s 15-m movement was a breakthrough; its energies were channelled into neighbourhood and workplace assemblies, which helped sustain direct-action protests against home repossessions and public-sector cuts. In Barcelona, the 15-m rebellion intermeshed with the campaign for an independence referendum, in protest at the 2010 ruling by Spain’s pp-run Constitutional Court against Catalonia’s revised Statute of Autonomy. In Greece, Syriza’s vault onto the national stage in June 2012 was a direct outcome of two years of mass mobilizations against the Troika, estimated at one point to involve nearly 20 per cent of the population.

Shaping the new oppositions from below, a further determinant has been the scale and militancy of popular protests. In France, Britain and Italy these have been low-key. By French standards, during the long gap between the 2010 battle against Sarkozy’s pension law and the heartening eruption of the Nuit Debout occupations this spring, struggles remained small and isolated, though often fiercely fought at school or factory level. England, too, has been largely quiescent since the 2010–11 student protests and anti-police riots, with Tory cuts implemented without demur by Labour councils; only in Scotland did the 2014 independence referendum become a focus for frustrations about ‘austerity Britain’. In Italy, local activism around municipal and environmental issues—polluting incinerators, high-speed trains, military bases—has not yet translated into national revolt.

Third, blowback from the worsening crisis of Western intervention and civil war in the Middle East and North Africa has begun to overlap with the economic debacle, in Europe if not America. France and Britain have been in the forefront of the wars, Greece and Italy the recipients of their victims. If Blair led the eu contingents in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, Hollande is now the eu’s most hawkish leader. After Libya, French military intervention in Mali in 2013 became a bridgehead for Operation Barkhane, targeting supposed jihadists across Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad; Hollande then joined Obama in pounding Iraqi and Syrian lands. At first, only a tiny percentage of the tens of millions displaced by the fighting succeeded in crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, Greece or Spain. But in 2015, a million refugees reached Europe from the widening arc of war. Meanwhile France and Britain—not only the eu’s main aggressors there, but with large, relatively deprived, Muslim populations of their own—have seen Islamist terror attacks against civilian targets. Blair responded with stepped-up surveillance and pre-emptive policing, Hollande imposed a state of emergency. Under these conditions, the civil-rights parameters in which opposition movements can function have been narrowed and their foreign policies thrown into relief.

A second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win ‘Formula Two’ of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. footnote 1 Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe’s Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts: Blair had already lost 3 million votes between 1997 and 2005, but Brown shed another million in 2010; psoe’s vote fell by nearly 6 million between 2008 and 2015; pasok was virtually eliminated, dropping from over 3 million votes to under 300,000 between 2009 and 2015, while in France, Hollande has plunged from 52 to 15 per cent in the polls since 2012. This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats—often into ‘grand coalitions’ with the conservatives—opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum; the centre-right parties have stayed closer to their original constituents. A different pattern holds in the us, where the Democrats’ popular vote has remained steady—the lesser evil—and a fifty-fifty split has prevailed between them as both parties glided to the right.

The common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after seven years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the us and uk are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008. Across the board, the super-rich have done best out of the crisis—during Obama’s first term, over 90 per cent of income growth in the us went to the top 1 per cent—while the young have borne the brunt of it. In each country, the ebbing tide has exposed the hypocrisy and corruption at the top of the system: Tony Blair, Jean-Claude Juncker, the Clintons.

2. STRUCTURES

Within these distinctive contexts, what forms have the new oppositions taken? A striking common feature is the importance of charismatic leaders. Tsipras swiftly established himself as a more telegenic presence than the ageing Syriza politburo members who had picked him as leader in 2008. Sanders, Corbyn and Mélenchon emerged as presidential or prime-ministerial contenders; Grillo capitalized on his tv profile. But even Podemos broke with Spanish norms and the horizontalism of the indignados to use Pablo Iglesias’s face as its symbol on ballot papers. So analysis should begin by looking at these figures—all men; four of them over 65—before turning to the parties themselves.

Figureheads Five of the six have been on the left since their teenage years, with Corbyn and Sanders squarely in the social-democratic tradition. Sanders, born in Brooklyn in 1941, the son of an immigrant paint salesman, was involved in ‘democratic socialist’ politics from the late 1950s; at the University of Chicago, he was initially with a group that would go on to form the dsa, a us affiliate of the Socialist International.footnote2 Sanders has famously been giving the same speech for the past fifty years, first as Mayor of Burlington, then as an independent congressman and senator of Vermont. Corbyn, born in 1949, joined Labour’s Young Socialists at the age of sixteen in The Wrekin, Shropshire, where his father was an experimental electrical engineer; both parents were active Party members. After vso teaching in Jamaica, he became a stalwart of the London Labour left from the 1970s, elected to Parliament in 1983, and a tireless solidarity campaigner. Mélenchon, born in 1951, comes from a pied-noir family that relocated from Tangiers, where his father was a wireless operator, to northern France. Swept up in the school-student protests of 1968, he spent four years in a Trotskyist group, the Organisation communiste internationaliste, before joining the Mitterrandist wing of the French Socialist Party in 1974; but his political culture is not so much Marxist as a masonic-tinged republican socialism, with an avowed patriotic strain—La France, la belle, la rebelle—similar to Sanders’s, though quite alien to Corbyn or Iglesias. A senator, then junior minister in Jospin’s government, he created a faction of his own inside the ps, organized from 2004 around the journal Pour la République sociale. Tsipras and Iglesias both grew up within the remnants of the Third International. Born in Athens in 1974, Tsipras joined the local Communist youth organization in his teens and was later its secretary, training as a civil engineer while operating as a party organizer; he presided at the Athens World Social Forum in 2006. Iglesias, born in Madrid in 1978, and likewise in the pce youth organization, has the most sophisticated intellectual culture of the six, coloured first by Negri, then by Laclau’s Gramscianism. The Bolivarian movement was a formative influence: Iglesias lectured in Caracas and, like Mélenchon and Corbyn, was friendly with Chávez, whom Sanders has anathematized. With a tight-knit group of comrades at Complutense University, Iglesias pioneered a radical tv talk show, closely identified with the 2011 protests, which won him national recognition.footnote3 The odd man out is Grillo, described in his youth as ‘frivolous, cynical, only interested in money’.footnote4 Born in 1948 near Genoa, where his family owned a blowtorch factory, Grillo trained as an accountant, enrolling for a degree in economics and business studies; but most of his time was spent as a neighbourhood joker and wide-boy, a jeans salesman, then a stand-up comic in local bars, where he was talent-spotted by a television presenter. By the early 80s he was best known for his comic tv travelogues, satirizing national customs (I’ll Give You America, I’ll Give You Brazil) somewhat in the manner of Sacha Baron Cohen. Radicalization came late, in the mid 80s, as Italian political culture sank into a swamp of corruption, the Socialist Craxi, Berlusconi’s patron, almost outdoing his dc rival Andreotti. Grillo lampooned Craxi on a visit to China (‘If they’re all Socialists here, whom do they steal from?’) and was briefly banned from mainstream tv. He came into his own after the meltdown of the Italian political system in the Tangentopoli scandals of the 90s, excoriating multinational corporations and environmental damage, and became a mainstay of the post-pci’s annual Festa dell’ Unità and ally of Italia dei Valori, the anti-corruption party founded by ‘clean hands’ prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro. Unlike Di Pietro, Grillo began to speak out for the rights of young workers, collecting their stories in Schiavi Moderni (2007)—‘modern slaves’. A turning point was his meeting with Net theorist and entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio, who persuaded him that online voting could provide a form of direct democracy that would offer all citizens unmediated access to political power; Casaleggio’s firm would manage Grillo’s blog.footnote5 In style, Sanders and Mélenchon are orators of the old school; Corbyn and Tsipras are more diffident, with a workmanlike delivery which, in Corbyn’s case, owes something to the low-church tradition of Tony Benn. In different ways, both Iglesias and Grillo have honed their styles for tv, which favours one-liners and speedy, off-the-cuff responses. Iglesias’s hallmark is a cool intelligence, while Grillo’s is caustic wit and performative buffoonery. In knowledge of the world, Tsipras and Grillo are perhaps the most parochial; even Sanders, who comes from an avowedly anti-communist tradition, visited Nicaragua, Cuba and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and took time out on a kibbutz after university. Mélenchon has visited China and knows Latin America well, as does Corbyn, who, as a roving un election observer, may be the best travelled of them all. As icons, all prompt the question: where would their movement be without them? Sandernistas will have no obvious rallying point after July, though the dsa may get a new lease of life. Without Mélenchon, the Front de gauche would revert to its constituent parts. It remains to be seen whether the Labour left will sink back into its low-key role in the party if the Blairites evict Corbyn from the leadership. In Greece, Tsipras is surrounded by grizzled fixers of the old school, but as a party of government Syriza will no doubt be able to produce another presentable, young-ish candidate, along the lines of psoe’s Pedro Sánchez. In Spain, an impressive layer of articulate young militants has emerged since 15-m, among them Ada Colau and Teresa Rodríguez, though fragmentation could be an even bigger problem there without a unifying figurehead. Strangely enough, Grillo is the only one so far to have secured a successor: Luigi Di Maio, 29-year-old leader of the Five Stars in the Chamber of Deputies—warmly welcomed by the Financial Times.footnote6

Formations Though conventional wisdom has it that political parties have been atrophying over the past decades, left oppositions have produced no fewer than four of them since 2008. How do they compare to the mainstream parties in democratic functioning and accountability? Syriza and the Parti de gauche come closest to conventional left models. Syriza was founded as a unified party in 2013, through the fusion of the half-dozen groups that had formed an electoral ‘coalition of the radical left’ in 2004; at that stage its dominant component was Synaspismos, itself a coalition around one of the Greek communist parties, then with some 12,000 members. The new Syriza established a traditional structure: an elected central committee, on which the different factions were represented, a secretariat and a parliamentary group, centred round Tsipras’s office and only nominally accountable to its base. In July 2015—loyal to a Stalinist notion of democratic centralism which Lenin would have scorned—all but two Syriza deputies followed Tsipras in rejecting the Greek referendum’s resounding ‘Oxi’ and surrendering to the Eurogroup; the Left Platform faction would quit the following month to found Popular Unity.footnote7 In France, the Parti de gauche, launched in 2008 by Mélenchon’s former Socialist Party faction, looked at first to Germany’s Die Linke as a model: uniting a left split from social democracy (Mélenchon and the Parti de gauche, in the roles of Oskar Lafontaine and the wasg) with a rump cp, at first within an electoral Front de gauche; the dream was that, as with the pds in Die Linke, the pcf would dissolve itself inside a larger formation of ‘The Left’, with a gravitational force strong enough to pull in all the asteroids of the far left and environmentalist movements. Privately, Parti de gauche militants would describe the mummified pcf as ‘a ball and chain—but a necessary one’. The pg had a membership of perhaps 12,000 at its peak in 2012; it has an elected 24-member secretariat and a larger National Council. But while Die Linke was operating within Germany’s proportional-representation system, the Front de gauche was blocked by France’s second-round ‘winner takes all’. The ten fg deputies elected in 2012, mostly pcf members, owed their seats to a cosy deal with the Socialist Party, mutually ‘desisting’ in favour of whichever party’s candidate was the stronger in a given constituency; in the local elections two years later, the pcf stood with the ps, leading to a crisis in the electoral front. In the National Assembly it regularly supports the Socialist government, against the positions of the Parti de gauche—backing Hollande’s post-Bataclan state of emergency legislation. Podemos and the Five Stars both aimed from the start to be new types of political organization. Podemos sprang into existence in January 2014, the initiative of the nucleus around Iglesias, who put out a call for a new, anti-austerity platform for the Europarliament elections. Nearly a thousand local ‘circles’ began forming almost spontaneously, built by 15-m and far-left activists. Podemos was formally constituted at a Citizens’ Assembly in October 2014, with over 112,000 members signing up online to vote on its founding documents—‘a transparent democratic structure’, according to its website; activists charged that online voting replaced a democratic role for the local circles, holding the leadership to account. Successes at municipal and regional level in May 2015 brought new resources—jobs; administrative infrastructure—and set new ‘transversal’ dynamics in play: local Podemos leaders determined their own alliances in the Autonomous Communities, with differing outcomes in Andalusia, Valencia, Galicia, Catalonia and Madrid. Coalitions with regional left forces, sealed by support for a Catalan independence referendum, helped lift Podemos to 21 per cent of the vote in the December 2015 elections, with 69 deputies in the Cortes, nearly a quarter from Catalonia—opening up sharp divisions within the leadership over negotiations with psoe. In Italy, the Five Star Movement took online organizing a stage further. From 2005, Grillo’s blog offered the chance of local meetups for ‘friends of Beppe Grillo’, alongside commentary on the state of the nation. These assemblies began running weekly market stalls and organizing discussions. In 2007, Grillo urged them to stand in municipal elections, with a programme focused around the ‘five stars’ of safe public water and transport, sustainable development, environmentalism and connectivity. When the national M5S was launched in Milan in 2009, its ‘Non Statute’ cited Grillo’s website as the movement’s hq: an instrument to identify election candidates who would support his campaign of ‘social, cultural and political awareness’. Would-be candidates, who had to live in the constituency where they were standing, posted cvs and YouTube clips onto a website; local M5S assemblies then interviewed them in person and chose the candidates—subject to final ‘certification’ by Grillo. The leadership remained a two-man show: ‘Those who say that I want all the power and that Casaleggio takes all the money can just get out’, Grillo said. Though the local assemblies retained much of their autonomy, attempts to build horizontal links between them were nipped in the bud. Strongest at first in Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont, in 2012 the Five Stars took town-hall seats across northern and central Italy and topped the regional poll in Sicily, where anti-mafia and environmental campaigners united under its banner—a springboard for its vault into parliament in 2013. The social profile of M5S’s 109 deputies and 54 senators was a marked departure from Italian norms (as with Podemos deputies in Spain): they were it workers, students, housewives and the unemployed, mostly in their twenties and thirties—rather than lawyers, professors and party officials. The M5S deputies pointedly took only half their allotted salaries, donating the rest to local projects; they disdain the formalities of the Palazzo Montecitorio, addressing their fellow deputies as ‘Citizen’ rather than ‘Honourable’—unlike the Corbynistas or Podemos. Uniquely, Five Star parliamentarians were obliged to vote according to their mandates, determined by online plebiscites in which at most 30,000 took part. Ignoring the mandate brought immediate expulsion; around a quarter of the parliamentary caucus has been ejected to date.