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It’s the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, and all the Australian Labor Party wants to offer are measures that are so inadequate, they’re tantamount to smoke and mirrors. That’s why Labor is rapidly losing ground to the Left.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese speaks to media on February 20, 2023 in Perth, Australia. (Matt Jelonek / Getty Images)

It’s not every day that a Jacobin article finds itself at the center of Australia’s political news cycle. But that’s exactly what happened on Wednesday, June 21, when PM Anthony Albanese misrepresented a recent contribution by Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather, on Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF).

According to Albanese, Chandler-Mather stated that the Greens are voting down HAFF and “opposing 30,000 social and affordable homes” in the hopes that the resulting housing stress will galvanize a movement against the government. Or, as Albanese summarized, “they want people to stay in poverty so they can have a rally against it.”

The only problem is that Chandler-Mather said the complete opposite. As he and his colleagues in the Greens have argued, the problem with HAFF is its inadequacy. In addition to barely touching the sides of the housing crisis, if the bill passes without a rent-freeze — as the Greens are demanding — it will condemn millions of renters to worsening rental stress and poverty. Not only would this be a betrayal, it would also demoralize the growing movement behind a national rent freeze.

Albanese’s attack did not land and Labor’s campaign appears to have backfired. Polling this week shows his approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since the 2022 election while he trails behind Greens leader Adam Bandt among voters aged eighteen to thirty-five. Indeed, 68 percent of all voters think Labor is not doing enough to ensure “affordable and secure rentals.”

The explanation for this — as well as the Greens’ success — runs deeper than parliamentary grandstanding, however. A year and two months after Australia’s 2022 federal election, a global economic crisis has turned into a generational cost-of-living crisis. And thanks to Labor’s neoliberal orthodoxy, Albanese’s response has failed badly, leaving his government disoriented and vulnerable to criticism from the Left.

Collapsing Living Standards

Ultimately, Labor is losing the political argument because of the severity of the economic crisis. While not technically a recession because economic growth is not contracting, living standards are collapsing. It is fair to say that most of us are experiencing the kind of “pocketbook depression” that Europeans and Americans experienced following austerity cuts implemented in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. At the time, Australians were lucky to be spared these impacts by the foresighted anti-austerity response of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government. Now, however, our luck has changed.

It’s a story best told in statistics. Since the June quarter of 2020, real wages have declined by 7 percent, the largest decline on record. This is partly driven by out-of-control increases to the cost of essential items. Gas is up by 26 percent, while electricity, dry goods, cereals, and dairy have risen by 15.5, 11, 12 and 15 percent, respectively.

Housing affordability is a particular focal point of the crisis. Capital city apartment rents increased six times faster than wages in the last year, while rents for houses have increased three times faster. The average share of disposable income spent on housing costs is now 25.1 percent, up from 16.7 percent in 2021. Already, 20 percent of all people who rent in New South Wales are below the poverty line.

And it’s only going to get worse. In May, governor of the Reserve Bank Philip Lowe told the Senate Estimates Committee that he expects rents to increase by another 10 percent over the next twelve months. For those Australians lucky enough to own the home they live in, a “mortgage cliff” is expected in September when fixed-rate loan terms expire. This is expected to push the average home owner’s repayments up by $891 a month.

In short, almost everyone who works, rents, or has a mortgage in Australia is poorer than they were last year — and unless something changes, they will keep getting poorer.

For young Australians, there is a sense of accelerating civilizational decline that isn’t quite captured by the statistics. All around us, we can see our society deteriorating. Everyone under forty knows friends and family members who have chosen between absorbing rent increases amounting to hundreds per month or moving back home. The alternative is couch surfing — or worse. Tent cities have started forming in inner-city parks, full of residents in full-time work.

And almost everyone has had to cut back on nights out or on eating what we want to eat. Many are forced to choose between paying for medicine or paying rent. And even those who are comparatively secure have had to cut discretionary spending. No one is immune and everyone is stressed out of their minds.

Labor’s Response Is a PR Strategy

Labor has responded by implementing what amounts to an austerity budget while simultaneously claiming that it’s taking action decisively to address the crisis. It’s essentially a public relations strategy — and not a terribly sophisticated one either.

This PR approach boils down to making new spending announcements with big-sounding dollar figures while relying on the media to not analyze the policies further.

For example, take Labor’s announcement that it will spend $4.9 billion on increasing JobSeeker unemployment benefits. This amounts to $2.80 a day. Similarly, Labor’s boost to Rent Assistance payments will cost $2.7 billion, resulting in a $1.12 a day increase. One-third of Australian households rent their home — as they know firsthand, to call it a Band-Aid on a broken leg is a disservice to Band-Aids.

Labor has also been disingenuous, hoping that spin will be enough to save its fortunes. For example, the government claimed it would save bulk billing, restoring the access to free primary health care, which Australians consider a right. In fact, it has only increased the bulk billing incentive for children under the age of sixteen, pensioners and Commonwealth concession card holders. This excludes the vast majority of Australians, including the working poor, effectively formalizing the end of universal public health care. This also exposes Medicare to right-wing grievance politics by feeding middle-class resentment that tax dollars are being used to subsidize health care for the supposedly lazy and poor.

The proposed Housing Australia Future Fund was to be a key part of this smoke-and-mirrors show. Although it will only pay a guaranteed $500 million per year on housing, Labor tried to spin HAFF as $10 billion in funding. In reality, that’s only the figure the government wanted to gamble on the stock market. Worse, according to Labor’s original proposal, if the investment were to lose money, it would not be required to disburse funds on housing at all. If the performance of the existing Future Fund is anything to go by, that was likely — last year, the fund lost 1.2 percent, which would have meant no money for housing. On top of that, the proposed HAFF will only begin spending in 2025.

Labor also claimed that the fund would be able to finance the construction of up to thirty thousand homes. This figure appears to have been made up, and it was a lazy lie at that. It presumes that a home can be built for $72,000, land costs included. In no Australian capital city is this remotely possible.

As consequence of the Greens’ campaign, Labor has made some minor concessions, the most significant of which is $2 billion in immediate, direct funding. But even this will not begin to reverse the shortfall of social and affordable homes which currently stands at 640,000 homes and is projected to worsen over the next five years.

All of this is a political choice. During the worst housing crisis in generations, Labor is pushing ahead with stage three of Scott Morrison’s tax cuts. These will cost the federal budget $254 billion over the next ten years, with 80 percent of the benefit flowing to the top 20 percent of taxpayers. Albanese has also locked the government into spending $368 billion for nuclear attack submarines under the AUKUS deal.

By contrast, the government’s own housing experts say that it would take $15 billion per year to solve the housing crisis. Labor could easily afford this if it chose to do so. Instead, Labor is trying to fool voters into thinking that it is taking action — and hoping that the government will avoid their anger.

Voters Aren’t Buying Labor’s Spin

Labor’s PR strategy is not working. The Guardian’s Essential Report this week confirms that 75 percent of voters think Labor is not doing enough on the cost of living.

By contrast, Greens proposals are gaining traction. For example, Greens MPs have campaigned for a two-year national rent freeze followed by ongoing rent caps. As an example of how this can work, they look to the Australian Capital Territory, where, from 2019, the Labor-Green government limited rent increases to 1.1 times the customer price index, or CPI, per year and banned no grounds evictions from April this year.

As a result, over the past year, the median rent in Canberra fell 1.9 percent. Contrary to the federal government’s fearmongering, these reforms have not driven landlords to withdraw their houses from the rental market.

Labor has also claimed implausibly that the federal government has no power to impose a national rent freeze. However, from the beginning, the Greens have demanded that Albanese coordinate with state governments — which are all Labor-controlled, barring Tasmania — via the National Cabinet to introduce a rent freeze followed by rent caps harmonized across the country. These proposals make sense and are popular because they will materially improve the lives of renters. This means a good deal more than Labor’s false hope.

Indeed, Greens housing spokesperson, Chandler-Mather, has positioned the Greens as the party that champions the interests of renters. So far, his approach has been a lesson in principled, left-wing mass politics.

Before the HAFF came to a vote, the Greens made it clear that unless Labor agreed to direct spending on public housing and a national rent freeze, they would use their numbers in the Senate to block it. They backed up their stand by door-knocking in Labor electorates to explain why the housing fund is inadequate and to build their support base among the one-third of the country which rents.

They won the political argument. Polling showed that by the end of May, 60 percent of voters backed the Greens’ call for a national rent freeze. After months of saying that it was “absurd” to demand direct spending on housing, moments before HAFF came up for vote, Labor buckled and promised to immediately and directly spend $2 billion on social housing.

Presumably, Labor expected the Greens to bank the concession as a win and back the bill. When the Greens refused to buckle, it triggered Albanese’s ballistic question-time tirade against Chandler-Mather. But the PM’s reaction was more than an unconvincing misrepresentation of the Greens’ position — his bluster also suggests the weakness of the government’s position. That’s why the best thing the Greens can do right now is refuse to blink and keep building public pressure on the government for a national rent freeze.

Indeed, even mainstream media commentators now consider it possible that we are on the verge of a major political shift, with renters forming an expanded constituency for the Greens. If this prediction plays out, it will largely be thanks to the mass-politics strategy championed by Queensland Greens like Chandler-Mather.

Indeed, this strategy works because it sees short-term demands like a rent freeze as part of what Brisbane Greens member Joanna Horton has called a “broad, transformative vision for changing society.” This contrasts sharply with the traditional Greens approach of moralizing about refugees and the climate crisis, a strategy that saw the party fail repeatedly to break out beyond 10-15 percent of the vote.

Combined with mass door-knocking, the Greens’ more combative left-wing program threatens to de-align renters from the Labor Party, toward the Greens. It’s working because it will obviously improve people’s lives. And when all that Labor has to offer is spin, bullying, and endless rent increases, Albanese is right to be worried.

It’s hard to imagine any other government getting away with the crimes that Saudi Arabia’s monarchy has. And yet the Saudi-backed LIV Golf’s merger with the PGA Tour shows the Gulf nation continues to be treated as anything but a pariah in the United States.

Paul Casey on day three of the LIV Golf Invitational on October 16, 2022 in King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia. (Chris Trotman / LIV Golf via Getty Images)

Is there anything the Saudi Arabian government can’t get away with?

Over the last few years, the Saudi government has dismembered a Washington Post columnist and US resident, waged a gruesome war on a neighboring country facilitated by multiple US administrations, cozied up openly with Washington’s chief global rivals at its expense, and repeatedly humiliated the current US president, theoretically the most powerful single human being in the world — all while revelations slowly dripped out showing that the Saudi government was directly complicit in the September 11 attacks.

In spite of it all, the US government still has friendly ties with the brutal Saudi monarchy and continues to enable its deadly blockade of Yemen that is starving that country’s people. In fact, President Joe Biden stepped in to grant the Saudi crown prince legal immunity over assassinating an American columnist, and he just dispatched the top US diplomat to Saudi Arabia for an exceedingly friendly visit, part of the Biden administration’s determination to normalize relations between the Gulf state monarchy and Israel.

But maybe the most eye-catching Saudi-related news of the last year has revolved around the LIV Golf tour, backed by the government’s sovereign wealth fund. LIV Golf inked a commercial merger with the American PGA Tour, after months of litigation and a public spat that was growing nastier by the second before the deal.

Swimming in a near-bottomless well of oil-stained money, the Saudi-backed LIV Golf has been throwing golf bags full of cash at some of the sport’s top players to lure them over, some of whom outright quit the PGA Tour, leading the organization to suspend seventeen of its players in reprisal. LIV Golf and some of its superstar defectors, including golfer Phil Mickelson, in turn sued the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) over the suspensions, claiming the PGA Tour was abusing monopoly power to crush its competition. This triggered a countersuit that charged LIV with paying players “astronomical sums of money to induce them to breach their contracts” and to “sportswash the recent history of Saudi atrocities.”

The Saudi government’s atrocious human rights record became more and more prominent in the PGA Tour’s campaign against LIV, with PGA’s public relations firm accusing LIV of trying to “build an intelligence file” on the families of September 11 victims and the PGA Tour trying to obtain information about Saudi complicity in the terrorist attacks from LIV’s DC-based consulting firm. The chair of the 9/11 Families United organization denounced the defecting players for having “made a choice to turn their backs on their country,” while PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan invoked the families in criticizing the suspended players, asking them if they’ve ever “had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour.”

The Saudi government has indeed been using sports as a vehicle to burnish its soft power and rehabilitate its dreadful public image, dating back at least to the billion-dollar deal it inked with World Wrestling Entertainment in 2018 for a series of high-profile wrestling pay-per-views. But between making “sportswashing” a household term, the public involvement of September 11 families, and lawsuits that threatened to expose damaging details about the kingdom, the whole snafu jeopardized whatever PR gains were originally meant to have been made.

And then, just like that, it was over. After seven weeks of secret meetings brokered by Jimmy Dunne, an investment banker who had dozens of his workers die on September 11, the two mortal enemies suddenly announced in June that they were merging. The lawsuits were dropped, the recriminations were halted, and all — and that means all — was forgiven.

“Nobody is perfect,” said golfer Bryson DeChambeau, who had signed a deal with LIV reportedly worth $125 million.

“If someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with [the attack], I’ll kill him myself,” Dunne assured the press. (His late employees surely wouldn’t have wanted something like their murder to stand in the way of a good business deal.)

The PGA Tour is now dealing with a public relations fiasco of its own, with Monahan denounced as a hypocrite by September 11 victims’ families and labeled a “piece of shit” by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy (who made sure to clarify that he would gladly accept the Saudi money if they offered him $1 billion, just not an amount like $5 million). And it’s still far from clear if the merger will go ahead, with the US Senate in opposition and the Justice Department examining it on antitrust grounds.

But despite that encouraging pushback, it’s a sad reflection of the political landscape that these Saudi plans, which date back to 2021, were even able to get this far. If the Russian government had started a rival golf tour and threw money at a bunch of famous players, it’s hard to imagine it would have poached enough of them to draw the PGA Tour’s ire, let alone merge with the organization in a lucrative partnership. In a political climate where so much as setting a book in 1930s Siberia is met with apocalyptic levels of outrage, the weight of moral censure for anything of the sort would have likely been total and overwhelming.

Yet by every measure, the Saudi government is even worse than Vladimir Putin’s. It’s far more socially reactionary, less democratic, and vastly more repressive toward its people — and it has been waging an even more brutal war on its neighbor for roughly eight times as long and with an even bigger death toll. And, as bad as the Kremlin is, it so far hasn’t been complicit in the worst attack on US soil that left thousands of Americans dead, as the Saudi government was.

Even so, not only are Saudi royals and their government able to buy soccer teams, lure entertainment promotions for free PR, and enmesh themselves in the world’s premier golf organization headquartered in the United States, they’re regularly feted by Washington, where their powerful lobby buys influence daily and where they are granted glossy whitewashing by some of the nation’s leading newspapers. In fact, at this very moment, the Biden administration is spending significant political capital to try to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, despite considerable security risks and uncertain upsides.

Despite all the dings the Saudi government’s image has taken these past few years, it’s still not even viewed as a global pariah, let alone treated like one by those in power — which is why someone like Portnoy can, in the same breath that he admits he’d take Saudi money if the price was right, say he wouldn’t play in a golf tournament organized by Putin “for $100 billion.”

At the end of the day, we live in a world where, for as much as US officials talk about democracy and human rights, most things — including the way a despotic government is perceived by ordinary, nonpolitical people — come down to a question of wealth, resources, and power. With the rise of China as a global power providing an alternative to the United States, despots like Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman who happen to have their hands on the tap for oil production can feel free to do things like threaten the US president or smother the sound of moral outrage with a massive pillow of cash.

It’s hard to imagine any other government getting away with the things the Saudi monarchy has gotten away with over the past few years and decades. But then, we’ve chosen to live with a global political economy and a type of politics in the United States that makes it easy for them to do so. We can still choose another.

Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.

Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell in Asteroid City. (Focus Features, 2023)

By this time, you’re either a diehard Wes Anderson fan or most definitely not. So presumably that’ll decide whether you see his new film Asteroid City. He’s become so extremely Wes Andersonian over the years that people who merely liked his early films like Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) have fallen away gasping for relief, unable to handle the increasing airlessness of his authorship.

Asteroid City, ironically, is about the vastness of space and the grand mysteries of life and death, involving the attendees at an astronomy convention in a tiny American desert town that becomes the site of an actual alien landing. But Anderson’s way of handling such expansive topics is to make everything tight and contrived and stage-bound. It’s possible that he’s trying to convey the limitations of human experience, and the way we tend to live stuck within stiff, diorama-like architectural arrangements and confining social conventions and stodgy habits of mind, no matter what extraordinary things happen to us.

But I don’t think so. Lately especially, Anderson movies — no matter what the premises or plot developments — always use complex frame stories and theatrical settings. It just seems to be because he likes the effect.

This particular one features a “Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets” convention in 1955 in the remote desert town of Asteroid City, where a crater left by the supposed falling of a meteorite ages ago is the main tourist attraction. A motel manager (Steve Carell, replacing Bill Murray, who had COVID) runs the only tourist accommodations in town, a series of rudimentary guest cabins. There’s only one restaurant — a diner. Atomic bomb testing nearby sends up occasional mushroom clouds, which accounts for the strong military presence, led by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright).

During the convention, a small group of brainy teenagers are awarded prizes for their space-related inventions, and their parents and other adults are there to witness the ceremony. They include war photographer and grieving widower Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), movie and TV star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), teacher June Douglas (Maya Hawke), and astronomer Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton).

Then there’s an actual space-alien landing, and an extraterrestrial — an amusingly elongated, pop-eyed animated creature, with Jeff Goldblum as the actor playing him behind the scenes — who touches down in the crater. This stunning event temporarily alters everyone’s experience, until the routines of family and professional life overtake them all again.

All of this is presented in Anderson’s patented, extremely stylized way, of course, with a distracting and quite beautiful color scheme featuring an intensification of Southwestern colors like turquoise and coral. The most memorable images in the film are probably the flat, frontal shots of Johansson as Midge, in Elizabeth Taylor–like raven-black hair and cat-eye makeup and red lips, framed in her cabin window, talking to Schwartzman as Augie, similarly framed opposite her, as they conduct a deadpan love affair between “two catastrophically wounded people.” Johansson in particular seems to have found the key to delivering Anderson’s semi-sedated dialogue effectively, and she credits Schwartzman — an Anderson favorite ever since he starred in Rushmore way back when — with helping her figure out how to do it.

The movie starts in black and white with the old, square Academy aspect ratio to convey a 1950s TV image featuring a typically stiff, solemn male narrator of the day (Bryan Cranston) describing a landmark televised play called Asteroid City. It’s by a noted American playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whom we see at work on the play. Then his characters begin to populate the stage. The image opens out into widescreen color as we watch the more open-air and realistic version of the events of the play, though a basic staginess remains in the ticky-tacky look of the “sets” and the somewhat narcotized performing style of all the actors. But the narrative keeps on shuttling back and forth between these characters, in color, and the actors playing the characters, and Earp at work, in black and white.

In interviews, Anderson talks about his youthful obsession with director Elia Kazan, who’s the inspiration for the rampantly macho director of the play Asteroid City, Schubert Green (played by Adrien Brody). Like so many explanations for what Anderson is supposedly doing in his films, this one draws a blank, because no filmmaker ever seemed less inspired by Kazan, who was a member of the Group Theater and cofounded the Actors Studio, dedicated to a theater of leftist social commentary, before selling his soul by naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a director, Kazan specialized in raw emotion, social injustice, and the agony of the American experience in films like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and A Face in the Crowd (1957).

In contrast, Anderson’s approach seems designed to keep you at an emotional distance, without any, say, Brechtian political theory or any other theory to justify or make sense of it. Though some people find this film incredibly moving, in spite of all of Anderson’s best efforts at distance. Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri was brought to tears. And to do him justice, he has a take on all of Anderson’s films to account for his emotion:

There’s a point to all this indulgence. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain. The regimented universe of Moonrise Kingdom is sent into a spiraling decline by the mania of young love. The Mitteleuropaïsch candy-box milieu of The Grand Budapest Hotel is undone by the creeping evil of authoritarianism. The romantic, Continental fascinations of The French Dispatch are hit with protest, injustice, and violence. Asteroid City might be the purest expression of this dynamic because it’s about the unknown in all its forms. Death, the search for God, the creation of art, the exuberance of love, the mysteries of the cosmos — in Anderson’s telling, they’re all facets of the same thing.

I love movies about “the unknown in all its forms” and think film is a medium amazingly suited to contemplating it. I also love film formalism, with wildly inventive and attention-getting uses of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound. This ought to mean I love Wes Anderson. But his filmmaking in recent years has completely lost me. My reaction to Anderson films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch is frothing rage. Asteroid City created the same effect.

At the end of Asteroid City, the credits play over the song “Freight Train,” with its upbeat tempo, bright Southern twang, and grim lyrics: “When I’m dead and in my grave / No more good times here I crave / Place the stones at my head and feet / And tell them all I’ve gone to sleep.” It’s clearly meant to reflect the film’s combination of sunny desert setting and youthful space cadet convention with atomic mushroom clouds of doom hanging over them — which by extension evoke our current state of doom and denial.

Then, in the middle of that culminating song, a crudely animated roadrunner appears at the bottom of the screen and does a herky-jerky dance that lasts till the final image. Hard to explain why it’s so infuriating, and has such a huge fuck-you-losers effect. Does this nerd from suburban Texas think he’s exempt from the human condition just because he lives in Europe now and hangs out with the cultural elite and wears bespoke suits?

Speaking of his suits, a friend of mine said that Wes Anderson seemed like somebody who, as a kid, was dressed by his parents in a miniature seersucker suit, as worn by desiccated Southern gentlemen, just to see how precious he’d look. Then he never stopped wearing it, having larger and larger seersucker suits made until he developed a kind of seersucker suit of the soul. His films, even at their best, were affected and aligned with the elite, and they get more removed from the concerns of ordinary suffering humanity every day.

Anderson just attended the Cannes Film Festival, where Asteroid City premiered, in a seersucker suit. It seems appropriate.

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France’s left has often failed to speak up for marginalized minorities. But after the backlash over the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel, left-wing parties have taken a clear stance, refusing to condemn rioters and insisting their anger is justified.

Crowds protest during a memorial march for a French teenager, Nahel, who was killed by police on June 29, 2023 in Nanterre, France. (Abdulmonam Eassa / Getty Images)

Still out of breath after the marche blanche in Nanterre — a solemn procession in tribute to Nahel, the seventeen-year-old shot dead by French police in this suburb west of Paris on Tuesday — La France Insoumise (LFI) MP for Seine-Saint-Denis Éric Coquerel is adamant: “This march was historic: at last, the left-wing activist community was there! Bit by bit, something has happened.” For this historic pillar of LFI, a tireless supporter of social struggles and working-class and marginalized neighborhoods, the parties of the Left have responded to the current riots in a totally different key to their stance toward the riots that broke out in 2005.

Back then, when the banlieues were set ablaze by the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré as they fled from the police, the political class was at best indifferent, at worst totally surpassed by events. While then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy fanned the flames of youth hatred with talk of “blasting the streets clean,” “scum,” and “zero tolerance,” the Socialist Party (PS) aligned itself with the government’s positions: the priority was the unity of the Republic’s main political forces (it only abstained from voting on the state of emergency).

Even the far left felt “little invested in cars being torched,” sociologist Michel Kokoreff, professor at University of Paris 8 and author of La Diagonale de la rage, told Mediapart. In a 2007 study sociologist Véronique Le Goaziou wrote that the far left had “been conspicuous by its absence during a large part of the riots.” She noted the “silence of far-left groups,” but also “the embarrassment, even cacophony of the governing left (Socialist and Communist Parties),” which had “left the rioters deeply isolated politically.”

2005: Deafening Silence

“In 2005, the France 2 news first talked about the scandal of the burned-out cars, then the death of the children, and the political reactions were all aligned with this hierarchy of information. There was a consensus in the call for calm, which left these children absolutely alone,” recalls anthropologist Alain Bertho, a specialist in the phenomenon of riots. “The prevailing idea was ‘working classes, dangerous classes’: we had such an outsider’s view that we didn’t understand,” agrees Coquerel.

Nearly twenty years on, something may well have changed. If the left-wing parties are still dizzy from the expression of popular anger over the last three nights, they are now sharing their amazement with understanding.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Tondelier (head of the green party called Europe Écologie–Les Verts), and Olivier Faure (secretary of the Socialist Party) are calling for the anger to be listened to, even if they don’t say it in the same way. “There are many issues, the police-population relationship has deteriorated too much, the economic and social situation is very particular: all of this has become explosive, and that’s what’s being expressed today. I don’t see any message we can send that will calm things down,” says Faure.

Despite the avalanche of accusations of “anti-cop” hatred from the Right and far right, and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s haughty calls for “the professionals of disorder” to “go home,” the left-wing parties’ condemnation of police violence is unanimous, and they are finally putting words to the causes of the anger being expressed.

After former prime minister Manuel Valls — still widely presented as a man of the Left (despite his record in office under President François Hollande in 2014–16 and later outspoken support for Macron) — criticized LFI for “blowing on the embers” with a view to “taking political advantage,” France Insoumise MP Alexis Corbière told Mediapart: “If you think people are going to burn down a police station because they read a tweet, that’s a conspiracy-theorist way of seeing things, which ignores the social reasons behind these conditions. People have lost their lives, and the way it’s been handled hasn’t given the families any confidence. The police force needs to be rebuilt, and its control body cannot depend on itself.”

At the Socialist Party, which as late as 2022 still rejected “the use of the terminology ‘police violence,’” its line is shifting — and it’s not giving an inch to accusations that this language is inflammatory. Emma Rafowicz, party spokeswoman and president of the Young Socialists, defends the use of these words: “It’s the reactions of the Right and far right, who only condemn the riots and judge that it’s too early to comment on Nahel’s death, that are fueling a huge wave of anger. We understand this anger, which is political. We’re a long way from peace and calm. We do need to find solutions to calm things down, but these reactions are the opposite,” she tells Mediapart.

Slow Recognition

Even if there are differences of opinion on the Left about the need to call for calm or not (“My Insoumise friends are wrong not to call for calm, they’re reacting like people who don’t live in working-class neighborhoods,” says the Socialist president of Seine-Saint-Denis, Stéphane Troussel, for example), Bertho believes that the attitude of this political camp bears witness to a “real shift” compared to 2005.

There are many reasons for this change. First and foremost, they are rooted in the experience of police repression that social movements and political activists have had to endure in recent years.

“The mobilization against pension reform and, before it, the ‘gilets jaunes’ made this militant generation aware of the unpunished police violence that neighborhoods have been suffering for years. The considerable intensification of police repression has demarginalized these young people and these neighborhoods, and changed the way we look at them today,” Bertho details. Coquerel agrees: “What the working-class neighborhoods have been suffering for years, others are suffering today, even if not with the same severity. So everyone understands that it’s the same social order that’s at stake.”

What’s more, for several years now, links have been forged between traditional labor movement organizations and movements from working-class and marginalized neighborhoods: for instance the Comité Adama (a campaign group first set up to seek justice for Adama Traoré, a young black man who died in police custody in 2016) led the “people’s rising tide” march in Paris on May 26, 2018.

For Kokoreff, this new understanding on the Left also stems from the politicization of working-class neighborhood collectives and the fight against police violence, which have raised the awareness of political parties: “There has been a new awareness over the last twenty years, which is undoubtedly linked to the development of decolonial and postcolonial movements, such as Black Lives Matter, which Assa Traoré [founder of the Comité Adama], for example, drew inspiration from. The Left’s ‘software’ has changed, and the basic axiom of the American sociology of riots, according to which they always have a political explanation, has been adopted. The subtext today is: Who protects us from the police?”

Rebuilt Connection

During the 2005 riots, Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) leader Alain Krivine, a resident of Saint-Denis, recognized an elusive situation, “where dialogue is, for the moment, uncertain and we don’t have the means to pursue another policy.” Almost twenty years later, his political heir, Olivier Besancenot, spokesman for the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), claims to be closer to the driving forces behind the Immigrant and Banlieues Movement (MIB) and the Comité Adama: “The revolt is there. Now, either we go into denial, that is to say, into a law-and-order response, or we start from the responses that come from the movements on the ground. Working-class neighborhoods are not political deserts. Left-wing parties need to assert their solidarity, and move away from paternalism,” asserts Besancenot.

From this point of view, Mélenchon’s recent presidential campaign also testifies to a change in the way left-wing programs take into account the inhabitants of working-class and marginalized neighborhoods and their situation. Former spokesperson for the Indigènes de la République, Houria Bouteldja, hailed a “France Insoumise remolded by struggles,” attesting to a political landscape that has changed since 2005.

In the political history of the former Socialist senator Mélenchon, this turning point came in 2019, when he took part in the march against Islamophobia: “There’s been a shift on his part on this subject, he’s cleaned up his act a little and, during the 2022 campaign, he pointed the finger at the issue of police violence, police impunity, and the necessary independence of the police force,” notes Kokoreff.

“Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign, his tone toward the banlieues and Islamophobia, which is a dimension of what they suffer, has built bridges,” confirms Bertho. In fact, Mélenchon achieved a spectacular breakthrough in urban centers and their immediate suburbs in 2022.

However, there is still a yawning gulf separating the Left from the poorest housing projects — and we should be under no illusions about its ability to impact the course of events. Former Socialist interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s responsibility for the legislation allowing easier use of firearms by law enforcement has not been forgotten. Nor is the still-recent participation of the Socialists and Greens in the police union demonstration on May 19, 2021, in front of the National Assembly. On the Left, only France Insoumise did not attend.

Today, even if it has been muted by the shock of the video of Nahel’s death, this divide remains in the background, in the criticism leveled at the Insoumise who refuse to call for calm. Yet Coquerel is determined to put a positive spin on things: “Now, there’s a broad understanding on the Left that, whatever form anger takes, it’s about legitimate things, notably the use of the police as a tool for discriminatory control of people in our neighborhoods.”

In Weld County, Colorado, a sixteen-year-old boy has been charged as an adult concerning the fatal shooting of his ex-girlfriend, who was fifteen years old. Jovanni Sirio-Cardona is facing murder and other charges in the death of Lily Silva-Lopez.

An arrest affidavit reveals that a neighbor called 911 on June 16th after Silva-Lopez’s thirteen-year-old brother told her that his sister had been shot. He informed the neighbor that Silva-Lopez’s former boyfriend, Sirio-Cardona, had broken into the home, shot the victim, and fled.

The document also states that Sirio-Cardona had entered Silva-Lopez’s bedroom window. When he was entering, she told her brother to run. Her brother attempted to dial 911, but the call was unsuccessful. At the same time, Sirio-Cardona found Silva-Lopez in the hallway outside her room and shot her multiple times. Sirio-Cardona then found the victim’s brother and demanded his phone, preventing him from calling the police.

The brother informed the police that Sirio-Cardona had been seen walking around the house on camera the Tuesday or Wednesday prior. When police arrived at Sirio-Cardona’s home after the shooting, his grandmother asked why they were there. He allegedly replied by saying he did what he had to do, and he shot someone.

Silva-Lopez and Sirio-Cardona dated for about six months, according to Silva-Lopez’s mother. For four weeks before the shooting, Silva-Lopez had tried to end the relationship. Sirio-Cardona allegedly responded by putting a gun barrel in her mouth and telling her that she was not allowed to break up with him and had to tell him she loved him. On June 10th, an officer responded to Silva-Lopez’s home on a report that Sirio-Cardona had punched Silva-Lopez in the face and injured her arm.