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Because of a Big Oil–backed exemption, federal air quality data won’t reflect this week’s wildfire smoke. The exemption allows states to ignore pollution from “exceptional events,” freeing polluters from reducing emissions to offset smoke impact.

The sun rises behind One World Trade Center, while the smoke from Canada wildfires covers Manhattan, New York on June 8, 2023. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / Getty Images)

Seventy-five million people nationwide have been under air quality alerts, as days of smoke-filled skies sent soot levels soaring to more than ten times beyond what federal regulators consider safe for breathing.

But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil–backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down on soot and particle pollution, industry groups are opposing those reforms, too.

Under current rules, states like New York, where residents have been urged to remain indoors, won’t have their “hazardous” air quality index levels count against their compliance with the federal Clean Air Act — so emissions sources in the state, for example, won’t be required to reduce other discharges to help offset the smoke pollution.

“Every air quality monitor from New York to D.C. is going to blow past the limit,” said Sanjay Narayan, a managing attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. But instead of localities counting that data toward the overall standards they’re required to maintain, he said, “They’ll say, ‘This is caused by wildfires, so we’ll continue to do what we normally do.’”

Environmental justice groups in cities like Phoenix, Chicago, and Detroit have previously accused states of exploiting the wildfire loophole to avoid cleaning up air that’s already dangerously dirty — often to the benefit of polluters that also helped push changes to the Clean Air Act beginning in the mid-2000s.

Those changes allow states to skip reporting pollution from natural occurrences like dust storms, thereby reducing the likelihood of triggering enhanced cleanup measures that could impact industrial activities. In 2016, the oil industry’s top lobbying group even took the rare step of siding with federal environmental regulators in a court challenge from green groups arguing that they had illegally expanded the reporting exemptions to include some human-caused pollution.

In an echo of their larger campaign of climate denial, oil lobbyists argued that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between “purely natural emissions” and those connected to human activity — so regulators should treat wildfires and other similar occurrences as “natural events.”

Last year, a panel of outside scientific experts took the opposite position, questioning whether federal regulators should continue to treat wildfires as “exceptional” given that they’re now seasonal events.

“The dramatic increase in wildfires over the last decade is not natural,” wrote the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in its March 2022 recommendations, noting that the causes included both climate change and land management practices. “Given the potential for significant adverse health events, it may be time to reconsider the current approach.”

Dirtying the Clean Air Act

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, its advocates were concerned primarily with pollution spewing from industrial sources like smokestacks — problems regulators could pinpoint and reduce. Under the law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets pollution control standards that states must find ways to meet and maintain. States are also required to report any air quality data falling below those standards.

The loophole for exceptional events, which was codified in 2005 amendments to the Clean Air Act, was intended to avoid penalizing states for events they can’t control. While New York City suffers through the worst air quality in the world this week, for example, there’s little state regulators can do to stop Canadian wildfires.

At the time, oil lobbyists praised the move, encouraging the EPA in 2006 regulatory comments to “expand the definition of exceptional events to include all emissions and events that are beyond the control” of states, and they explicitly cited particle pollution from wildfires as an example. Over time, the federal agency has continued to expand the definition, making it easier for states to receive waivers.

But while pollution from wildfires may not fit neatly into the existing regulatory paradigm, environmental groups say that regulators can’t afford to ignore it. Residents forced to breathe soot-filled air aren’t concerned about the source, and erasing smoke pollution from the record doesn’t undo the damage its buildup can cause to the heart and lungs over time.

Seasonal blazes have already reversed decades of progress on clean air, according to a recent study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Part of the problem, some wildfire science experts say, is a framework that can ding states for smoke from the kind of controlled burns that help prevent wildfires, while letting them off the hook for the larger, more dangerous conflagrations that often result.

In public comments on proposed changes to the EPA’s “exceptional events” rule in 2016, one fire science expert suggested that the agency take “the exact opposite” approach to regulating wildfire smoke.

“The state air regulatory agencies should count wildfire emissions,” wrote Scott Stephens, a wildland fire science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, arguing that doing so “would become a driver for ecologically appropriate prescribed fire and managed wildfire use.”

The Cost of Doing Nothing

The EPA didn’t incorporate suggestions from fire scientists in the 2016 changes.

But the agency did loosen the overall standards for what could be counted as an exceptional event — a move that the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, had backed in its own regulatory comments.

In prior years, the API had lobbied alongside Exxon on proposed legislation to relax the criteria for states seeking air quality waivers from such events.

Environmental groups challenged the laxer rule in federal court in 2016, arguing that it created too large a loophole for some types of human-caused emissions. In response, the oil lobby did something unusual: intervene on the side of the EPA.

The API’s attorneys wrote in a brief that overturning the agency’s rule would force states to report more data showing poor air quality — a move that could negatively impact its members’ operations. In other words, forcing states to more fully account for air pollution, even from sources they didn’t completely control, could mean a crackdown on more sources they do control.

The court sided with the EPA and the oil lobbyists. In recent years, states have increasingly relied on wildfire waivers to meet their required air quality standards, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office — even as air quality has declined.

On multiple occasions, local environmental groups have challenged the federal agency’s decisions to sign off on the waivers. In March, a Detroit-based group contested an exceptional event waiver granted by the EPA for poor air quality registered in the city the previous year. State environmental regulators claimed that the readings were influenced by distant wildfire smoke.

But in a letter to the EPA, the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center said that the state was instead seeking “to delay and evade utilizing their regulatory responsibility to lower ozone pollution in the Detroit area,” which suffers from disproportionately high asthma rates. The federal agency approved the state’s waiver in May.

Federal environmental regulators are currently considering one measure that environmental justice groups say could help address rapidly declining air quality, including from wildfires — tightening standards for soot and particle pollution. That move is staunchly opposed by the oil and gas, mining, and chemical lobbies.

While there’s no single regulatory solution for wildfires, the eerie haze currently gripping the skies above huge swaths of the country should serve as a reminder of the urgency of addressing their underlying causes, said the Sierra Club’s Narayan.

“This is why it’s critical that the EPA regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — that’s what the act was meant to do,” he said. “We hear industry complaining about the cost of greenhouse gas reductions, but this should be a reminder that the costs of doing something are a lot lower than the costs of doing nothing.”

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Manchester City is the hot favorite to win tonight’s Champions League final with the best team that an oil-rich autocracy can buy. It’s the latest stage in a long-term process that has converted the people’s game into a plaything of wealthy elites.

The Premier League match between Brentford FC and Manchester City at Gtech Community Stadium on May 28, 2023 in Brentford, England. (Craig Mercer / MB Media / Getty Images)

Manchester City have just won their fifth Premier League title in six seasons, the culmination of a lavishly funded project to boost the prestige of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. The Saudi monarchy has bought their domestic rivals Newcastle United and the rulers of Qatar own Paris Saint-Germain.

The financial gulf between the wealthiest clubs and their rivals is wider than ever before, depriving many national leagues of any element of surprise. But members of the self-perpetuating oligarchy at the top of the game are still looking for ways to strengthen their economic advantage. How did a sport deeply rooted in working-class communities become a multibillion-dollar industry where financial doping is the norm, and is there anything that can be done to reverse the process?

We spoke to Jonathan Wilson, a football columnist for the Guardian and the Observer, about the current state of the football industry. His books include Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics and Two Brothers: The Life and Times of Bobby and Jackie Charlton. The following is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast; you can listen to the interview here.

Daniel Finn

What do we know today about the circumstances in which Qatar won the right to host the World Cup, and how does it relate to the wider FIFA corruption scandal?

Jonathan Wilson

That’s a massive question. What we know is that of the twenty-two members of the executive committee of FIFA who made the decision, sixteen have either been convicted of corruption offenses or credibly accused of corruption. I don’t think there’s any direct evidence against Qatar or indeed Russia — the two hosting decisions were made at the same time — but certainly the body making those decisions has been shown to be flawed.

There were all the arrests in Zurich in 2015, when the FBI got involved. This is one of the problems with football corruption: because it goes cross-border, it’s very hard for anybody to have the authority to take proper action. I think what they actually got them on was fraud over some TV deals in South America: some of the interactions that were questionable were carried out in dollars and that gave the US authorities the right to intervene. It may not be coincidental that the US is hosting the next World Cup in conjunction with Mexico and Canada.

Because football corruption goes cross-border, it’s very hard for anybody to have the authority to take proper action.

That led to the downfall of Sepp Blatter. I personally don’t find Blatter as objectionable as a lot of people do. It’s very easy to think that FIFA’s corruption was embodied in him. It’s important to stress he’s never been convicted of any corruption, although I think he absolutely did pay himself an enormous salary and very generous expenses.

He was instrumental during the 1970s in helping João Havelange topple Stanley Rous in the presidential election of 1974, which is what led to FIFA’s modern age of corporatism and the corruption that has accompanied that. I think it’s probably fair to say that at some level, he had the best interests of football at heart. He genuinely was an evangelist for football. He believed that FIFA had a chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for taking the World Cup to South Africa in 2010.

He had wanted to take it to South Africa four years earlier in 2006. There was some very dodgy stuff going on that resulted in the 2006 tournament going to Germany. A delegate from New Zealand who would have voted for South Africa disappeared the night before the vote and went back to New Zealand.

It was never explained why he did that. If he had stayed, the vote would have been 12–12 and Blatter would have given his casting vote to South Africa. Instead, it was 12–11 in Germany’s favor. That’s never been properly investigated.

Sepp Blatter believed that FIFA had a chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for taking the World Cup to South Africa in 2010.

Blatter did take the tournament to South Africa in 2010. I don’t think it was a great World Cup, but the idea behind it was laudable. To an extent, Blatter was a realist. He thought that when you have enormous global corporations that essentially exist beyond the reach of any one authority, a certain amount of corruption is inevitable.

What Blatter did was keep an eye on that corruption and expose it when it was politically useful for him, as in the case of Mohammed bin Hammam, the Qatari who stood against him in the 2011 FIFA presidential election. He showed that bin Hamman had made payments to the Caribbean football union. He could take out opponents that way.

He didn’t crack down on corruption, but rather used it to his own ends. Whether that makes him personally corrupt is a slightly different issue. But he was toppled in the wake of the Zurich arrests in 2015. You then had a very strange campaign against Michel Platini, who was the obvious person to succeed Blatter.

Platini had been involved in the Qatar business in a direct way as the president of UEFA [Union of European Football Associations]. It looked as if he and the other two UEFA delegates would vote for the US to be host nation in 2022. Nine days before the vote, he went to a meeting at the Élysée Palace with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and the son of the emir of Qatar, who is now the emir himself. After that meeting, he and the UEFA delegates mysteriously switched their votes to Qatar, and there was then a big order placed by the Qatari government for French fighter jets. Make of that what you will.

In any case, Platini was seen as president-elect after Blatter, if you will. There was then an allegation made that he had taken two million dollars or Swiss francs in an illegal payment from Blatter. The evidence was always quite flimsy, and they were both exonerated earlier this year, but it was enough to end Platini’s political career in the world of football.

He was replaced by Gianni Infantino, the current FIFA president, who has shut down various ethics commissions. Infantino seems quite happy bantering on the world stage with Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, and he lives in Qatar, which is also an interesting development.

Daniel Finn

Last summer, English clubs spent well over €2 billion on transfer fees — more than the next four European leagues put together. Do you think that the architects of the Premier League in the early 1990s had any idea that it would prove to be so successful in global commercial terms?

Jonathan Wilson

I’m sure they hoped it would be. It was part of a more general movement in football at the time. Silvio Berlusconi had bought AC Milan in 1986 and rescued them from probable bankruptcy. He gained popularity from that, and it helped launch his political career.

In the 1987–88 season, the Italian champions Napoli played Real Madrid in the first round of the European Cup, which in those days was a straight knockout competition. Berlusconi said this was crazy, because you had two of the biggest TV markets, Italy and Spain, playing against each other: whoever lost was out and you would have lost all that revenue. He said it was a crazy way to organize the competition.

There was a realization across Europe in the 1980s that the commercial potential of football wasn’t being exploited as much as it could be.

Berlusconi didn’t want his team to win the Italian league and find themselves playing against the Spanish champions or the German champions in the first round. He was very much the leader of a move toward what became the Champions League. The first season of the Champions League, 1992–93, was also the first season of the Premier League.

There was a realization across Europe in the 1980s that the commercial potential of football wasn’t being exploited as much as it could be. In the specific case of England, you had the ban on English clubs playing in Europe that had been imposed after the death of thirty-nine Juventus fans at Heysel stadium in Brussels when their club was playing Liverpool. English clubs were banned from European competitions for five years and lost a lot of revenue and exposure as a result.

Trying to obtain more revenue from domestic TV rights was not so much a bid for world domination as a way of staving off financial crisis. But they went on to market it brilliantly. Whatever you think of its founding principles, the Premier League has run itself better than any other league in the world. The result is that thirty years on, it is absolutely dominant in financial terms.

Daniel Finn

How important was the purchase of Chelsea by Roman Abramovich in shaping the economic development of English football?

Jonathan Wilson

It was hugely important because previously, you always had to do well on the pitch to generate money. Obviously when you generate money, you can buy better players and employ better managers, and you’re then more likely to be successful and generate more revenue in turn.

There had been a recognition that this was the case from the early days of the Football League in England, so there was a general levy of 4 percent of a club’s income that was then divided among all ninety-two league clubs. Twenty-five percent of gate receipts from ticket sales at matches went to the away club. As a result, even though you had an advantage if you had a big stadium, it wasn’t that much of an advantage.

It was only when the TV rights revolution began that you started to have self-perpetuating elites. The term “super club,” which is now bandied about quite freely, first appeared in the early ’70s. There was a recognition that the marketplace had changed with the launch of Match of the Day on the BBC in 1964. You could be a Manchester United fan without having to live near Old Trafford, since you could just watch them play on TV on a Saturday night.

That changed the parameters. In 1981, the English football authorities scrapped the protocol according to which the home club had to give a percentage of gate receipts to the away club. That allowed the big clubs to become bigger — an effect that was magnified after the coming of the Premier League. But even during the first decade of the Premier League, you still had to win games to make money.

Then Abramovich came along and suddenly a club’s wealth was not contingent on its performances. It decoupled success on the pitch from wealth: you could have money just because you had a megarich owner. Of course, this had sometimes happened in the past when a local businessman got involved. Jack Walker, for example, spent a lot of money supporting his local team Blackburn, who went on to win the league in 1994–95.

But the sums involved in those cases were much smaller than what Abramovich was now putting in. In the summer of Abramovich’s first year as owner, Chelsea spent more than the next nine clubs, I think, put together. They weren’t far off that in his second summer, either. It was an enormous investment from an external agent of a kind we’d never seen before.

Roman Abramovich decoupled success on the pitch from wealth: you could have money just because you had a megarich owner.

I had just started out as a journalist at the time, and I think we were pretty naive about it. We just thought, “Oh, it’s an amazing amount of money — this is all very exciting, all these players are arriving.” Alongside that, there was a slight feeling of distaste, wondering how moral it was that a very rich man could come along and break up the existing structures. I don’t think we really had any notion of what we now call “sportswashing” — of the reasons why Abramovich might be investing.

It was only nine or ten years later that we really began to interrogate the question of why he was doing it. We had bought the line that he watched the Champions League match in 2003 where Manchester United beat Real Madrid 4:3 and thought “I love this game — I must buy a slice of it for myself.”

If we looked further, the sense was that he was protecting his own position against Putin by making himself a figure who was well known in the West. Perhaps there really was an element of that because Abramovich subsequently took Israeli citizenship, which you could argue has given him certain escape routes. I don’t think it occurred to anybody to ask if this was part of a wider phenomenon of Russian money inveigling itself into West European society.

But in terms of the impact on football, the obvious comparison is to Arsenal. Around the same time, they had begun the process of moving away from Highbury, their traditional home, which had quite a small capacity and very limited corporate facilities. They realized that if they wanted to challenge Manchester United, they needed their own version of Old Trafford, which at the time was state of the art, with amazing commercial possibilities around it.

Arsenal thus began the process of moving to the Emirates stadium, but it came at an enormous cost. The interest repayments on the loan impacted their ability to pay transfer fees and wages for a long time, even after they moved into the new stadium. By the time that stadium was built, the idea of needing to generate your own revenue was already old hat: revenue had to come from a sugar daddy from abroad. Abramovich began that process of decoupling wealth in football from performance on the pitch or the ability to drag fans through the gate.

Daniel Finn

The Champions League has clearly widened the gulf between big clubs and small clubs and between big leagues and small leagues across the whole of Europe. Was that always the intention behind it, or is it a case of unintended and unforeseen consequences?

Jonathan Wilson

I think it’s very difficult to say. Clearly the fundamental urge was greed, with the big clubs saying we have to make more money. Perhaps there was an unwillingness or an inability to recognize that European football was an enormous ecosystem and that once you started damaging parts of it, that would have ramifications elsewhere. It was totally foreseeable, but I don’t think they did foresee it, if that makes sense.

Some people did, to be fair. Particularly with the Premier League, there was a lot of opposition to it in the early days, with people pointing out that this process of enriching the rich at the expense of the poor was inevitable. But that was never fully communicated to fans, and you didn’t get the same kind of backlash against it that you later had against the proposal for a European Super League.

I think it was an inevitable consequence, and it’s very difficult to put things right once that process has begun. There have been various tweaks made to the Champions League structure to try and encourage clubs from outside the big five leagues. But that brings problems of its own.

For example, a team from Cyprus, APOEL, reached the quarter finals of the Champions League a decade ago. You might think this was a great underdog story. But the money they got from that run completely destroyed the Cypriot league, because suddenly APOEL’s budget was ten, twenty, or even thirty times greater than that of their nearest competitors.

Not only are the richest clubs in the Champions League much stronger than the poorest clubs, but the poorest clubs are then much richer in turn than their domestic rivals.

Not only are the richest clubs in the Champions League much stronger than the poorest clubs, but the poorest clubs are then much richer in turn than their domestic rivals. That skews the domestic competitions, which means that those clubs carry on qualifying for the Champions League and receiving more money. I don’t really know how you put this right without wholesale redistribution, which clearly none of them will ever agree to.

Daniel Finn

What impact have the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules devised by UEFA had in terms of leveling the playing field?

Jonathan Wilson

In truth, almost nil. They were introduced in 2011, just as Russian oligarchs were beginning to invest in Russian clubs like CSKA Moscow and Anzhi Makhachkala. The story behind Anzhi Makhachkala was bizarre: it seems to have been an idea of the Russian government to go to Makhachkala in the disputed region of Dagestan and give them a top-level European club to calm the waters. They invested enormous amounts of money, bringing in world-famous players like Roberto Carlos and Samuel Eto’o. That wave of investment in Russian domestic football slowed down dramatically after the FFP regulations were brought in.

But in terms of checking what Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) have done, the regulations have had virtually no impact. Every now and then, somebody raises a quibble and there will be an investigation that drags on and on. UEFA doesn’t have the financial clout to legally challenge a state-run club like City or PSG. Those clubs can afford to pay lawyers to drag things out until the statute of limitations has expired.

UEFA doesn’t have the financial clout to legally challenge a state-run club like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain.

Manchester City were banned from the Champions League but got off on appeal — not because they hadn’t committed an offense but rather because the offense had been committed too long ago for them to be punished for it. There has been an investigation by the Premier League into payments made by City a decade ago that’s been going on for several years, with no sign of it coming to an end. Even if some punishment is finally imposed, it will be a decade or more after the offense took place, if indeed it was an offense.

In reality, FFP has had almost no impact. We’ve also discovered that state-run clubs have a lot of other state-run entities that can give them lucrative sponsorship deals. It’s almost impossible to say what a fair market price is for those deals.

Daniel Finn

Would you say the formation of a European Super League is inevitable in the long run, despite the setback to that project in 2021? And if it is, will we even notice the difference by the time that it happens?

Jonathan Wilson

I’m loath to say it’s inevitable, but it feels like the direction of travel. I think the Premier League is fine. Even though Manchester City are clearly dominant, having won five of the last six titles, it’s not like Germany, where Bayern Munich have won eleven in a row, or France, where PSG have won nine out of the last eleven, or Italy, where Juventus won nine in a row between 2011 and 2020. In Spain, there’s a very obvious duopoly between Real Madrid and Barcelona — if both of them have terrible seasons, Atlético Madrid can just about pinch the title, but nobody else can.

The leading countries are very worried by that because they realize it’s not a good product if the same team wins all the time. They’ve become trapped in a financial system whereby if a team is successful, it makes more money and can buy the best players. How do you get out of that without breaking the structures completely?

The pandemic has accelerated the process. The Premier League, because it’s wealthier and has bigger TV broadcast deals, was able to ride out the pandemic better than other countries. There’s a lot of economic pressure on the rest of Europe so they look at the Premier League and think “we need a way to combat that.” The Super League seems like an obvious way of doing it.

But how do you actually achieve that goal? PSG were against the Super League, because, I think, their owners were smart enough to recognize that fans don’t like the idea of a closed league. They like the idea that the Champions League is somehow still a meritocracy and that a team can fall or rise. However difficult that may be in practice, it is still at least theoretically possible, which wouldn’t be the case in a closed league. You would have quasi-franchises.

German fan culture would be very much opposed to it. There’s absolutely no reason for the English clubs to get involved and I honestly find it mystifying that so many of them were involved before. It’s significant that many of the clubs that went along with it have American owners who may have seen the possibility of an American-style system — a quasi-franchise system to lock in the revenues. The Premier League has such an advantage at the moment that I’m not really sure why they would give that up.

The leading football countries are very worried because they realize it’s not a good product if the same team wins all the time.

One key factor is a court case that’s been taken against UEFA by the three clubs that are still invested in the project: Juventus, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. They accuse UEFA of holding a monopoly position. The European courts will decide whether or not UEFA is allowed to hold that position.

If they rule in favor of the clubs, suddenly there will be nothing to stop them from setting up a Super League. Perhaps the leaders of FIFA could stop it, but they might opt instead to sit back and claim a slice of the club revenues they’ve been shut out from, while stabbing their old rivals from UEFA in the back at the same time.

If that was to happen, football might begin to splinter in the same way as golf or boxing. If you ended up with Manchester United belonging to one franchise while Real Madrid belonged to another so they couldn’t play each other, that would be a much less attractive product.

Daniel Finn

You mentioned earlier the role of Silvio Berlusconi, who famously launched his entire political career on the back of his position as chairman of AC Milan. Today’s generation of club owners don’t seem to be very interested in national political interventions in the way that someone like Berlusconi was. Is that a fair generalization, and if so, why do you think that is?

Jonathan Wilson

In Europe, it probably is true. You’ve got the case of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, who was the president of Boca Juniors. In much the same way as Berlusconi, that gained him the popularity and recognition to become president of his country.

But in Europe, the leading clubs are now just too big. An aspiring political candidate couldn’t afford them. In order to buy a club, you have to be either the sovereign wealth fund of a state or else an American hedge fund.

Daniel Finn

As you’ve alluded to, three major European clubs are now effectively state-run projects of the Gulf monarchies. What does that mean for the game in England, France, and the wider world?

Jonathan Wilson

It’s very hard to see it as anything other than terrible, on a number of levels. Take the case of Newcastle, a proud old club that has existed for one hundred twenty–odd years, representing the city and the people of Newcastle. It is now beholden in theory to a Saudi public investment fund, but realistically to the leaders of Saudi Arabia. Who’s to say that, if the oil price falls, they won’t think “we’ll get rid of that, we don’t need it”? And then what are the consequences for Newcastle?

What are their reasons for owning the club? Is it to win matches and titles? Is it to make money, or to promote the image of Saudi Arabia and give it an avenue into the society and business environment of Western Europe? If you believe that football clubs can and should be a representation of their area, that’s a major change.

A lot of Newcastle fans seem quite happy with the deal they’ve done. But you saw with Chelsea what can happen if you get involved in geopolitics. Your owner can suddenly be sanctioned, and then you could realistically be facing bankruptcy. As it is, Chelsea were taken over by Clearlake [Capital] and Todd Boehly, who I don’t think have made a very good job of it so far.

Ownership of football clubs has been taken away from the community, and that’s a very dangerous thing.

To an extent it’s true with hedge funds as well — ownership has been taken away from the community, and that’s a very dangerous thing. Fifty or sixty years ago, when clubs were owned by a local building magnate or haulier, that person might have had a lot of power, but he was still to some extent beholden to the community from which he came. That dynamic has changed.

The much bigger issue for football generally is that these clubs are not controllable, as I mentioned earlier. If they have the sovereign wealth fund of a state behind them, then how can the [Football Association] or the Premier League or UEFA control them? When it comes to any kind of legal battle, Saudi Arabia can afford the better lawyers and can afford to drag it out. They can win by draining your resources. In that context, the associations and organizations that supposedly provide the governing structure for the game are as good as meaningless.

Daniel Finn

During the first decade of this century, many English football fans looked to Germany as an alternative model for how football could be run in the modern age that wouldn’t have the same stark inequalities between clubs. Does the hegemony of Bayern Munich over the last decade mean that they had it wrong?

Jonathan Wilson

I don’t think they had it wrong, but they possibly hadn’t looked at the bigger picture. I totally get why the German model is attractive. They have the 50+1 rule, which states that the fans must control a minimum 51 percent stake in a club, with a couple of exceptions, such as Bayer Leverkusen, who are owned by the local pharmaceutical firm, and Wolfsburg, who are owned by Volkswagen.

Leipzig are now owned by Red Bull, who have shown that you can drive a truck through the spirit of the 50+1 rule while complying with the letter of it. But I get why that’s attractive — the sense that fans do have control.

When you compare the atmosphere of German grounds to the slightly anodyne Premier League crowds these days, you can see why that’s appealing to people.

German fan culture is also very attractive. When you compare the color and atmosphere of German grounds to the slightly anodyne Premier League crowds these days, you can see why that’s appealing to people. Ticket prices are much lower. There’s a much greater sense of fan engagement on political issues, taking strong stances against homophobia or in support of refugees. All of that is very attractive and I understand why people want to import some of that into the Premier League.

However, it didn’t alter the fact that Bayern were getting richer than everybody else, much quicker than everybody else, and nothing seems to have been able to stop that. That’s partly because Bayern were successful, and partly because Munich is a wealthy city with a lot of sponsors and investors. Bayern have around 70 percent more revenue than Borussia Dortmund, who are the second-richest German club.

Inevitably under those conditions, they win. They possess so much power that they can effectively neuter opponents by buying their best players. Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund, when they were challenging Bayern, lost Robert Lewandowski, Mario Götze, and Mats Hummels, all to Bayern. It wasn’t just that they sold those players — they sold them to their direct rival.

When you look at German football now, it’s still a great league, but Bayern are so dominant that there’s no sense of a title race. That obviously takes a lot away from the attractiveness of it.

Daniel Finn

The traditional stereotype presents the US as having a more cutthroat, unregulated version of capitalism than many European states. It’s somewhat ironic in light of that stereotype that top-level American sports appear to be rather more egalitarian than European soccer in various ways, in terms of the draft pick, the distribution of television money, and so on. How did that American sporting model come about, and could it ever be replicated in Europe?

Jonathan Wilson

I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as that. Yes, TV money is much more equitably divided, and you have the draft system, which makes competition much more equal. But that’s actually a very cynical, money-oriented way of doing things, because these are not organic clubs — these are franchises in a cartel. The cartel makes money and in fact it’s almost impossible to lose money, because it keeps everybody going on a level.

There’s no organic sense of a club representing its society, which for me is the great beauty of European football. I’m a Sunderland fan. The football club grew from a teachers’ team in the 1870s. A teacher called James Allen put the team together and it slowly grew into the Sunderland we know today, which has become probably the one thing that Sunderland has left as the heavy industries have fallen away. It’s the one reminder of the city that Sunderland used to be. It’s very difficult to get that with a franchise model.

Could you impose a franchise model on Europe? Let’s say you want thirty-two franchises across Europe — the same number as you have in the National Football League in the US. You wouldn’t put two of those franchises in Manchester and one in Liverpool, or three in London and two in Milan. Yet those rivalries between the Manchester clubs and Liverpool, or between the two Milan clubs, are among the great selling points of European football.

In US sports, there’s no organic sense of a club representing its society, which for me is the great beauty of European football.

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has the idea for an African Super League. In Africa, you can make the case that football is in desperate need of investment and there is a system of club competition that is less wealthy and less well-established. That’s true to an extent, although the African Cup of Champions has been going since the early 1960s — almost as long as the European Cup.

Infantino’s idea is that you will have a closed league of twenty clubs that share all the investment arising from that between them. But you have an immediate problem: Where do you put those twenty franchises? Do you base them on existing clubs?

How can you choose between Al Ahly and Zamalek in Cairo, or between Raja and Wydad in Casablanca? Those derbies are still one of the big selling points of African football, so losing them would mean losing the one thing that people are still interested in.

The same problem arises in South America. Would you still have River Plate and Boca Juniors, both from Buenos Aires, if you had a league with franchises across the continent? You probably wouldn’t.

That’s an issue for US football. There’s no way for these organic rivalries, which mean so much more than football, to grow up. You can have a rivalry to some extent between New York and Boston (or between New York and New England, in terms of the franchises). But it’s not as visceral and deep-seated as Liverpool vs. Manchester United. That makes it a harder sell to a wider public.

Thursday marks the tragic death of a 23-year-old Russian man, Vladimir Popov, at the Elysees Dream Beach Hotel in Hurghada, Egypt. Video footage of the attack shows Popov struggling in the surf after being dragged under the water by a massive shark.

Popov’s stunned and terrified girlfriend managed to swim away to safety following the chaotic incident. Onlookers attempting to help Popov could not stop the attack, and he tragically died.

The Environment Ministry of Egypt confirmed that a man was brutally attacked and killed by a tiger shark in the waters close to Hurghada. In response to the incident, a 46 mile section of the waterfront has been shut down and will remain inaccessible until Sunday.

Tiger sharks are second on the list for most likely to attack humans, following great whites, says National Geographic. What sets tiger sharks apart is that they normally don’t swim away after taking a bite. The area where the attack occurred is a popular tourist destination, and shark attacks are rare. Although this is the third attack in Hurghada in the past year, the two others claimed the lives of an Austrian and Romanian tourist.

After the attack, authorities captured the shark in question and transferred it to a laboratory for further investigation. As a result of the incident, all water-related activities within the vicinity were restricted until Sunday.

Vladimir Popov’s sudden death reminds us to be aware of our surroundings in the ocean and how vital it is to protect our sea life and oceans. It also highlights the risks of swimming in the ocean and how important it is to be mindful of our safety.

…

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Born in Trinidad, George Padmore became a key organizer of Pan-African anti-colonial networks. Strongly influenced by Marxism, Padmore always stressed that national independence should lead to social liberation instead of just replacing one flag with another.

George Padmore, circa 1937. (Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America via Wikimedia Commons)

George Padmore was one of the most important figures in Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial politics during the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad, he subsequently moved to London, where he became a key organizer of networks that brought together some of Africa’s future leaders in the struggle against European domination.

Padmore became a high-profile communist activist in the 1920s, although he later broke with the movement when he believed that it was downplaying the struggle against imperialism. Yet Padmore continued to draw on Marxist ideas and stressed that liberation from colonial rule should involve a radical transformation of society, not just a new flag and anthem.

The Color Line

Malcolm Nurse, who would later become famous as George Padmore, was born in Arouca, in Trinidad’s East–West Corridor, on June 28, 1903. Trinidad was a British colony defined by a clear racial hierarchy. Nurse belonged to the black middle class and was acutely aware that racism and colorism would limit his prospects.

As C. L. R. James, Nurse’s childhood friend, observed of the Trinidad of their youth:

Socially racial lines were clear. The whites, the browns and the blacks each kept their own company. The best positions were shared (very unequally) by the first two . . . It was on the black as opposed to the brown middle class that the discrimination fell hardest and George was a member of that class.

Nurse was not simply born in Trinidad — he was born into a world of white imperialist domination. Trinidad was one corner of a world divided, for the most part, between European colonial empires. The world’s three independent black-led nations — Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia — each enjoyed a fragile sovereignty that the Western powers would challenge over the coming years.

George Padmore was one of the most important figures in Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial politics during the twentieth century.

In 1900, the delegates of the First Pan-African Conference convened in London. The conference set out to find solutions to the problems that black people faced across the world. Surveying the global scene, the African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois declared at the end of the conference that the twentieth century’s great issue was “the problem of the color line.”

Africans and people of African descent soon made significant contributions to the Allied war effort during World War I. Many of these people hoped that their service would lead to greater freedoms after the war, only to be faced with further violence, repression, and discrimination. Black dissatisfaction and disillusionment found expression in the massive global popularity of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, as well as the international networks forged through Du Bois’s interwar Pan-African Congresses.

Meanwhile, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 led to a surge in support of communism across the world. For many black people, the Soviet Union stood in stark contrast to the racist exploitation that marked the United States and the European empires.

Padmore and Communism

Nurse left Trinidad to study in the United States in 1924. In 1927, while a law student at Howard University in Washington, DC, he joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA). He adopted the name George Padmore to mask his Communist activities, which included writing for the CPUSA’s Daily Worker and editing its Negro Champion. He quickly made a name for himself, and in 1929 was recruited to work for the Communist International in Moscow.

W. E. B. Du Bois declared at the end of the First Pan-African Conference that the twentieth century’s great issue was ‘the problem of the color line.’

The Sixth Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow during the summer of 1928, set the tone for Communist activism over the following years. It marked a sharp turn in Communist policy away from seeking united fronts with social democrats and toward uncompromisingly revolutionary — and highly sectarian — “Class against Class” politics. The congress also committed the Communist International to support proletarian-led anti-colonial struggles more enthusiastically. As part of this realignment, it launched the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW).

Padmore was a crucial figure in organizing the ITUCNW’s International Conference of Negro Workers, held in Hamburg in July 1930. Its resolutions called for the “immediate evacuation of the imperialists from all colonies” and a revolutionary challenge to the global order:

The spontaneous struggles of the Negro workers for equal wages, against forced labor, segregation and colour bars, etc., must be developed into a conscious struggle against imperialism and the whole system of capitalist and colonial exploitation.

In keeping with Communist “Class against Class” politics, the gathering denounced all reformists, whether black or white.

Shortly after the conference, Padmore moved from Moscow to Hamburg to take up the editorship of the ITUCNW’s journal, the Negro Worker. He also published a short book, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), which was the most thorough expression of his political thought while working for the Comintern. Building on Vladimir Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he elaborated on the role that black workers and peasants played in a global capitalist-imperialist system.

For Padmore, the “Negro toilers,” oppressed along both class and race lines, would be a central plank in a future world revolution. From Marx, he borrowed an aphorism that he would use countless times throughout his life: “Labor in the white skin cannot free itself while labor in the black is enslaved.”

Breaking With the Comintern

However, Padmore’s association with the Communist movement would not last much longer. In August 1933, he published an article announcing his departure from the Negro Worker. The Communist International proclaimed his expulsion in March 1934.

According to the Comintern, Padmore was expelled

for contacts with a provocateur, for contacts with bourgeois organizations on the question of Liberia, for an incorrect attitude to the national question (instead of class unity striving towards race unity) and for not handing over the affairs of the committee on which he had worked.

Padmore, for his part, argued that he found himself “in no conflict with the fundamental principles of our movement,” but accused the Comintern of sacrificing anti-colonial struggles so as to appease the British and French governments.

Padmore accused the Comintern of sacrificing anti-colonial struggles so as to appease the British and French governments.

While Padmore’s claim that the ITUCNW had been “liquidated” was exaggerated, the Comintern’s subsequent pivot to the Popular Front strategy vindicated the essence of his complaints. Spooked by Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviet Union regarded Nazi Germany as an existential threat. It joined the League of Nations (which Lenin had previously characterized as a “thieves’ kitchen”) in September 1934, and signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France in 1935.

The Comintern’s Seventh Congress in 1935 formalized the Popular Front strategy, as the international Communist movement made clear that its priority was making alliances with “democratic” and “progressive” forces in opposition to fascism, regardless of their position on colonialism. Padmore identified in this new Communist position a belief that “the colonial peoples living under the yoke of British, French, and American Imperialisms must forgo their struggle for self-determination and line up in defence of ‘democracy,’ something they have never known.”

Anti-Colonial Networks

By this time, Padmore was living in London, where he would spend most of the rest of his life. He arrived in the summer of 1935, during one of the many great crises of the decade. It had been clear for some months that fascist Italy had designs on Ethiopia, which eventually culminated in an invasion in October 1935 and the capture of Addis Ababa in May 1936.

In London, Padmore joined the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE), a group that his fellow Caribbean activists Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James had founded to campaign for Ethiopia’s continued independence. The black activists who comprised the IAFE understood Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia to be emblematic and symptomatic of a wider capitalist-imperialist system underpinned by racist ideologies.

The future president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was traveling through London when news of the invasion broke. He later remembered feeling “almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally.”

During these early years in Britain, Padmore published How Britain Rules Africa (1936) and Africa and World Peace (1937), while also founding the International African Service Bureau (IASB) out of the remnants of the IAFE during the spring of 1937. He was joined in the IASB by the likes of James, Chris Jones (from Barbados), Jomo Kenyatta (from Kenya), T. Ras Makonnen (from British Guiana) and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson (from Sierra Leone). The organization’s work was greatly supported by Padmore’s British-Jewish partner, Dorothy Pizer.

There was a remarkable continuity in the political thought of Padmore during his Communist and post-Communist days.

There was a remarkable continuity in the political thought of Padmore during his Communist and post-Communist days, as he continued to espouse a Leninist understanding of imperialism, as well as stressing the interdependence of metropolitan and colonial revolutions. The IASB’s “Manifesto Against War” (1938) addressed the following words to the British working class:

Though you have neglected us in the past, today in this hour of common crisis, we want you to know that we Blacks bear you no ill-will. The Imperialists are our common enemy. . . . Our freedom is a step towards your freedom.

Padmore also attacked the Comintern’s distinction between “democratic” powers (like Britain and France) and “fascist” ones (like Germany and Italy), and he began to describe various British and French colonial laws and practices as “fascist” in order to illustrate his point. He was exasperated that so many erstwhile comrades were willing to overlook one form of racially stratified authoritarian rule in order to fight another.

Moreover, he argued, colonialism and fascism shared a root cause: capitalism. As Padmore wrote in Africa and World Peace:

“Democratic” Imperialism and “Fascist” Imperialism are merely interchanging ideologies corresponding to the economic and political conditions of capitalism within a given country on the one hand, and the degree to which the class struggle has developed on the other.

While Communists proclaimed the need for a Popular Front “against fascism and war,” Padmore argued that the fight against fascism and war could only be won through a more direct struggle against capitalism and colonialism — a struggle that the Popular Front strategy had subordinated.

Pan-Africanism

When World War II came, Padmore’s political activities were greatly limited. Most of the IASB’s members had left London, and Padmore himself was afflicted with a throat ailment that prevented him from undertaking any public speaking during the early 1940s. Nevertheless, Padmore, alongside comrades like Chris Jones and the South African writer Peter Abrahams, who arrived in London in 1940, continued to make the case for anti-colonial revolution.

They urged black and other colonized people not to contribute to the war efforts of their European oppressors and to use the war instead as an opportunity to achieve independence. Padmore also became increasingly immersed in the networks of the British Independent Labour Party, whose wartime “Socialist Peace Offensive” owed much to Padmore’s analysis of the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, fascism, and war. At the same time, Padmore was aware that the Communist position was at the mercy of the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and as such shifted dramatically according to events like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

At the war’s conclusion, Padmore played a leading role in organizing the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester.

At the war’s conclusion, Padmore played a leading role in organizing the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, the achievement for which he perhaps remains best known. Eighty-seven delegates — including three future African presidents: Hastings Banda, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah — and around two hundred observers packed into Manchester’s Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall over the course of a week in October 1945.

The congress invoked the lineage of Du Bois’s interwar congresses, while eschewing the bourgeois nature of these earlier gatherings. Abrahams remembered the Manchester congress as “the first truly representative one,” while Padmore called it an “expression of a mass movement.” The meeting’s “Challenge to the Colonial Powers” declared:

We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for private profit alone. We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.

The Bandung Spirit

The movement for the independence of the Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana) occupied much of Padmore’s time and attention after World War II. He played a mentorship role to Nkrumah, who led the country to independence in 1957. Nevertheless, despite this focus on the Ghanaian nation, Padmore — like Nkrumah — was convinced of the need for Pan-African liberation that aimed at achieving socialism and went beyond national borders.

The movement for the independence of the Gold Coast occupied much of Padmore’s time and attention after World War II.

In a 1956 letter to the African-American writer Richard Wright, Padmore explained that his “concentration” on Nkrumah was a result of Nkrumah’s Marxist analysis. He added that leaders like Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria’s future president) were “only the Kerenskys,” in reference to the Russian leader whom the Bolsheviks had overthrown. James remembered that Padmore

spoke ironically of nationalist politicians who were satisfied with “a flag and a national anthem” . . . African independence did not mean for him a mere repetition of the European experience.

As the Cold War deepened, Padmore believed that nonalignment offered the most realistic prospect of meaningful African independence. His last book, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), was written very much in the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference.

Padmore played a strategic Cold War game and exaggerated the historical divergences between Pan-Africanism and Communism. He argued that Pan-Africanism would pose little threat to the West if African leaders like Nkrumah were left to build their own brand of socialism, but that Pan-Africanists might turn to Moscow if the European powers did not grant their colonies independence.

However, despite his continued criticisms of the contemporary Communist movement, Padmore continued to defend the Leninist legacy. He wrote, for instance, that during the Russian Civil War, the “reactionaries failed largely because Lenin’s bold anti-colonial strategy paid such rich dividends.”

Padmore moved to Ghana in 1957 to act as Nkrumah’s adviser on African affairs. However, his time in Ghana was short and frustrating. In declining health, he returned to London, where he died from cirrhosis on September 23, 1959. His ashes were interred at Christiansborg Castle in Accra the following month. A CIA-backed right-wing military coup overthrew Nkrumah’s government in February 1966.

James wrote of Nkrumah: “Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a regime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society.” Padmore was a key figure in the destruction of the old regime and longed to see a new society free from capitalism and imperialism. While Padmore and his comrades failed to create that new society in the twentieth century, his life and works remain instructive if we are to accomplish the task in the twenty-first.

Many commentators see the eccentric Robert F. Kennedy, Jr as an “antiestablishment” alternative to Biden. But he doesn’t even support single-payer health care, the brightest line dividing the centrist Democratic Party from its base.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr visits The Faulkner Focus at Fox News Channel Studios on June 2, 2023 in New York City. (Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)

No elected president has been denied his party’s nomination for a second term since Franklin Pierce in 1856. The last time one even faced a serious primary opponent was 1992, when Pat Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination. And the last time it happened on the Democratic side was when Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

But according to recent polling, only 37 percent of Democrats say they want Joe Biden to seek a second term. His age has a lot to do with that. But so does the state of the country.

Biden came into office surrounded by credulous journalists hailing him as a second FDR. He’s utterly failed to live up to the hype. If anything, the recently concluded debt ceiling negotiations made him look more like a second Bill Clinton — haggling with Republicans about exactly how much to shrink the welfare state. Meanwhile, the United States is becoming ever-more deeply involved in a potentially catastrophic war between Russia and Ukraine.

All of this creates an opening for a primary challenger. Ted Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has stepped in to fill that niche. He’s not the only Democrat running against Biden — Marianne Williamson is too — but in most polls I’ve seen Kennedy is well ahead of her. And it’s not hard to see why he might emerge as Biden’s most prominent challenger. On the one hand, he comes from a lineage of Democratic Party royalty. On the other hand, he’s an edgy antiestablishment “populist.”

Or at least that’s how he’s been widely portrayed — both by commentators who are repulsed by Kennedy’s proclivity for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and those who find his criticisms of the Biden administration compelling. But the populism label is false advertising. On key issues from Israel/Palestine to Medicare for All, RFK, Jr’s politics are a thousand miles away from his branding.

A Bold Truth-Teller?

Is Kennedy really a tribune of ordinary people screwed over by powerful interests? If so, it might be surprising that so many of his biggest fans are on the Right. He recently hung out on Twitter Spaces with union-busting billionaire Elon Musk, and last month a paean of praise for Kennedy appeared in the conservative journal National Review.

The author of the National Review piece, Matthew Scully, calls Kennedy “courageous of heart.” He writes that the mainstream media is hostile to the Kennedy campaign because of RFK, Jr’s “inability to tolerate the intellectual dishonesty he finds in his antagonists.” He says that Kennedy would still be in liberals’ good graces “if only he didn’t have so much integrity.”

Much of this is about Kennedy’s stance on COVID. It’s probably true that he wouldn’t be such a pariah if he weren’t a “skeptic” about vaccines and masking — although the claim that his positions on these issues display honesty and integrity is far more dubious. For example, Kennedy has claimed that there are “mountainous archives of peer-reviewed science supporting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.” But meta–analyses of the research so far show exactly the opposite. Nathan Robinson and Lily Sánchez look at this and a number of other examples in a long article on Kennedy’s COVID conspiracism and conclude that “he’s telling people lies that will endanger their health.”

That would be bad enough if it were his only flaw. Part of the job of a president, after all, is to provide leadership during public health emergencies. But COVID policy isn’t likely to loom as large in the 2024 election, as some voters might care less about whether Kennedy thought they should get vaccinated two years ago than where he stands on health care policy in general right now.

Is Kennedy prepared to pick up where Bernie Sanders left off in 2020, continuing the fight to put an end to the parasitical private insurance industry and institute Medicare for All?

Antiestablishment, or Just Eccentric?

In a recent interview with left-wing journalist Krystal Ball, Kennedy was asked whether, given the hostility to the pharmaceutical companies he often expresses while talking about vaccines, he’d be willing to support a “public option” for pharmaceuticals or maybe even the outright nationalization of the industry. He immediately dismissed this, saying, “Oh I don’t think that’s the right thing,” and switching the subject to how to insulate regulatory agencies from the industry’s influence. He didn’t even pause to explain why it wouldn’t be the right thing. Apparently, he finds the suggestion too outlandish to even consider.

It’s worth noting that Kennedy’s hostility to even providing a public option to compete with privately manufactured medicine puts him to the right of California governor Gavin Newsom, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat who recently announced that California is going to start manufacturing its own insulin later this year.

The California news is one small indication of the way health care policy debates have shifted in the last decade and a half. I can remember watching then president Barack Obama on TV when he first rolled out the Affordable Care Act (the ACA, otherwise known as “Obamacare”) in 2009. Obama said that if the United States was starting its health care system over from scratch, he would prefer a “single-payer” system — what would later became known as Medicare for All. But because we weren’t “starting from scratch,” what Obama actually proposed was a market-based patchwork of regulations.

He never actually explained why the fact that we weren’t “starting from scratch” meant that we can’t switch to single-payer health care now. And it says a lot about the dismal political landscape of 2009 that hardly anyone at the time challenged him on that point.

Obama’s original proposal at least included a public option that would compete with private health insurance plans. This always would have been something much less than a half measure. Americans poor enough to qualify for Medicaid have long had a “public option” — and many doctors don’t take it. A proposal for a more widely available public option is still a proposal for two-tiered health care, and it would leave in place many of the deep injustices of the existing system. People would still stay in jobs they hated, for example, for fear of losing the better insurance they received from their employer.

Even so, a public option would be better than nothing. But Obama abandoned the public option by the time the ACA’s final form took shape.

Debates about abandoning the ACA in favor of Medicare for All dominated the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders argued for Medicare for All, while Joe Biden said he’d veto any such proposal that crossed his desk as president. Biden did, however, say that he’d support a revival of Obama’s “public option” proposal.

Where does RFK, Jr stand on all this?

In the conversation last month with Ball and her cohost Saagar Enjeti, Ball asked Kennedy if he would support “universal health care through a Medicare for All program.” In his response, Kennedy shifted the goalposts in a more moderate direction, redefining “single-payer” health care to mean something more like the Obama/Biden “public option” proposal. “I would say,” he said, “[that] my highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that but to have a single program that is available to everybody.”

Or at least this is what he would support if he were “designing the system from the beginning.” But we aren’t. And he’s not sure enacting such a system now would be “politically realistic.”

Measuring Kennedy’s Foreign-Policy Courage

As bad as that answer is, there are other subjects where Kennedy’s pronouncements are more promising. For example, he’s advocated peace negotiations in Ukraine, and in his best moments he even talks about “unwinding” The United States’ global empire.

Actually doing any such unwinding as president would require tremendous courage and resolve, since he would be facing down fierce opposition from the “intelligence community” and America’s vast and multifaceted military-industrial complex.

How would a hypothetical President Kennedy hold up under such pressure?

We got a significant clue last week, when Kennedy made the mistake of praising Roger Waters — who’s recently been accused of antisemitism due to the rock star’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Whatever legitimate criticisms can be made of Waters, this one is a cheap smear.

Kennedy responded to anger about his praise for Waters not by mounting a principled defense of Palestinian human rights or condemning the weaponization of spurious accusations of bigotry, but by rolling over and playing dead. He met with a prominent supporter of Israel, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, and abjectly apologized — pleading ignorance of Waters’s “antisemitism.” According to Boteach’s summary of the meeting, “Kennedy said his dedication to Israel’s security is unshakable and unalterable”:

I told him his father was one Israel’s greatest friends and we in the Jewish community mourn him till this day. I then asked him to please march with me tomorrow, June 4th, at the annual “Celebrate Israel Parade,” and he immediately agreed.

If Matthew Scully is right that Kennedy is “courageous of heart,” the candidate has a funny way of showing it. But Scully is probably right that Kennedy’s zany position on vaccines is the main thing keeping him out of mainstream liberals’ good graces.

As little as I like Kennedy’s stance on COVID, the way most coverage of his campaign zeroes in on that issue might be obscuring a more mundane reality. On issues ranging from Medicare for All to Palestine, he’s just another mediocre Democrat.

…

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For Donnie Adams, a 52-year-old man from Tampa Bay, Florida, a simple bite had life-altering consequences, as reported by WFLA. In February, Adams experienced a painful, small bump on his right thigh after someone in his family bit him as he tried to stop a fight at a family gathering. Initially, Adams presumed a course of antibiotics and a tetanus shot would be enough to fend off any further damage from the bite. But he was sadly mistaken.

Three days after the bite, Adams found himself almost unable to walk and was rushed to the Florida Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg. Upon arriving at the hospital, Dr. Fritz Brink surgically cut into the bite. Out poured an alarming gray ooze, and Adams’ leg tissue was found to be riddled with necrotizing fasciitis, a severe and often fatal bacterial infection.

Dr. Brink noted that though it is uncommon to contract an infection from a bite, the bacteria in the mouth can create optimal conditions for the germs to grow. What makes this case even more shocking is that Dr. Brink mentioned Adam’s condition would have been even worse if he had waited only one more day for medical help. He could have lost his leg altogether or developed sepsis, a more dangerous infection that can be fatal.

Adams was in the hospital for three weeks and endured six more months of healing and treatment before fully recovering. He attributes his return to a positive attitude, a strict diet, and a multitude of prayers. Adams is now fully content with his heavily scarred leg and blessed to be in a good place.

Given this story, the public can better understand the importance of seeking medical assistance as soon as possible after a seemingly minor injury such as a human bite. Quick action and awareness of potential bacterial infections may prevent life-threatening situations like this one.

Greece’s general election handed a huge victory to the conservative New Democracy, as Syriza shed one-third of its support. With Alexis Tsipras’s party crushing any hope of an alternative to austerity, voters reached for right-wingers promising stability.

Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Syriza party, speaks to party supporters ahead of the second round of the Greek parliamentary elections in Nikaia in Piraeus, Greece on May 31st, 2023. (Nicolas Koutsokostas / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Opinion polls ahead of Greece’s election had generally credited the conservative New Democracy with a strong lead over main rival Syriza. Yet the scale of its success in the May 21 vote nonetheless came as a political shock. Except for the November 1974 elections, which came just four months after the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship, there had never been such a vast distance between the winner and the main opposition party. New Democracy secured a twenty-point advantage over Syriza, as Aléxis Tsípras’s party lost more than one-third of its 2019 electorate. There was also another unprecedented aspect of the result: not since 1974 had the total right-wing and far-right vote exceeded 50 percent, with the far right at over 10 percent — an all-time record — albeit spread over several lists.

New Democracy’s victory was not enough to win a parliamentary majority, and a new election has already been announced for June 25. This second vote will take place under an altered electoral system as the outgoing government reintroduced so-called “reinforced” proportional representation. This system is designed to ease the formation of parliamentary majorities by awarding a bonus of several dozen seats to the leading party. In this case, New Democracy looks all but certain to be able to form a majority.

*in 2023, the most important of these far-right lists is Niki (Victory) with 2.9 percent; in 2012, Golden Dawn won 7 percent (May) and 6.9 (June); in 2015, 6.3 percent; and in 2019, 2.9 percent.

Right-Wing Radicalization

The May 21 vote reflects an undeniable push to the right, which takes many forms. By breaking the symbolic 40 percent barrier, New Democracy has recaptured its position in the pre-2010 two-party system, in which it divided most votes with the social democratic Pasok. The far right has risen to unprecedented levels, for now only partially reflected in parliament due to its fragmentation. Following Golden Dawn’s exit from the political scene, this current underwent a profound ideological and political recomposition. Its dominant poles are no longer linked to the neofascist or neo-Nazi tradition, as Greek Solution and its newcomer rival Niki (“Victory”) are closer to alt-right movements.

In a sort of Greek-style Trumpism, they combine religious references, xenophobic nationalism, and an inclination toward conspiracy theories. Greek Solution’s success owes much to its much-televised charismatic leader Kyriakos Velopoulos, also known for his miracle cream against COVID-19 and for claiming to possess handwritten letters by Jesus Christ. Niki, a formation that had passed all but unnoticed before election night, relies on well-structured networks linked to fundamentalist sectors of the Orthodox Church.

When the hope once associated with the turbulent 2010–15 period vanishes, all that remains are the distressing memories of a violent downgrading of living conditions, the streets filled with shuttered storefronts, and a country left stigmatized and crushed.

Both parties are champions of religious-traditionalist values, expressed in terms of “culture war,” and of nationalist and xenophobic discourses opposing the recognition of the Republic of Northern Macedonia (following the Prespa Agreement) and promote an aggressive rhetoric toward Turkey and the Turkish minority living in Greece. They denounce domestic political elites and the European Union (EU) and hold them responsible for the disaster caused by the memorandums implemented by successive Greek governments. But the far right refuses to call for any kind of break with the EU (or exit from the euro), just proclaiming “Greece first” and cultivating nostalgia for its mythical past greatness.

The denunciation of “illegal immigration” is also an integral part of the new far right’s discourse, but unlike Golden Dawn, it does not occupy a central place, nor is it accompanied by street action — these formations are straightforward electoral machines. Indeed, their discourse on the subject hardly differs from the virulent anti-migrant rhetoric of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy government — and the policy that comes with it, such as systematic illegal pushbacks of migrants.

With racism and xenophobia spreading, the post–Golden Dawn far right is above all tapping into the feelings of humiliation in a brutalized and impoverished society. Its strongholds are in Greek Macedonia, a region strongly polarized over recognition of the neighboring republic of the same name. In these constituencies, the two formations totaled above 10 percent. In eight counties, including the greater Thessaloniki area, their score varied between 12 and 15 percent. In these areas, New Democracy in fact lost ground (by two to three points, and up to six in the county of Pieria), while at the national level it rose by one point.

The Driving Forces Behind New Democracy’s Victory

The Right’s victory results from a combination of factors, three of which played a key role: the delayed effect of Syriza’s capitulation, the economic situation, and its effect on the electorate’s expectations.

After four years in power, New Democracy is reaping the full benefits of Greeks’ resignation to the absence of an alternative. Such resignation is not inevitable, but was methodically cultivated by Syriza following its capitulation to the Troika in summer 2015. The electorate ended up preferring a government fully assuming these policies to one saying “sorry, it wasn’t our choice, but we couldn’t do otherwise” while relentlessly implementing the harsh neoliberal policies prescribed by the July 2015 memorandum.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and leader of the New Democracy party speaks to supporters at the suburb of Peristeri, as part of his pre-electoral campaign, for the upcoming second round of elections of June 25, on May 29, 2023. (Aris Oikonomou / SOOC / SOOC via AFP) (Photo by ARIS OIKONOMOU/SOOC/AFP via Getty Images)

In other terms, when the hope once associated with the turbulent 2010–15 period vanishes, all that remains in the collective consciousness are the distressing memories of a violent downgrading of living conditions, the streets filled with shuttered storefronts, and a country left stigmatized and crushed. What emerges from such a disaster is a desire to turn the page, to repress this painful past and try to live as “normally” as possible. The accumulated resentment is now turned against those considered – quite rightly – to bear the main responsibility for the catastrophe, namely those who had committed themselves to fight and overturn it.

New Democracy surely also benefited from its incestuous connections with the media system, entirely controlled by a handful of oligarchs with close ties to the Greek state — a system which it generously supported with public funds. Its capacity to shape the “public conversation” and to delegitimize, or silence, dissonant voices shouldn’t be underestimated. But the essential reason for its success lies elsewhere: in the relative improvement in the economic situation in 2021–22 and the temporary relaxation of budgetary constraints within the EU due to the pandemic.

Even with expectations for the future collapsing, New Democracy profited from both the improved situation of the already well-off and a more diffuse feeling of stabilization.

Thanks to the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing policy, money creation has exploded in the eurozone, and real interest rates had been negative for a whole period. Public spending increased, mainly to support business, but wage earners and other groups also benefited, albeit unevenly. Buoyed by the tourism industry, which has returned to its pre-pandemic levels, Greek growth rates recovered from the low of 2020 (-9 percent) to reach 8.4 percent in 2021 and 5.9 percent in 2022, among the eurozone’s highest.

Admittedly, the inflation that followed (close to 10 percent in 2022, over 20 percent for most food products and petrol, and over 140 percent for electricity), canceled out the effect of these measures, leading to rapidly rising interest rates, losses in purchasing power and the announcement of a gradual return to fiscal austerity. Unemployment has continued to fall, however, even if it remains double the European average (18 percent in 2019, 12.5 percent in 2022 versus an EU average of 6.2 percent), and the government has taken a number of measures to support household incomes through one-off benefits and “vouchers” to stimulate consumption.

Added to that, for the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector — much bigger in Greece than the European average — inflation has even had positive effects, by triggering an increase in demand. Moreover, for farmers (11.7 percent of the working population in 2021, compared with 1.5 percent in France), higher prices for agricultural products have boosted gross income.

As Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas points out, “in the eyes of many, the Mitsotakis government seems to have stabilized the economic situation in a context of international turbulence.” Of course, not everyone has benefited equally. In 2002, according to a Bank of Greece report, corporate profits jumped by 38 percent, reaching an all-time high. This rise even reached a 72 percent average for the seventeen most profitable companies listed on the stock exchange.

Wages, meanwhile, stagnated (+0.3 percent) and remain the fifth lowest in the EU. At €780 a month, the minimum wage remains 11 percent below its 2012 level, a unique case in Europe. And while it has slightly fallen, the “poverty and social exclusion risk” affects 28 percent of the population (2022 figures), the third highest in the EU, with only Romania and Bulgaria doing worse.

In the four years following its 2019 defeat, Syriza led a toothless opposition, in line with the policies it pursued in power.

All this has a clear impact on the expectations of large sectors of the electorate. An opinion poll this March revealed that 60 percent said they were “rather” (27 percent) or “very” dissatisfied (33 percent) with their economic situation, compared with just 12 percent “satisfied” and 3.5 percent “very satisfied” (24.5 percent “neither”). But among those close to New Democracy, only 27 percent were dissatisfied, compared with 37 percent “rather” or “very satisfied” (36 percent “neither”).

As for the future, 40 percent expect their situation to deteriorate, versus 20 percent who expect it to improve and 38 percent who expect it to remain stable. Among New Democracy sympathizers, the “optimists” number almost 40 percent and those expecting stability 47 percent. By comparison, these figures for Syriza supporters are 10 and 30 percent respectively, with 57 percent expecting their situation to deteriorate.

Even with expectations for the future collapsing, New Democracy profited from both the improved situation of the already well-off and a more diffuse feeling of stabilization. It has thus been able to consolidate its electoral base in middle-class and affluent constituencies (e.g., 46 percent in Athens-North, +0.2 since 2019) and in traditionally conservative regions (except in Northern Greece where it loses ground to the far right), while making significant progress in more working-class areas. In the Athens-West constituencies, it rose by almost 5 percent, and in the emblematic working-class belt of Piraeus it leapt from 30.2 to 37.4 percent.

Syriza’s Downfall

Yet the real key to understanding this election lies in the collapse of Syriza. Its electoral base had held up relatively well in 2019, when it succeeded in remobilizing an electorate around a “useful vote” reflex to counter the Right’s certain return to power. But in the hands of Tsípras and his party, this new mandate — to build an opposition to the Mitsotakis government — suffered a fate comparable to the Greek people’s “no” to the Troika in the July 2015 referendum.

In the four years following its 2019 defeat, Syriza led a toothless opposition, in line with the policies it pursued in power. It voted for 45 percent of the laws proposed by the Mitsotakis government, including some of the most emblematic bills, such as the one authorizing the sale at a symbolic price of the land of the former Ellinikon Airport to the oligarch Yiannis Latsis. Latsis’s project, in association with Qatari capital, is to build an “Athenian Riviera” of gigantic towers housing luxury apartments, casinos, and shopping malls. Syriza also supported vast arms contracts, worth almost €15 billion to date, which led to a doubling of the military budget between 2020 and 2022. Greece is now first-placed in NATO for defense spending relative to GDP, overtaking even the United States (3.9 versus 3.5 percent).

Syriza’s election campaign mirrored this rhetorical opposition. A pale imitation of the Pasok campaigns of the 1980s, which promised “change,” it began with a program of social measures designed to reconcile “realism” and “justice.” The proposals quickly proved to be inconsistent, such as the promise to “protect homes” threatened with repossession due to mortgage repayment difficulties. This is an important issue in Greece, since some three hundred thousand homes are potentially affected in what will undoubtedly be the largest operation ever carried out in Western Europe to transfer small-household property to investment funds.

These are vulture funds based abroad and domiciled in tax havens. In reality, Syriza’s proposal mainly guaranteed the profitability of these funds’ purchases of “nonperforming” mortgages, up to 50 percent of the face value of a security purchased at an average of 3 percent of its initial value. This is hardly surprising, given that it was the Syriza government that facilitated auction procedures and repossessions by transferring the settlement of disputes from the courtroom (where judges’ rulings and militant action usually allowed evictions to be postponed) to an electronic platform and by harshly repressing mobilizations to protect threatened homes.

With its “contract for change” ending in a whisper, Syriza quickly turned to seducing the “centrist electorate,” tempted by a vote for Pasok or even New Democracy. Now appearing as the champion of the “middle class,” whom he regretted having “unjustly overtaxed” when in power, Tsípras built most of his campaign around a double argument.

On the one hand, he proposed a “progressive government,” in essence a coalition with Pasok, without even alluding to a common programmatic base. Pasok immediately and categorically rejected the proposal, thus stripping it of all credibility. On the other hand, he appeared as the defender of the “rule of law” through the incessant denunciation of the phone-tapping scandal, of which Pasok leader Nikos Androulakis was a key target.

Alexis Tsipras proposed a ‘progressive government,’ in essence a coalition with Pasok, without even alluding to a common programmatic base. Pasok immediately and categorically rejected the proposal.

Although perfectly well-founded, these accusations have hardly shaken Mitsotakis, who simply admitted to having “made a mistake,” and even less so an electorate that has few illusions about such methods being standard practice. If they have served any purpose, these criticisms have essentially reinstated Pasok as a regulatory force within the bloc of mainstream parties.

As the ultimate repudiation of the ultimate remnant of left-wing references, Tsípras declared during the campaign that he now supported the maintenance of the militarized fence (a veritable anti-migrant “wall”) around the Evros river, along the Greek-Turkish border. This system enables the Greek authorities to carry out mass illegal deportations of migrants using vigilante methods. To top it all off, Syriza, which has already absorbed a substantial part of the former Pasok nomenclature, decided to include among its candidates people such as the Greek-American shipowner and former Goldman Sachs prodigy Stefanos Kasselakis and the former minister and spokesman for right-wing governments Evangelos Antonaros.

Syriza lost one-third of its 2019 electorate in this election, heading in all directions. According to exit polls, 11 percent went to New Democracy, 10 percent to Pasok, and 8 percent to radical left-wing parties (the Communist Party [KKE] and MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture). The heaviest losses were in the working-class districts of major urban centers, where Syriza’s scores were almost halved (-17.5 percent in the working-class belt of Piraeus, -16 percent in Athens-West, -18 percent in Attica-West). In the regions, a substantial proportion of the electorate in former Pasok strongholds returned to their original party, particularly in Crete, where Syriza suffered losses between seventeen and twenty-one points. These losses also benefited New Democracy, which headed the poll in all counties.

Posters featuring images of Aléxis Tsípras, head of Syriza party, ahead of the general election in Thessaloniki, Greece, on May 16, 2023. (Konstantinos Tsakalidis / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Among young voters (aged seventeen to twenty-four), Syriza continues to fare better than its national average, but is down fourteen points on 2019 (from 38 percent to 24 percent), mainly to the benefit of the radical left (KKE and MeRA25-Alliance for a Rupture gather a total 12.4 percent in this age group) and Zoe Konstantopoulou’s party (6 percent). However, for the first time in Greek history, New Democracy had a clear lead even among young voters (33 percent, nine points ahead of Syriza).

Syriza can no longer claim to be a “party of government,” the axis of a future majority, and faces an existential crisis. A characteristic symptom of the vertigo that seems to have seized the party’s upper echelons: stunned by electoral disaster, Tsípras put in charge of Syriza’s communication team Nikos Marantzidis, the leader of the Greek “revisionist” school of historians, pioneer of an anti-communist rewriting of the history of the Resistance and the civil war, who had himself ferociously attacked the Left, and Syriza in particular, during the 2010–15 period.

In its campaign the Communist Party promised nothing more than to form a ‘strong opposition’ to any government — a line that seemed to resonate with the common sense of this period, i.e. resignation to the lack of an alternative.

Stripped of its original identity and unable to invent a new one, weakly rooted in civil society (it controls no major municipalities and has only a marginal presence in the trade union and in the student movement), entirely centered on the now-devalued figure of its leader, Syriza is entering a period of turbulence. As some party figures suggest, even the question of Tsípras’s succession is no longer taboo…

The KKE’s Recovery and Its Limits

The KKE counts among the winners of the May 21 elections. With 7.2 percent, it gained 1.9 points on its 2019 score and managed to make up most of the ground lost in 2012. Back then, after refusing the unity proposal put forward by Syriza, it lost almost half its electorate (from 8.5 percent in the May 2012 election down to 4.5 percent in the June 2012 election). The KKE is the only left-wing party to retain a militant and popular base. Its trade union front, All Workers Militant Front (PAME), is an important force, although a clear minority in the workers’ movement, and its youth organization has a strong presence on campuses, winning recent student elections on an increased turnout.

In these elections, the KKE could thus appear as a “safe vote” for a historic left-wing force, clearly identifiable and active on the ground. In its campaign it promised nothing more than to form a “strong opposition” to any government — a line that seemed to resonate with the common sense of this period, i.e., resignation to the lack of an alternative.

Starting with a limited but loyal and well-structured electoral base, the KKE was able to make further headway among young voters (7.3 percent among seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds, +3.3 percent compared to 2019; 8.1 percent among twenty-four- to thirty-five-year-olds, +2.1 percent) and particularly among students, where it doubled its previous score (from 4 percent to 8.2 percent). Its results are above 10 percent in the working-class districts of the main cities (11 percent in the working-class belt of Piraeus, 11.5 percent in Athens-West) and in traditional “red” areas (13 percent in Lesbos, 35 percent in Icaria, around 11 percent in certain Ionian islands). This upturn should not, however, conceal that Syriza’s collapse primarily benefits forces to its right, with the KKE garnering a meager 5 percent of this electorate. Even in the working-class districts of Athens and Piraeus, its advance is only a third or a quarter as strong as New Democracy’s rise.

Despite the Communist Party’s often effective union work, its radical rhetoric serves to disguise a practice of political passivity.

Despite its limitations, the KKE’s upturn could bring a note of hope — had this party not been stuck in a sectarian attitude that has kept it away not only from any form of unity of action with other left-wing forces (tirelessly denounced as “crutches of the system”) but also from all the major popular mobilizations of the recent period. For example, the KKE rejected any involvement in the 2011 Occupy the Squares movement, accused of being “petty-bourgeois,” “anti-political,” and a mere “vent.” It also refused to call for a “no” vote in the July 2015 referendum, preferring to promote a null vote using ballots distributed by its activists bearing the party’s slogans. This sectarian line is at one with the systematically cultivated nostalgia for the USSR, and even for Joseph Stalin, whose complete works (in sixteen leather-bound volumes) have been republished by the party’s publishing house and offered for sale at the promotional price of €208.

More strategically, the KKE has rejected the “popular fronts” line, which has earned it a degree of benevolence from certain far-left currents, but only to turn, with a few nuances, to that of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which equated social democracy with “social fascism” and predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism. It also refuses any sort of “transitional demand” considering that “workers’ power” is the preliminary condition to resolve any problem. For instance, after the recent Tempi train disaster, it refused to call for the nationalization of the railways — arguing that whether privately or publicly owned, they would still serve the capitalist system.

In reality, despite often effective union work (particularly in the private sector, deserted by bureaucratized unions), its radical rhetoric serves to disguise a practice of political passivity. Its actions are entirely focused on “building and strengthening” the party and its various fronts (trade union, youth, cultural, etc.), which are simply used as transmission belts for it.

As the recent triumphalist communiqué of its Central Committee indicates, the (relative) electoral success will only confirm the KKE’s sectarian line and nostalgic neo-Stalinism. All the more so as the failure of the only unitary radical left pole, MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture (MeRA25-AR), if confirmed in the second election on June 25, will make the KKE the only force to the left of Syriza represented in parliament.

The Failure of MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture

The causes of MeRA25-AR’s failure in the polls cannot be reduced to a single factor. To analyze them, we need to recall some of the stages in the process that led to the formation of this coalition. Its main component (in electoral terms) is MeRA25, a movement created in 2018 by Yanis Varoufakis as the Greek section of his transnational European movement DiEM25. It managed to pass the 3 percent threshold in the 2019 election and enter parliament.

Like its high-profile leader, this loosely structured movement started as a platform for an unstable mix of societal demands (particularly on minority rights issues), left-wing Europeanism, and the spirit of the anti-Troika struggles of the 2010–15 years. Its 2019 electorate was heterogeneous, with a strong youth component and some success in the working-class suburbs of Athens and Piraeus.

Over the next four years, MeRA25 began to structure itself and, above all, gradually clarify its line in a more radical direction. In a text published last December, Varoufakis called for a broad convergence of radical-left forces on a programmatic basis, reflecting his movement’s leftward turn: acceptance that the EU cannot be reformed, disengagement from NATO and nonalignment, euro exit if necessary, and emphasis on the theme of rupture.

Among the organizations of the radical left, only Popular Unity responded positively to this call, joined by various intellectuals and social movement activists. A coalition was thus formed, called “MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture” and its main slogan in the campaign was “for the first time, rupture.” Armed with an elaborate program of alternative proposals, close in its ambition and content to France Insoumise’s L’Avenir en commun, it sought to demonstrate that “everything can be different.”

The only one of these proposals to receive media attention was the creation of an electronic payment system based on the tax authorities’ digital platform. It would make it possible to bypass the banking system and provide the state with a means of payment without necessarily resorting to a national currency. By opening an account in this system (named Demeter), individuals and small businesses could avoid the exorbitant commissions levied by Greek banks on even the smallest transactions and benefit from a tax rebate, which would serve as a means of remunerating their account.

A flood of alarmist propaganda from New Democracy and the media constantly raised the specter of 2015, the chaos that would allegedly follow euro exit, and the stigmatization of Yanis Varoufakis as the man who wanted to drive Greece into bankruptcy.

Such a scheme — and this was also part of the proposal — could considerably facilitate the transition to the national currency, should the European Central Bank repeat the blackmail on liquidity provision it carried out in 2015. This was all it took to unleash a flood of alarmist propaganda from New Democracy and the media, who constantly raised the specter of 2015, the chaos that would allegedly follow euro exit and the stigmatization of Varoufakis as the man who wanted to drive Greece into bankruptcy. Syriza hastened to follow suit, and the rest of the program’s proposals were entirely ignored.

While this undoubtedly helped to divert the more moderate part of the 2019 electorate, the key to MeRA25-AR’s failure lies elsewhere, namely in the absence of a minimally stable electoral base and the dizzying turnover of its electorate between 2019 and 2023. MeRA25-AR only attracted 18 percent of its own 2019 electorate, with 42 percent turning to New Democracy, 27 percent to other radical left formations (the KKE and the far left), and 13 percent to former Syriza parliamentary president Zoe Konstantopoulou’s party. Gains came mainly from the electorate of Syriza and of other radical left formations and even from New Democracy.

Despite its unitary orientation, the coalition led by Varoufakis proved insufficiently competitive fighting on the terrain of the radical left, where it chose to position itself unambiguously. But the turn to the Left was also announced too late to be convincing. It was insufficiently rooted in militant practices — only Popular Unity offered a (small) organizational base. Its cost proved thus higher than its benefit. Credible when it emanates from a strong movement like France Insoumise, the attempt to embody an alternative proposal for rupture appeared too heavy a burden for a formation fighting for its parliamentary survival.

In a context of overall retreat for the Left, the KKE seemed a safer bet as an opposition force, especially as Varoufakis’s discourse may have seemed too technocratic and abstract to the popular classes. MeRA25-AR fell 0.8 percent on average compared to 2019, but suffered the heaviest losses in working-class districts (-1.5 percent in the belt of Piraeus, -1.3 percent in Peristeri, and -1.8 percent in Aspropyrgos, two working-class municipalities in the greater Athens area). It proved more resilient among young people (from 6 percent down to 5.1 percent), particularly among students (stable at 6 percent), but fell behind the KKE even in this category.

The Surprising Rise of Zoe Konstantopoulou

MeRA25-AR, and the radical left more generally, have suffered from the rise of Course of Freedom, the party of Zoe Konstantopoulou, a renowned lawyer and short-lived president of parliament during the first Syriza government in 2015. This party, founded in 2016, relies entirely on the charisma of its leader and on a discourse initially positioned as “left populist.”

Its main inspiration was French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 2016–17 campaign and, in particular, its patriotic and republican overtones. In 2018, in a context of heightened nationalism around the issue of Macedonia, Konstantopoulou decided to join the protest rallies against the Prespa Agreement negotiated by the Syriza government and recognizing the neighboring state as the “Republic of North Macedonia.”

These rallies were massive, particularly in northern Greece, but they were also clearly dominated by the far right and proclaimed the refusal to recognize any state bearing the name of Macedonia, considered as the exclusive property of Greece. This nationalist turn led to a rupture in the already tenuous relations between Konstantopoulou and the radical left.

In 2019, Course for Freedom had obtained 1.5 percent and failed to enter parliament. However, it managed to position itself as the reference pole for an emerging constellation of small “sovereignist” formations, combining nationalism, refusal of the right-left divide, and anti-Troika and “anti-system” rhetoric. The May 21 vote gave this approach a further boost.

Konstantopoulou’s simple, straightforward language, acquired over many years of court practice, enabled her to successfully triangulate anti-system themes from the repertoires of  both the “Right” and the “Left”: nationalist slogans (on Macedonia or relations with Turkey) mixed with references to the struggles of the 2010–15 period (notably on the debt issue); defense of the “identity of the Greek nation,” but also insistence on her status as the only woman leader of a Greek political party, with a focus on the issues of sexist and sexual violence and attacks on the LGBTQ community; flattering opponents of vaccination, but also defending public rights and freedoms and denouncing police repression and state violence against refugees; and combining a rhetoric of virulent rejection of all politicians with a strong legalism and a constant reminder of her institutional status as former president of parliament.

The May 21 vote belied the expectations of those who thought that the previous elections marked the consolidation of a two-party system.

Voting results and exit poll data show that the composition of the Course for Freedom electorate reflects the “triangulation” of its leader’s discourse. It includes a component coming from the Right, even from the far right, as suggested by the fact that it captured nearly 9 percent of the electorate who considered voting for the successor party to Golden Dawn (which a court ruling prevented from running). But it also managed to attract 13 percent of MeRA25’s 2019 electorate.

The overall profile is nevertheless sociologically and spatially “left-wing.” Course for Freedom achieved its best results in the working-class suburbs of Athens and Piraeus (4 percent in Athens-West, 4.3 percent in the Piraeus belt, with peaks of 5 percent in the most working-class municipalities). On the other hand, in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods, scores were well below the national average (1.3 percent in Filothei, 1 percent in Ekali). The formation also made inroads among young voters, overtaking MeRA25-AR among seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds (5.9 percent versus 5.1 percent).

This “sovereigntist” profile was thus able to attract a significant proportion of the anti-system vote and compete effectively with the KKE and, above all, MeRA25-AR as a way to sanction Syriza while also opposing the other mainstream parties. The first post-electoral polls suggest that Konstantopoulou’s success will be amplified in the June 25 second election and again allow her into parliament.

Back to the Old World?

As political scientist Yannis Mavris points out, the May 21 vote belied the expectations of those who thought that the 2019 elections marked the consolidation of a two-party system, comparable to that of the 1981–2009 period, with Syriza taking the place previously held by Pasok. The first to submit to this fallacious premise were surely Tsípras and the Syriza leadership, who believed that the popular electorate and youth were definitively won and that they could safely engage in the “race to the center” to win over the “moderate” middle- and upper-class electorate.

In reality, if the two-party system is in retreat (the Syriza–New Democracy total fell from 71 percent to 61 percent), it is exclusively to the detriment of the “center-left” pole, opening the way for a sharp rightward turn in the overall political scene. At present, the only forces capable of inflicting losses on New Democracy are far-right ones. Greek Solution and, in all likelihood, Niki now seem certain to be represented in the parliament that emerges after June 25, giving the far right an unprecedented institutional weight.

Another way of reading these results is to see them as the return of the “old world,” that of the political forces swept aside by the popular uprising of 2010–15 and the historic elections of May and June 2012. New Democracy is again reaching the scores of its heyday, Pasok is resurrected from the dead, and the KKE is nearly back to its former position and, for the first time since the fall of the dictatorship (with the exception of a brief period between 1993 and 1996), it can even claim to monopolize the institutional representation of the radical left. The breakthrough of a party such as Course for Freedom should also serve as a warning: it may well be that (anti)political confusion fills the void left by the failure to build a unitary and credible pole of the radical left.

Once again, we can only observe that the betrayals of the Left pave the way to a reactionary restoration and a dynamic of radicalization on the Right.

It remains to be seen to what extent the June 25 vote will confirm or reverse these trends. After all, the ground on which the Greek political system rests has proved more fragile than expected.