It seems pretty clear now that even the leaders of the Leave campaign in the UK’s referendum on the European Union didn’t believe that Brexit could win. UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage not once but twice conceded a narrow defeat on election night before the results for Sunderland indicated a much bigger Leave vote than predicted […]
05 Oct
Following on from Part 1 and Part 2 of my analysis — which were first published in abridged form as a single article at Jacobin Magazine — I bring the Greek tragedy up to date with why the Syriza breakaway Popular Unity failed its first electoral test, as well as delving deeper into the dead-end of trying […]
22 Sep
This is the second of three parts of my analysis of the Greek radical Left debacle. Part 1 focused on the lead-up to the referendum in July. Part 3 will focus on the most recent developments, including the election result, and respond to some criticisms of my argument that have emerged within the Marxist Left. While my prediction that Tsipras […]
21 Sep
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The results of the Greek election, with Syriza again able to rule with the help of the hard-right nationalists of ANEL (the Independent Greeks), represents a further blow to the radical Left political project in Europe. Syriza now has an electoral mandate to implement the austerity deal it agreed with the Eurogroup, and which saw […]
04 Jul
A selection of KEVIN OVENDEN’s live posts from the massive No protest in Athens, 3 July 2015 Rally for the No side this evening — various different forces calling it — in Syntagma Square, central Athens. The rally will be big and militant. But please do not over-read the size of it and so on. […]
02 Jul
SPECIAL DISPATCH FROM ATHENS BY KEVIN OVENDEN Kevin is the author of a forthcoming Pluto Press book on Greece and Syriza, Escaping the Labyrinth The streets of Athens are calm tonight. The political atmosphere, intense. I joined a patient queue in the Galatsi area to withdraw a few euros from the ATM. We smiled and […]
13 Apr
Two hostile intersecting axes are forming against the Syriza-led government in Athens. Together they comprise an increasingly cohered effort to destabilise and defeat the government, to usurp the democratically expressed hope of the Greek people to break from the iron cage of austerity. The first axis, from without, has been evident since before the 20 […]
20 Mar
PHIL BUTLAND, Berlin (with the input of KEVIN OVENDEN, Athens) reflects on the Blockupy protest in Frankfurt this week and whether we are at a “Prague moment” opening up a new sequence of anti-capitalist and international mobilisations Just four days ago, I* was reporting with hope about a few hundred people demonstrating in Berlin for Greece […]
12 Mar
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Within a year of its creation, Podemos became the main opposition party in Spain. Analyses of its rapid rise have centred on its unorthodox and ambitious political approach and the different forms of participatory democracy practised (however imperfectly). Less has been said about the relation between the Podemos phenomenon and the Spanish context of major […]
12 Mar
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KEVIN OVENDEN returns to Athens for the first in a new series of posts at Left Flank. It is worth reading in full yesterday’s speech by Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras on the incendiary issue of German war reparations to Greece. The issue was not resolved upon the unification of the German state in 1990 […]
26 Jun
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