It brings to mind the Italian “hot autumn” — that of 1969, in the aftermath of the “Sixty-Eight” — which marked the beginning of the strategy of tension, with the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan.
We recently wrote that there is an air of a strategy of tension across Europe
One should not believe that everything has been fabricated from scratch, but that it is being manipulated and exploited — yes, that much is true.
We will have to take a major leap forward in our understanding of reality because, in this transitional era of crisis, conflicts are multiplying, and those being fought within each camp, and even within each party — because they are connected to competing centers of interest that are also subject to different degrees of foreign dependence — are far more serious and significant than those staged between the various “broad coalitions,” whether of the right or the left.
Sweden provides evidence of this: its center-left coalition, which has just won the elections by a hair, is the sum of three different and irreconcilable political forces.
In short, this is a time of protests, activism, various forms of populism, heated rhetoric without real solutions, and erratic, frantic policymaking. It is therefore a time for manipulators — and they, too, must be reckoned with.
This applies in many different settings.
Here is a telegraphic reflection on what the left is currently staging in France and Spain
In France, the student protest is an expression of the times. It reveals the presence of a teaching body that is numerically inadequate and very poorly qualified, dealing with young people spoiled by a systemic welfare culture. The latter’s demands are rather childish: they want smaller classes and more funding for education (from where?), but not as an investment in quality, because they also demand fewer commitments and less selection.
The surprisingly violent protests have been joined by the apparatuses of Mélenchon’s party, which is pursuing the chimera of social warfare by bringing together young people and the banlieues (Islamogauchisme) and the CGT (the communist trade union). They are copying the 1968 model. But, unlike then, the government has chosen a hard line. Some students, especially when isolated, have literally been beaten to a pulp by riot police. The Élysée wants to reach next spring’s presidential election by feeding fears, with the need for a turn toward order: between Mélenchon, who risks failing to make it to the runoff after his latest moves, and Marine, who should reach it with a substantial lead, it is banking on a reassuring third candidate.
In 1968, in several countries, the national-revolutionary opposition gave rise to a different and parallel protest, which at times even intersected with the red one. It represented an alternative that established a current that found its place in the student world and subsequently fostered a generational continuity around the cause.
For the moment, I have not seen any expression of an alternative student activism opposed to the prevailing one, one that could draw on the esprit de corps and generational solidarity shared by many students who nevertheless do not identify with the anthropology or the positions of the left-wing agitators.
And this is a pity, because such an absence could have significant consequences for future popularity.
In Spain, the protest has a different motivation, one that is much more valid in itself, beyond its exploitation
With democracy, which dismantled the Francoist system, real-estate and housing speculation expanded to an extreme degree. There is now a banking oligopoly over property ownership, speculation is running wild, and with it evictions, not infrequently unjustified and brutal, such as that of the eighty-seven-year-old Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid.
Sánchez, who, together with Macron and Giorgia Meloni, is one of the few rulers to possess political intelligence and character, is using the street protests that erupted around Maricarmen’s case to make people forget Ceuta and to lose the elections — provided, of course, that he does not perform miracles in the next month and a half — not over the crisis that would destroy him, while instead preserving the leadership of a left that would find itself in opposition to a difficult PP–Vox coalition, which he believes would not last long.
The immediate reason for the snap election was the defeat of the government decrees against the “vulture funds,” on which the governing majority had never voted as a united bloc.
Since in this case it is above all a matter of political tactics, there is no room for an alternative component that could make the demands of the streets its own.
Nevertheless, there is an opportunity
to promote what was Franco’s “Política de Vivienda,” entrusted directly to the Falange, which had provided virtually all Spaniards with housing.
It was democracy, with its sum of cynical self-interests, that overturned everything.
What today’s left-wing rebels are demanding — rather poorly, moreover — is nothing compared with what Spaniards were guaranteed for a good half-century.
Republican flags can be seen flying everywhere among the demonstrators, those with the purple stripe and without the symbols of Spain. Someone should teach these spirited young people that it is precisely the insidious and gradual return of that Anti-Spain that produced speculation and, consequently, the vulture funds that were supporters of the Republic.
There’s a very different flag to fly when it comes to housing rights!
Be that as it may, each of these scenarios demonstrates a failure — and it is not the failure of one side, but that of the human, moral, and political architecture of anti-fascism.