It’s a special year that’s coming to an end. An exercise which saw many benchmarks shattered. At the international level, first of all. The war in the Middle East has reached terrible heights. The Jewish state today finds itself accused of genocide by a whole series of international institutions and NGOs.
The inability of Western democracies to assume their responsibilities marks a breaking point. By practicing double standards – by being rightly firm with Russia, guilty of warlike imperialism in Ukraine, but by blindly supporting Israel in its military radicalization – they are shattering the UN structure and the values universal principles of democracy and human rights.
We are witnessing a shift in the world. The end of multilateralism in favor of relationships based solely on particular interests. And dynamiting international law has a price. When Donald Trump announces that he wants to make Canada a bantustan of the United States, annex Greenland and invade Panama to regain control of the canal, he behaves like Vladimir Putin.
This change in the world is also ideological, 2024 saw a marked surge in the far right. In France, with the National Rally which succeeded in subjugating the classic bourgeois right, against a backdrop of political and institutional implosion. An extreme right-wing that crosses most European democracies as well as the United States, with the improbable return of the Orange president.
In Switzerland too, it is an alliance between the liberal right and the Udecist far right which makes the law in Parliament. Result: gifts to the rich, the army and the nuclear lobby, all paid for by the poorest.
This moral and political disintegration requires both resistance – it is important not to give an inch of ground in the face of fascist gangrene – and ideological and cultural reconquest. A new world must be invented and built.
Let our readers be assured of this, The Mail will contribute to this building which can only be collective. We do not intend to give up. The challenges are numerous: the climate crisis – 2024 has once again broken heat records -, social injustices – the Mazan rape trial highlighted the weight of patriarchy – and economic – inequalities are widening at great speed. v.
But recent votes have also shown that nothing is set in stone. The arrogance of business and the world of money can be defeated. We saw this with the thirteenth AVS pension, accepted by the people against the advice of bourgeois reaction. Or when refusing the automobile rush, to the detriment of the climate, defeated at the polls. A useful reminder of a principle of the workers' movement which says that “History does nothing, it is man, real and living, who does everything.”
