Taking power in a crisis: France’s green cities
In June 2020, after a drawn-out process punctuated by the peak of the health crisis, Green lists excelled in France’s municipal elections. They are now at the head of the executive in some of France’s largest cities, including Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Tours. In…
Northern Uproar
For some activists on the Labour left, municipal politics may now offer a constructive outlet and an opportunity to play a useful political role by using town halls as a base for action and agitation, linking up with trade unions, tenants’ unions, social movements and…
Grassroots group eyes Belgrade on route to toppling Serbian President
A grassroots movement in the Serbian capital has its eye on 2022 local elections as the next turning point in a battle to bring down the country’s ruling Progressive Party and President Aleksandar Vucic. In power since 2012, the Progressives have been stung by an…
Interview with Ethan Earle about the Gilets Jaunes and French democracy
New focus of protest has clearly emerged in France in these past years—bringing together Nuit Debout and the Gilets Jaunes, hospital and health care workers, pensioners and trade unionists, climate justice activists, Black Lives Matter activists. This locus has the attention of Macron, and of…
Turmoil in South Africa’s capital city points to the need to overhaul local democracy
The City of Tshwane, home to South Africa’s government and foreign diplomats, has been rocked by political turmoil for nearly a year. Coalition arrangements were first made after the 2016 municipal elections which finally collapsed earlier this year. This jockeying for power by the parties…
A green wave and a citizen slap in the face
The results of the French municipal elections are a call on our elected representatives, civil society and citizens to mobilize in favour of the necessary democratic, ecological and social transformation of our societies. Because our representative democracy has never been so out of breath. Because…
Municipalist politics and the specter of emancipation
In the past decade there has been a rise of new politics that have stemmed from different political backgrounds and contexts, and although they sometimes differ significantly, each was a manifestation of the “specter of emancipation” that was haunting the world. However, this emancipatory push…
In the wake of Sunday’s “green wave”
On Sunday the 28th of June, voters across France went to the polls to decide the municipal governments of 4.820 communes, including all of the country’s largest cities. Looking beneath the surface, all these victories were undergirded by widely differing political constellations. Despite a few…
New municipalism as space for solidarity
How can new municipalism develop a progressive localism and forge translocal solidarities? This article considers municipalism as a form of progressive localism, which on the one hand connects the local and the global through translocal solidarity, and on the other scales-up and becomes an alternative…