THE revolutionary tide is sweeping through the world as workers, youth and the oppressed rise up against an international capitalist system that offers no future except poverty and wars.
This weekend saw a massive defeat for US imperialist plans to dominate the Americas following the resounding defeat of president Donald Trump’s puppet candidate in the elections for Brazilian president.
Far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro was confidently predicted to defeat the incumbent left-wing Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
In the first round of voting, Lula narrowly lost to Bolsonaro – the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro currently serving 27 year in jail after his conviction for plotting a coup.
The first round held a record abstention rate of 21.08% which disproportionately affected Lula supporters who tend to live further from polling stations.
The second round, however, saw a massive turnaround with Lula receiving 4.4 million votes more than Bolsonaro.
The reason for this turnaround was down to what commentators are calling ‘Lula’s army’ of young people mobilising themselves and ensuring that Trump’s preferred candidate suffered a humiliating defeat.
It was a stunning defeat, not just for Bolsonaro but for the Trump administration which had worked aggressively to put him in power.
Lula’s victory severely damaged Trump’s desire for US imperialism to dominate Latin America. Brazil was not alone in recording a seismic political upheaval this weekend.
In Serbia, the country’s strongman leader Aleksandar Vucic was forced to concede defeat on Sunday in an election that pitted him and his right-wing party against a student-led opposition.
For two years, students and youth have led the fight against government corruption sparked by the tragic deaths of 16 people killed in 2024 when a concrete canopy collapsed at a train station.
This set off a wave of youth protests that blamed the collapse on high-level corruption and cronyism.
From these protests sprung a movement that attracted the support of Serbian workers and led to the stunning victory on Sunday.
From Latin America and the Balkans, the wave of revolutionary uprisings, led by youth, is spreading rapidly across Europe.
In France, a million workers and youth defied president Emmanuel Macron’s decree last week that only one demonstration in Paris would be permitted.
In Italy, protests spread across the country on Saturday with clashes between demonstrators and police in major cities.
Thousands took to the streets of Rome, Turin, Bologna and Milan demonstrating against war, the rising cost of living crisis and the massive deterioration of school conditions.
In Spain, a protest camp in Madrid has become the centre of a mass movement against the country’s acute housing crisis.
The movement that began on September 26 after police evicted an 87 year old pensioner from her longtime home in turn sparked mass protests across the country forcing prime minister Pedro Sanchez to call an early general election on November 29.
This revolutionary upsurge of workers, with youth in the lead, has swept Europe from France, Italy Spain and Portugal across through to Albania, Greece, Germany, Austria, Serbia and Ireland in recent weeks.
Trade union leaders are striving to contain the revolutionary tide sweeping across Europe and the world by limiting action to one-day general strikes.
The revolutionary nature of this crisis demands the building of a new leadership amongst workers that is prepared to call for general strikes to bring down the capitalist governments and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
