On Gaza, Burnham still talks only of the ‘disproportionate’ character of ‘what has happened’. This is the language of 2023. It fails to recognise that almost three years of deliberate Israeli destruction have inflicted appalling death, hunger and suffering. Gaza contains the world’s largest population of child amputees, and a new UNICEF study shows that the genocide has imprinted itself in children’s bodies, with one in eight showing signs of stunted growth.

Few apart from Israel’s apologists now doubt the genocide. According to polls, half the British public recognise it, despite media suppression of the term itself. Spain, the only other social-democratic government in Europe, has recognised that this is what is happening, as have Burnham’s cabinet ally, Louise Haigh, and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. The PM needs to catch up.

The terminology is important. It captures the defining features of Israel’s policy: that it has, in the language of the Genocide Convention, ‘deliberately inflicted’ on the Palestinian national group ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction’ in Gaza. The Convention binds the UK to ‘prevent and punish’ genocide when the risk is evident, not years later when a court finally delivers a ruling. This duty was triggered in January 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a ‘plausible risk’ and deemed it necessary to order Israel not to commit genocide.

Now, for more than thirty months, Britain has not only failed in its duty but has remained actively complicit in the crime. The ministers, civil servants and commanders involved in negotiating the RAF’s aid to Israel could even be charged for it. Complicity has been fostered by the Labour Party’s longstanding support of Zionism, the Labour right’s reliance on pro-Israel donors, and its weaponisation of antisemitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The costs are now apparent in the rubble of Gaza, as well as in Britain’s changing electoral map.

The UK must belatedly fulfil its duty to prevent genocide and make reparation for the policies of the Rishi Sunak and Starmer governments. The genocide is ongoing and nothing has been done to aid the survivors. Meanwhile, Israel continues to expand its control of Gaza and disobey the nominal restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s ‘peace deal’.

Recognising the genocide means that normal international relations can no longer apply to Israel; the situation demands nothing less than a repudiation of the UK’s alliance with it. The UK-Israel Military Cooperation Agreement, signed by Boris Johnson in 2020, under whose secretive terms Britain has aided the genocide, must be cancelled. Normal economic and cultural relations should be suspended. Members of the IDF who have taken part in the genocide should be denied entry to the UK, and visa-free access for Israelis should be ended to enable this.

A coherent anti-genocide policy would certainly require the mother of all U-turns from Burnham. He has retained several ministers in senior roles who bear direct responsibility for the worst policies under Starmer. The temptation will be strong to keep any shift within the bounds of the symbolic and performative.

But that approach has already been tried: Starmer criticised settler excess, banned some weapons sales and sanctioned individual ministers, with little to no impact in winning back former Labour voters. It is betting a lot on Burnham’s communication skills to believe that this will work a second time. The Palestine Action ban also continues to be a major embarrassment. Almost every Labour MP voted for it, with only nine against, even though seven in ten Labour members opposed it. Unless the Supreme Court rules the ban unlawful, Burnham will have to grasp this nettle and lift it.

Labour continues to focus on intensifying violence and displacement in the West Bank, yet its response there seems to be an escalation of Starmer’s token sanctions. Labour Friends of Israel is lobbying against even this, on the grounds that sanctions on settlements will become sanctions on Israel.

But this is precisely what the sanctions should be doing: targeting the occupying state, not just the settlements it has put in place or the individual extremist politicians at its head. The illegality of the occupation was confirmed in 2024 in a comprehensive judgment by the ICJ. The Labour government, despite the faux support for international law of Starmer and his attorney general Richard Hermer, has still to respond to this ruling. A key test of the reset is whether Burnham will rise to the judgment’s challenge.

At the beginning of 2026, Labour might have worried that an anti-Israel stance would seriously undermine Britain’s relationship with the USA. But the fallout of the Iran War means that all bets are off; Israel is increasingly criticised on all sides of US politics. Burnham might reflect that the war into which Israel bounced Trump — and which Starmer aided even while claiming not to (assistance Burnham has apparently decided to continue) — is a major contributor to Britain’s continuing cost of living crisis.

Israel is increasingly the weakest link in both far-right politics and the USA’s imperial network. Breaking with it is not only the right thing to do for Palestine; this could also be how Britain finally begins to move away from its decades-long dependence on the United States. If Burnham and Miliband cannot execute this shift, the Palestine movement, the Green Party, and the left must make it happen.

The forces harnessing this populist moment in Germany are not exactly new — the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was founded in 2013, far-left Die Linke in 2007 — but they have been given a new lease on life after years on the margins of parliamentary politics. This is particularly the case for the AfD, which is still subject to the political ‘firewall’ that all other parliamentary parties including Die Linke have erected around it, but is currently polling in first place nationally and on the cusp of winning a majority in some eastern states, where protest parties of different persuasions have traditionally been most successful.

At least for now, the AfD seems to be the first address for German voters looking to express frustration with the country’s political and economic situation. For years, exit polls have shown the AfD topping the polls among workers and the unemployed, whose economic anxiety has been ignored by the political mainstream. Like far-right parties practically everywhere, it is particularly strong among lower-middle-class men in rural areas. Yet it is increasingly gaining support among industrial trade unionists, at least some of whom have responded to external economic threats by turning inwards, seeking to protect their jobs by excluding potential competitors from the job market. Although its organised presence within the labour movement remains meagre, at least in demographic terms, the AfD is now Germany’s leading workers’ party.

Ironically, the AfD began as something quite different: a Eurosceptic formation founded in opposition to bailouts for Germany’s Southern European neighbours. Populist, perhaps, but certainly not popular. Indeed, the early AfD was eminently middle class and its activist core remains overwhelmingly so to this day. Its stunning success, then, has less to do with a supposedly populist agenda (as critics are keen to point out, the AfD’s economic programme remains well within the neoliberal mainstream) than with a mixture of deft opportunism and blind luck. As xenophobia began to spread in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘summer of migration’, the AfD quickly positioned itself as the anti-migrant party. When protests against lockdowns broke out during the pandemic, it again pivoted in time to become the voice of Covid-scepticism. The anti-migrant and anti-lockdown waves have long since subsided, but the AfD — now shorn of its more moderate layers — has endured, and is now stronger than ever.

Precisely because of its exclusion from government and polite society, the AfD appears to millions as the only truly authentic voice of protest. The question is whether the party, on track to win a majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt later this year, might become a victim of its own success: moving from an insurgent outsider to an established governing force. An AfD-led government is certainly an alarming prospect, particularly in a part of the country where its most reactionary elements dominate, but it would not mean the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany, as some alarmist voices tend to imply. The populist decade has already given us several examples of what the European far right in power actually looks like. The governments of Giorgia Meloni in Italy or (until recently) Viktor Orbán in Hungary succeeded in implementing regressive policies, but were — much like their counterparts on the populist left — domesticated by the institutions in which they operated. More importantly, they can, and almost certainly will, be voted out sooner or later, though it is less clear what will come next.

Could Germany’s belated populist turn therefore come to benefit the left? That is hard to say. Die Linke’s path to power has been rocky and winding. Teetering on the brink of political oblivion two years ago, the party has undergone a remarkable rejuvenation under the leadership of Ines Schwerdtner, once the editor of the German edition of Jacobin magazine. Today, it is gaining ground among disaffected centre-left voters and young people in urban areas, but has struggled to win back its traditional eastern electorate from the far right, and has made few inroads among working-class constituencies. As was the case for left populism in the rest of Europe, the resurgence in Germany remains largely restricted to downwardly mobile segments of the professional middle classes. Breaking out of this pattern will be key if Die Linke is to avoid the same fate as Corbynism or similar experiments that came to ruin.

It will also depend on whether the party can learn from the experiences of the last decade. In their book The Populist Moment (2023), Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello describe this trend among left parties as an attempt to ‘rethink mobilisation for an age of demobilisation; to organise for an age of disorganisation’. But while populism has had distinct success in mobilising an electorate, at least sporadically, long-term organising has proven far more difficult. In countries like Spain and Greece, where the left rode the populist wave into government but lacked corresponding structures on the ground, this project is now for all intents and purposes dead.

Schwerdtner for her part prioritises ‘building a house of stone’, meaning a solid organisation rooted in workplaces and communities, as opposed to a short-term electoral focus. But come September, Die Linke stands a good chance of taking first place in the Berlin elections and coming under pressure to join a cross-party coalition to exclude the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. There are strong arguments for doing so: Berlin is desperately in need of public investment after years of austerity, and it is hard to see any government without Die Linke making the necessary expenditures. As with Zohran Mamdani in New York, the party hopes to turn the city into a beacon of hope for the rest of the country, showing that democratic socialists can not only govern reliably, but improve the lives of their constituents in a meaningful, lasting way.

At the same time, assuming government responsibility — particularly in a poor state like Saxony-Anhalt, where there is little fiscal room for manoeuvre — risks tainting the party as part of the rotten establishment that sparked the populist wave in the first place. As was the case with Syriza in Greece, Die Linke’s foray in government could ultimately end up bolstering the far-right’s reputation as the only ‘real’ opposition and accelerating the country’s rightward drift. Schwerdtner surely had this dynamic in mind when she spoke of taking ‘difficult decisions’ at Die Linke’s party congress back in June. 

Whether or not the AfD or Die Linke find themselves in government later this year, the structural crisis of the German economic model will not be resolved anytime soon. Bearing that in mind, we can expect the populist moment to stretch far into the future, with all the political unpredictability that entails. For Germany’s — and Europe’s — sake, left populism needs to succeed where it failed in the 2010s. That means combining immediate electoral priorities, to restore confidence in the left as a force that can wield effective power, with the slower work of cadre-building and coordinating among our base. These are the foundations on which a house of stone must rest. Without them, parties like Die Linke will, in their desire to halt the advance of the far right at any cost, repeat the same strategic missteps which have undermined their projects in years past.