Parts of the movement had previously assumed that climate science could speak for itself, and that enough public awareness would precipitate political change. The task was to leverage popular power to appeal to the state and private capital. This produced campaigns centred on the Green New Deal, a framework that revived Keynesian stimulus policies to turbocharge investment in renewables.

The mainstream British climate movement relied on vague appeals to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ towards the planet. Yet this universalism papered over the role of imperialism in driving the climate crisis and its uneven effects across gendered, racialised and class lines. Demands to protect ‘our future’ from ecological disaster elided those in the Global South for whom that future had already arrived. The GND was a reflection of this narrow politics, based on national emissions targets and green jobs within Britain.

This solely national perspective opened the door to the strange convergences we see today: militaries commended for adopting sustainable aviation fuel reforms while remaining some of the largest contributors to the climate crisis and so-called ‘green transitions’ powered by extractivism of critical minerals in the Global South. A truly eco-socialist agenda, resting on democratisation, decommodification and decolonisation, was meanwhile pushed to the margins. The movement’s strategy of pressuring the state for concessions suffered a further setback when Keir Starmer scaled back his major green investment strategy and energy companies doubled down on profits from oil and gas.

Partly owing to its middle-class character and ‘post-material’ concerns, the British climate movement began to stagnate in the 2020s, becoming little more than a single-issue campaign. It missed a crucial opportunity to develop working-class power through an expansive green program. Its isolation from national liberation struggles in the Global South, and its failure to recognise the root causes of the climate crisis in capitalism and imperialism, echoed a larger structural weakness on the left.

This stagnation was deepened by surveillance, criminalisation and policing. Groups like Just Stop Oil were heavily repressed. The external assault combined with internal challenges: professionalisation, cults of leadership, unsustainable organising methods. Many young people radicalised by the climate crisis were absorbed into professionalised spaces, while grassroots collectives failed to translate the mass demonstrations into long-lasting structures capable of tackling the task at hand.

Covid-19 also exposed the fundamental limitations of a strategy based on demanding concessions from the state. As Andreas Malm has noted, capitalist states are repearedly proved incapable of anything more than ‘treating the symptoms’ of planetary crises ‘once they had blasted through the bodies of populations’. But even that seems generous: many Global North states preferred to let the pandemic run riot rather than risk the most minor disruption to accumulation.

Co-opted and hollowed out, the climate movement was powerless to resist the sequence of events that followed. The US, Europe and Britain abandoned meagre commitments to climate action, turning instead to a programme of rearmament unprecedented in the twenty-first century. Economic stagnation created space for climate denialism and fossil fuel accelerationism to take hold in British electoral politics, accelerating the rise of the far-right. Labour governments, first under Starmer and now under Burnham, have rowed back on climate commitments in pursuit of the illusory goal of ‘growth’.

October 7th crystallised existing contradictions both across the left and within the climate movement. Some climate organisations recognised that the same systems of fossil fuel extraction and militarism driving the climate crisis were also fuelling the genocide in Gaza; but the political space to make those demands was highly restricted.

When activists organised an open letter in solidarity with Palestine in December that year, leading climate organisations were notably absent. Their leaderships overruled internal dissent or found themselves constrained by funding models that place serious risks on criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian self-determination. This exposed a generational rupture, with the environmentalist old guard increasingly disconnected from a younger, more militant base radicalised in opposition to the genocide. While some leaders still urged activists to focus on simply lobbying national policymakers, Gaza revealed the need for internationalist climate justice, as the US, Britain and Israel collaborated in the annihilation of life and the eclipse of our planetary future.

This fundamentally altered the direction of the climate movement. Seasoned climate organisers pivoted to supporting Palestinian liberation: shutting down arms factories, resisting the expansion of state repression and forming new groups demonstrating the links between far-right politics, oil lobbyists and billionaires profiting from genocide.

This wasn’t all new: many who joined Palestine Action’s early direct action before 2023 were involved with Extinction Rebellion, knowing that British militarism and Israeli arms companies were among the primary drivers of the climate crisis. Yet 7 October expanded the boundaries of the climate movement, making its overlap with anti-imperialism more explicit. Since then, US aggression has escalated from Palestine to Iran, Venezuela to Cuba. While there has not yet been a unified response from climate organisations, individual climate activists like Greta Thunberg, who rose to prominence through the 2019 Fridays for Future school strikes, have actively tried to break the sieges on Gaza and Cuba, illustrating both the necessity to expand the remit of climate politics and the institutional inertia preventing a movement-wide shift.

These wars of aggression have demonstrated the extent to which US militarism is driving the climate crisis. The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels worldwide, its bases and warships frontline emitters of greenhouse gases. Our Resisting Rearmament report with Climate Vanguard details how Britain has subordinated itself to US monopoly capital, pursuing rearmament to maintain its ‘special relationship’ in this new and even more dangerous phase of empire.

If climate justice is concerned with protecting the conditions for human and ecological life, then struggles supporting the national sovereignty and liberation of the Global South are inherently climate struggles. The people of the global South are fighting to secure a future for us all against US-led global hegemony.

Eco-populism has recently surged under Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Parts of the climate movement have pivoted towards this electoral project and sharpened their emphasis on class politics. At the same time, ambitious ecological organising projects have emerged: Anakbayan UK has campaigned against British mining in the Philippines, the Palestinian Youth Movement has launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine, and local groups across Britain that have used direct action to target RAF bases and mass picket arms factories. Climate Vanguard have also developed radical political education for young people, who have in turn formed the Orbit cadre group with the aim of driving eco-socialist politics in various other left organisations.

In the labour movement, workers are now organising around anti-imperialist and ecological demands. Unite Hospitality members in Glasgow have launched a BDS-aligned service boycott at the Glasgow Film Theatre and are building an industrial strategy for Palestine. Workers for a Free Palestine is organising civil service workers to engage in work refusals; and Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine is coordinating across the NHS to end the renewal of the government’s contract with Palantir. The Heat Strike campaign is pushing for a legally recognised maximum workplace temperature and a heatwave furlough scheme, providing a clear possibility for anti-war and climate organisations to link Britain’s involvement in the war on Iran and hosting of US bases to climate breakdown and rising prices.

The aim must be to bring these currents together in recognising that Britain’s role in the imperial system must be dismantled as a precondition of climate justice. We must push beyond eco-populism and build towards eco-socialism. By orienting the climate movement towards this horizon, we can begin to confront the underlying weaknesses that led to its stagnation. The old climate movement — with its professionalisation, its isolation from the left and its inability to confront imperialism — cannot and should not be revived. Something new must take its place.

Energy Embargo for Palestine was formed in the wake of Israel’s intensified genocide in Gaza at the intersection of climate, anti-imperialist, and Palestine organising. Since launching, we have run a concerted campaign targeting BP’s operations and its complicity in fuelling the genocide — targeting institutional partnerships with BP, mapping and exposing the supply of oil to Israel via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and identifying points of disruption within Britain.

Climate justice should not be understood as an end in itself, a demand to be won and then set aside. It is a front in our broader struggle against capitalism and imperialism. The mass engagement of young people activated by the climate crisis, and the infrastructure developed from the past decade of movements, must be leveraged in a project that sees climate justice as inseparable from global class struggle, particularly the national liberation struggles of the Global South. The role of ecological organisations — and of those on the left more broadly — is to create the conditions for this project to emerge, and to join the fight for a just future.

AI is literally retarding our brains. If online media was once an echo chamber, it has now become a hellscape of algorithmic slop which heightens social alienation in ways that were previously unimaginable. A recent study shows that students who use LLMS to write essays exhibited reduced brain activity and diminished critical engagement compared to those who use search engines or simply their own unaided reasoning. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab found that the convenience of automated answers produces so-called ‘cognitive debt’: a clear, measurable contraction of human attention and creativity. Another study by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment identified a general fall in numeracy and literacy comprehension that coincides with the mass adoption of these technologies.

Behind AI’s consumer-facing slopverse there is a material infrastructure of staggering scale. Nvidia’s global supply chain, for example, draws tungsten from Brazil, gold from Colombia, and tantalum from Kazakhstan to manufacture GPUs at TSMC in Taiwan. These chips travel through a planetary web of logistics operators, miners, data labellers and e-waste dismantlers. Over 10,000 data centres now operate across 170 countries, but their distribution is profoundly uneven. Because the United States, China and the EU host more than half, computational power is highly concentrated in the Global North. The geography of AI thus reproduces old imperial hierarchies. The Global South provides minerals, labour and land; the North monopolises compute, patents and profit. 

All this will get worse as the different Big Tech players struggle for dominance. Amazon plans to invest $150 billion on data centres over the next fifteen years, while Meta’s projected spend on data centres was $37 billion in a single year. The United Kingdom aims to build 100 data centres by 2030, including a £10bn AI data centre in Blyth consisting of 10 buildings covering 540,000 square metres. These will all consume vast quantities of energy and water, straining local ecosystems while producing tons of greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste. 

The global data cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the aviation industry. Energy consumed by data centres alone accounts for 0.3 percent of global carbon emissions. AI advocates argue that as more hyperscale centres get built, efficiency will improve and green energy will be used more — but similar ‘net zero’ pledges by European energy companies from Shell to BP have been exposed as simply crass greenwashing scams. There’s little reason to think AI will be any different. 

People across the globe are now recognising these social costs. Between 2023 and 2025, activists blocked $18 billion worth of data-centre projects and delayed another $46 billion across 24 US states. Outside the capitalist core, similar movements motivated by environmental and infrastructural concerns are taking off. In Cerrillos, Chile, communities led by local activist Pamela Ramírez halted Google’s water-intensive facility amid a historic drought. In Dublin, Ireland, the ‘Press Pause on Data Centres’ campaign has been fighting back against data infrastructure that threatens to consume 27 percent of national electricity by 2028, while in the Netherlands the Save the Wieringermeer campaign has defended farmland and aquifers from Microsoft projects. 

The resistance to data-centre development in the UK combines struggles over land, energy, water and urban space. From East London to Buckinghamshire and Fife, objections around housing, energy grid capacity, water, pollution and work converge as communities are expected to surrender socially necessary resources to privately owned tech infrastructure, to enable AI expansion that nobody wants. 

The dispute over Brick Lane in East London, recently written up in these pages, makes this especially stark. There, the government is determined to redirect resources that could be used for housing and other social needs towards a highly capital-intensive data centre. There are over 192 data centres operating or being built around London: infrastructure won’t provide jobs or benefits to the community, but will simply become another tributary to US tech oligarch fortunes. Any opposition to them is cast as an impediment to ‘growth’. While Brick Lane is being forced through by Burnham’s cabinet despite the local mayor blocking it, Buckinghamshire was successfully stopped.

In light of the dangers of Big Tech, the scholar Dan Mcquillan advocates what he calls a ‘decomputing society’, involving the dramatic reduction of datafication and computational energy from infrastructure to culture. Decomputing requires democratic limits on data extraction and energy-intensive computation, prioritising socially beneficial technologies over capitalist efficiency. The campaign known as ‘Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla’ has targeted Elon Musk’s Gigafactory in Berlin along with his dealerships across Europe, and the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group has drawn up a manifesto for algorithmic disobedience: disrupting AI systems through data poisoning, misinformation loops, and ‘tarpit’ traps that flood data-scrapers with nonsense content. 

These disruptive strategies are one thing, but building a compelling social alternative is another. The classic left critique of technology reminds us that it is never neutral: that relations of power are reflected in its design, and that it therefore reproduces the capitalist imperatives of competition, scale and profit. Today, with politics lurching even further right, new technologies are absorbing reactionary tendencies from society at large. As oligarchs advocate a return to monarchy and promote conspiracy theories about the Antichrist, their fantasies become embedded in the algorithms that they own. 

The history of class struggle from the Luddites to the Writers Guild of America shows that the emancipatory potential of technology never comes from the technology itself. It comes from building enough power to fundamentally remake these infrastructures. Hence the recent movement for digital sovereignty: public clouds and computational models with transparent safety frameworks which are democratically designed, rather than imposed by the superrich. The Non-Aligned Technologies Movement aims to translate this demand into an international campaign against the unequal digital world-system. 

For such movements to succeed, they would need to be aided by a state-led industrial strategy to decommission data infrastructure or reorient it towards socially necessary functions, set by workers and users. A process of collective decomputing could meanwhile ensure that all data contributions remain in open commons, controlled by everyone rather than enclosed by rentiers. This might seem like a distant prospect. But the fact is that any technology that emerges out of intellectual monopolism and extractive supply chains will be marked by these destructive forces. Remaking the former inevitably means destroying the latter.

Both actions were led by Daniel Thomas, known to his followers as ‘Danny Tommo’, a notorious self-publicist whose backstory includes a prison sentence for attempted kidnapping. His organisation, Patriot Platform, is not a militia in any literal sense, despite its paramilitary pretensions. But it would be wrong to dismiss the matching black clothes, balaclavas and choreographed blockade as mere cosplay. It is more than just macho theatre designed to generate clips, donations and followers. Clickbait spectacle and organisational heft are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the spectacle is an essential part of the organisational process. It advertises the group, invites identification with it and tests whether an audience assembled online can assert power offline.

Dover was organised through mailing lists and peer-to-peer messaging services, allowing hundreds to assemble before the police or anti-racists had fully grasped what was happening. Portsmouth was more opportunistic. There, the unexpected decision to bring people rescued in the Channel ashore created an event around which Thomas and his allies could mobilise. Supporters were summoned through livestreams and social media. The physical crowd and the online audience reinforced one another.

Both events showcased the ‘influencer militia’ aesthetic that Thomas has long rehearsed, in which he has cast himself as a citizen-soldier defending Britain from invasion. The grandiosely named Operation Overlord, which he helped launch in late 2025, combined pseudo-military expeditions to France to harass refugees and charity workers with appeals for recruits and equipment. Its theatre was absurd, but its organisational purpose was real.

The streaming economy gives Thomas’s project a material basis. Confrontation produces content; content generates donations, subscriptions and merchandise sales; and those revenues help finance further confrontation. This is the spectacular politics of digital fascism. Patriot Platform can thus respond to an organisational problem exposed by the racist riots of 2024. They had proved how rapidly rumours and inflammatory online material could bring thousands onto the streets, but they also revealed the fragility of such protests. Crowds assembled and dispersed quickly under pressure from arrests, public revulsion and mass anti-racist opposition.

Patriot Platform asks whether something more durable can be built: a layer of people who can be contacted and redeployed once the bigger crowd has gone home.

Robinson does not lead a disciplined membership organisation. His power lies in connecting anti-migrant campaigners, streamers, wealthy donors, hardened fascists and a vast digital audience. This structure provides flexibility and distance from responsibility. Robinson can promote an action without formally organising it, creating an atmosphere in which violent confrontation is likely, and then disavowing it when it occurs.

Yet online followers are not necessarily dependable activists. Huge demonstrations can project an image of strength without leaving durable organisation behind. This was clear on 16 May, when Robinson’s attempt to reproduce the enormous Unite the Kingdom mobilisation of the previous September drew a significantly smaller turnout.

Patriot Platform attempts to compensate through a form of franchised mobilisation. Thomas operates at one remove from Robinson, recruiting and deploying activists while Robinson supplies mass amplification at decisive moments. At Dover, Robinson promoted Patriot Platform after the blockade had begun without assuming responsibility for it.

Robinson can thus gain access to a potentially more dependable street force without commanding it directly, while Thomas can gain recruits, money and authority through his proximity to Robinson. Dover and Portsmouth suggest that Thomas is trying to make racial violence less dependent upon a singular riot and more capable of being summoned, branded, repeated.

There are consequences here for the electoral far right. A scandal may weaken Reform while opening space for fascist networks to develop greater capacity on the streets, and for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain to court activists alienated by Farage’s faltering pursuit of respectability. Years of anti-migrant agitation have now created networks and forms of political power capable of outlasting any individual electoral vehicle. The climate of Farageism strengthens organisations beyond his control, which can develop capacities of their own.

Defeating Farage at the ballot box will not by itself dismantle the networks built around the politics he has helped normalise. A hardened and organised far-right core can continue to reproduce itself and expand its forces long after an election is over, with terrifying consequences for minority communities.

Still, the far right does not have the terrain to itself. In Glasgow in July, years of organising by Stand Up to Racism, trade unions, refugee groups and community organisations produced a mobilisation capable of substantially outnumbering ‘Unite the Clans’. Actions like this, alongside the enormous Together rally in London in March, play a critical role in breaking the far right’s claim to own the streets and limiting the confidence of the hardened core around Robinson, Thomas and others.

The bedrock of this response is the crucial but unglamorous work of building local relationships and networks of practical solidarity. Counter-demonstrations remain indispensable, but their strength is built before the far right announces its mobilisation. Anti-racist organisation must be consistent, rooted in everyday life and capable of bringing people together between moments of confrontation.

The wider labour movement must draw the correct organisational conclusion. The far right is using every tool at its disposal: it is digitally connected, internationally networked and able to draw upon wealthy donors. Anti-racists therefore need a more visible and durable presence in working-class communities. Trade unions have a particularly important role, both inside workplaces and beyond them.

Where such networks do not exist, a sudden riot or far-right demonstration outside asylum accommodation can leave small numbers of anti-racists isolated and threatened communities exposed. They may find only a handful of local labour activists, faith organisations or campaigners to whom they can turn. However committed those people may be, the balance of forces is not on their side.

Robust anti-racist networks can break that isolation. They make sustained campaigning possible, develop new activists, build relationships across communities and allow conversations with neighbours who have been drawn towards the outer edges of reactionary politics. They also establish the local foundations from which a much larger response can be mobilised when the far right appears. Such activity does not substitute for confronting the far right, but it does help create the relationships and practical solidarity through which larger confrontations can be won.

Reform’s Zia Yusuf blamed last weekend’s disorder on Andy Burnham, expressing support for protesters’ ‘outrage, their anger, their terror’. He accused the Prime Minister of generating disorder by providing a police escort to people whom he claimed had ‘broken into this country’.

Yusuf’s response illustrates how far-right disorder can be politically useful to Reform even while it attempts to preserve some distance from men like Thomas. Rather than challenge the racist premises of the mobilisation, party figures can recast the violence as evidence that Britain is trapped in a migration emergency. Those creating the disorder are kept at arm’s length, while the crisis they manufacture is used to validate Reform’s diagnosis.

The far right is not a single organisation operating under a common command. Reform, Restore Britain, Robinson and Patriot Platform pursue different forms of power and frequently compete with one another. Nonetheless, they operate on the same political terrain, legitimising shared grievances while playing different roles. Recognising this interplay does not mean describing them as the electoral and street wings of a unified project. It means understanding that gains in one arena can strengthen actors in another.

Anti-racism must therefore intervene wherever those forces operate — in elections, workplaces, communities and on the streets. Stand Up to Racism’s campaigning against Reform candidates across the country is one example of how electoral advances can be contested without abandoning the mobilisation needed to confront fascists physically.

The masked formation at Dover bore an eerie visual resemblance to federal immigration agents operating under Trump. Of course, Patriot Platform remains a private far-right initiative while ICE exercises the coercive power of the state. Yet the Trump administration has incorporated far-right spectacle and vigilante violence into its immigration enforcement campaign, which has pushed deaths in ICE custody up to their highest level for two decades.

Farage is down, but he is not out. Reform retains a substantial base that has proved resilient amid repeated allegations of corruption. Renewed shocks to food and fuel prices arising from the US–Iran war and the developing El Niño could deepen the cost-of-living crisis and give Farage another opportunity to redirect economic insecurity against minority communities. Voters beyond Reform’s core might now be repelled by the impression that something about Farage is seedy or corrupt, but worsening material conditions could change their calculations.

Andy Burnham has interrupted Reform’s momentum partly by offering a rival explanation for social decline. Towns have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation, privatisation, underinvestment and the concentration of political power. The clock is ticking for his government to translate that account into improvements people can feel in their everyday lives.

The new Prime Minister also faces immediate questions over Indefinite Leave to Remain. Trade unions and Labour backbenchers are pressing him to abandon Starmer’s plans to make life even more difficult for the social-care workers and other skilled migrants on whom we rely: dramatically extending the waiting period for them to apply for settled status, as a means of deterring migration and appealing to Farage voters. This will be an early test of whether Burnham is prepared to break with the programme of scapegoating migrants that characterised the previous leadership.

The different components must work together to prevent the most right-wing party in modern British history from taking power. That imperative is clear, but it is not enough. Though Farage may be faltering, the forces nourished by his politics are not waiting for Reform to recover; they are organising autonomously. The anti-racist movement must stop them in their tracks. It must assert its presence by confronting fascists on the streets, building the social power upon which effective confrontation depends, and becoming a force that the establishment cannot ignore.

When Brazilian millionaire businessman João Havelange ousted the obsolete English technocrat Sir Stanley Rous as FIFA president in 1974 (not least due to Rous’s opposition to the expulsion of apartheid South Africa), the FIFA he inherited was an archaic bureaucracy oblivious to commercial opportunities.

Unlike Rous, Havelange understood that the post-war Keynesian compact had given way to an increasingly unregulated, interconnected network of exchange driven by multinational corporate expansion. By partnering with Adidas and Coca-Cola, Havelange turned FIFA into a powerhouse in the age of neoliberal globalisation.

But with its lust for expanding its markets, its willingness to commercialise almost every aspect of the game and even its milquetoast and, in practice, highly disingenuous social liberalism, the FIFA of Havelange and his successor, Sepp Blatter, is now at odds with an emerging, post-globalisation world increasingly structured by protectionism, networks of patronage and ethno-nationalism.

Infantino, not coincidentally, was elected FIFA president the same year that Britain voted to leave the EU and Trump was first elected president of the United States. Infantino’s private finance sell-off plan marked the culmination of ten years navigating an age defined by what Jamie Merchant calls ‘a new inter-imperial competition for the global product’. Infantino clearly believes that Trump’s USA — and its imperial network — will be the winner.

Private finance, and particularly private equity, is essential to Trump’s project. Kushner, of course, is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared, and the son of Charles, the US ambassador to France and Monaco. More broadly, however, private equity and other forms of alternative finance were among the largest donors to Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and actively support kindred governments around the world. In return for their support, Trump and similarly minded officials relax financial regulations and allow these firms to access capital from life insurers and pension funds. The reward them comes back around: when private equity firms destroy healthcare, water, nursing homes and other everyday necessities by loading them up with debt, far-right politicians like Trump seize on the consequent sense of social and political breakdown to advance a politics of grievance and right-wing nationalism.

Bad as this may be, FIFA’s members have for years tolerated Infantino’s imbecilic behaviour to ingratiate himself with Trump, from his preposterous ‘I feel . . . ’ soliloquy at the 2022 World Cup, to his nauseatingly sycophantic creation of a FIFA peace prize to rectify Trump’s failure to win the Nobel and his role in the Folarin Balogun affair this summer.

Equally, FIFA’s members have long been content getting into bed with amoral actors and flogging football to the highest bidder. Just look at a list of World Cup hosts: Argentina in 1978, Franco’s Spain in 1982, the flirtation with Henry Kissinger and the ‘rock solid political stitch-up’ that led to Mexico in 1986, plus Russia, Qatar, and Trump’s United States. Saudi Arabia is slated to host in 2034.

Now, however, Infantino has crossed the line. While the deal promised extra cash up front to member associations, it threatened to significantly cut future transfers by about 20%. Perhaps this seemed like an unacceptable sacrifice at a time when the tournaments are breaking revenue records. Ego, too, has surely played a significant role. UEFA, in particular, resents not having the political power to match its financial muscle and has sensed an opportunity to assert itself.

So, the deal is defeated, and the worst may still be to come for Infantino. But as the FIFPro global union of professional football players declared, ‘withdrawing the proposal does not erase what it revealed.’ Fundamental questions remain about FIFA’s place in the world and where it goes from here.

For one, can the FIFA coalition hold with ‘America First’ as its geopolitical centre? What about as real-world conflict escalates between Trump’s rogue government and the rest of the world? For all the money it generates, the World Cup is not bullet-proof.

In addition, can the federation survive the internal tensions that this has generated? The Confederation of African Football (CAF) seems more likely to remain loyal to FIFA, which claims to have invested more than a billion dollars in African football. US Soccer, meanwhile, is going against the grain of its own government by calling for ‘meaningful change’, and the Mexican Football Federation is still supportive of Infantino, despite the heightened tensions between the Mexican government and Infantino’s puppet master Trump.

At the same time, US private equity is only getting started with global football. On the club level, they’re already in the building. Real Madrid is reportedly keen to follow neighbours Atletico Madrid in selling a stake in the club to bring in more money. The influx of cash from private equity is far from a guarantee of success. Despite Chelsea owners Clearlake Capital spending £1.5bn on players over a three-year span, the team finished tenth last season, and the owners are now notorious for having turned the club into a dysfunctional laughingstock. Investment in football clubs — these strange entities that can appreciate in value while losing money year after year — is much riskier than buying a stake in a global phenomenon like the World Cup, which always makes a profit.

Above all else, this episode signals a need for a new direction altogether. There are attempts to reform the game, but they are at nascent stages, and largely focused on domestic football-ticket prices, inconvenient kick off times and changes to supporters’ terms and conditions. FairSquare’s Reboot FIFA campaign is one that all football supporters should support, but to really create pressure on FIFA to clean up its act there must also be grassroots organising across partisan club-based lines in as many member nations as possible to pressure governments into holding the likes of Infantino to account.

The 2026 instalment of the World Cup blessed millions of people with transcendent joy, excitement and even silliness. Let it serve as a precious reminder: football can’t be something we only experience as a means of escapism, nor can it be something we leave to the elites. It must be something that we come together to shape ourselves.

The cracks within Podemos were apparent early on. Sergio Pascual, the party’s first Secretary of Organisation, remembers having ‘mixed feelings’ on the night of the 2015 elections. On the surface the results were impressive, with Podemos securing almost 21 percent of the vote to PSOE’s 22 percent. Yet Pascual knew that this one-point gap made all the difference. ‘We bet everything on the sorpasso of the Socialist Party’, he tells me, ‘sacrificing internal democracy and part of our programmatic identity to achieve it in an immediate electoral blitzkrieg. But once it failed to materialise, we faced a difficult institutional balance of power.’

Many of Podemos’s initial leading cadre, Pascual included, had previously worked as political advisors to leftist governments in Latin America. They saw a parallel between the Pink Tide backlash against neoliberalism and the crisis of representation in austerity-era Spain, arguing that the same conditions which had undermined traditional party systems in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia — allowing left-populist leaders to rapidly assemble new electoral majorities — had now arrived in Europe. The Indignados movement of 2011 was an unmistakable sign, bringing millions to the streets with the chant of ‘They Don’t Represent Us’.

By late 2013, Iglesias’s incendiary appearances on TV panel shows had turned the 35-year-old political scientist into a tribune for the disaffected. The pony-tailed professor eschewed the traditional language of the left and instead presented a series of populist binaries: el pueblo versus la casta, democracy versus oligarchy. After Spain’s existing left-wing party, Izquierda Unida, refused to join a united slate for the 2014 European elections, Podemos ran its own independent campaign with Iglesias’s face on the ballot papers instead of a party logo. It won 8 percent of the national vote. The leadership was convinced that a historic window of opportunity had opened. The task was to capture government within a single electoral cycle.

Podemos adopted a top-down organisational structure with a focus on media spectacle and message discipline, built for rapid advance at the ballot box. To ‘storm the heavens’, Iglesias declared, an ‘electoral war machine’ was needed for a twelve-month institutional assault.

One of the Podemos parliamentarians elected in 2015, Txema Guijarro, recalls the ‘epic character’ of that campaign: ‘Our Latin American experiences intoxicated us with the idea that winning was all-or-nothing. But maybe that was part of our miscalculation. In reality, the Spanish parliamentary system was never going to be as conducive to that kind of breakthrough, nor was the political system as fragile as it was in, say, Ecuador.’

The problem of translating the rapid insurgency into a more durable project became visible after the vote, which produced a deadlocked parliament and raised the prospect of a deal between Podemos and PSOE. There was no consensus among the leadership about how to move forward. For Iglesias the plan was simple: try to negotiate a coalition government of near equals, or, if that failed, force fresh elections. This threatened to deepen Spain’s crisis of governability and keep the right-wing government of the Partido Popular in power, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. ‘He knew our outsider appeal had a limited shelf-life’, says Pascual, ‘so he calculated that if PSOE would not share power with us, we should combine our vote with Izquierda Unida’s in a new electoral alliance that would allow us to beat PSOE in a second election’.

The party’s chief strategist, Iñigo Errejón, favoured a more conciliatory approach. He pushed for Podemos to allow PSOE to form a minority government so as to thwart the narrative that they were plunging the country into chaos. And he rejected the idea of forming a pact with Izquierda Unida, which, as he saw it, would mark a retreat from populism — with its below/above binary supplanting left/right — to a conventional strategy of ‘left unity’. Errejón began to organise within the party to challenge Iglesias’s dominance. As factional fighting spilled out into the open, amplified by a hostile media, Podemos lost momentum.

In the end Iglesias’s position won out; IU agreed to join a Unidas Podemos slate ahead of the June 2016 election, which was called to break the impasse in parliament. But much of the damage was already done. With more than a million left-wing voters deciding to stay home, the new alliance was unable to match the tally that Podemos had gotten just six months earlier. There now seemed to be no real possibility of eclipsing PSOE in the short term. The Iglesias and Errejón factions continued to clash: one calling for a line of open confrontation with PSOE, the other wanting to reduce antagonism and win support from wavering Socialists. The internal war accelerated the party’s downward spiral.

Iglesias again emerged victorious from this dispute. He built his strategy on the assumption that Spain was headed for a grand coalition of the centre. PSOE had recently launched an internal coup against its progressive leader, Pedro Sánchez, which seemed to suggest that the irreformable establishment was closing ranks. Podemos thus tried to stick to its intransigent position and consolidate its outsider status. But soon enough the political landscape shifted. In a surprise turn, Sánchez took on the old guard of his party, faced down his right-wing challenger and triumphed in the 2017 leadership contest, styling himself as the saviour of the Spanish left.

This closed off much of the political space Podemos had previously occupied. ‘We underestimated Sánchez,’ Guijarro concedes, ‘not least in his ability to push through a certain renovation in his own party. In making his comeback, he incorporated elements of our discourse and programme while minimising any openings available to us institutionally.’

The wider coordinates were also in flux thanks to a partial economic recovery and a reactionary tide of Spanish nationalism unleashed by the failed push for Catalan independence. The supposed threat to Spanish unity was now top of the agenda, and Podemos was struggling to respond. Miguel Urbán, a leading figure in the party’s radical Anticapitalista wing, and a member of the European Parliament until 2024, highlights its misreading of the conjuncture: ‘The electoral war machine model, with its hyperleadership structure, had marginalised early on any role for activists in the party, just when there had been a wave of popular enthusiasm around the project . . . By the time Podemos’s core leadership realised it had gone too far and attempted to reverse course, it had already undermined the conditions that would have made such a change of focus possible.’

The power struggle within Podemos’s leadership meanwhile led to a major split in 2019. Sidelined by Iglesias, Errejón struck a deal with Madrid’s left-wing mayor, Manuela Carmena, to set up a new regional platform called Más Madrid. He took most of his allies from the party with him, launching an unsuccessful bid for the capital’s regional presidency. Guijarro sees this as the result of a broader ‘failure of method’, in which Podemos’s inability to ‘create effective mechanisms for institutional dialogue and bargaining’ made it impossible to mediate internal disagreements.

At this point Iglesias changed tack. The same leader who had previously called for maximal antagonism with PSOE was now increasingly convinced that entering a Sánchez-led coalition was the sole means to stabilise the left, while renewing his own public image and that of the party leadership. By going all-in on this alliance, he argued, Unidas Podemos could block Sánchez’s preferred option: a more piecemeal coalition in which the centre and the right would wield real power, while the radical left would get only minor concessions.

The path to this agreement was long, running through two more general elections in 2019, during which Unidas Podemos’s vote share fell even further, to 14.3 percent in April and 12.9 percent in November. Finally, after four elections in four years, Sánchez found himself with no alternatives: he was forced to form Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, including five Unidas Podemos ministers, with Iglesias as deputy PM.

When I interviewed Iglesias in his ministerial office in October 2020 he acknowledged it was hard to get an electoral payoff as a junior partner — that PSOE stood to reap the rewards from any progressive measures they pushed through — but he insisted the arrangement had nonetheless opened up new possibilities for his party. ‘This allows us to make up part of the leadership of the state, it allows us to form government cadres which we did not have, it allows us an understanding of and a praxis in the state that you don’t get from local or regional governments. And’, he reminded me, ‘we are young — a political force that reached government after existing for only six years.’

Seven months later, Iglesias had resigned. Governing turned out to be a gruelling process for him and his ministers. Their social agenda came up against fierce PSOE resistance and they swallowed some unpalatable policies in areas like defence and law and order. In the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic, Unidas Podemos engaged in a series of highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias and free speech, but lacked the heft to force PSOE’s hand on any of these issues. The bitterness of the struggle diminished Iglesias’s public profile. ‘It’s clear’, he conceded on the night he stepped down, ‘that at this point I’m not contributing to the cause’.

Still, Unidas Podemos’s impact on government was real. Even with its limited leverage, it passed measures that were among the standout achievements of the coalition’s first term: a 46 percent rise in the minimum wage, a major new social welfare programme, a Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme, and a successful energy price cap during the Ukraine war which effectively contained inflation. With the far right on the rise, Unidas Podemos also played a key role in resisting its bigotry, calling for migrants to have their status regularised en masse.

As Iglesias exited the stage, much of Podemos’s political capital dissipated along with its dominance on the left. The most popular left leader to emerge during this period was Yolanda Díaz. A labour lawyer and member of the Communist Party, she took up the post of labour minister and was praised for her Covid furlough scheme as well as her major progressive reform of the country’s employment laws, which strengthened collective bargaining rights and massively reduced the use of temporary fixed-term contracts. Her political approach was distinct to the left populism of Podemos: rather than stoking binary antagonisms, she pursued a more cautious tripartism, striking deals between workers, business and the state. When Iglesias anointed her as his successor in the role of deputy PM and figurehead of Unidas Podemos, he passed the baton to someone outside his own party, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of its exhaustion. 

It then fell to Díaz’s new electoral vehicle, Sumar, to reactivate the country’s radical forces, with Errejón brought back into the fold as her de facto second in command. She set about integrating various national and regional formations into an alliance which, like its predecessor, was top-heavy and leader-centred, promising to extend the progress made under the coalition. But unlike Podemos, Sumar’s origins did not lie in a movement wave beyond the established institutions; the fact that it was built exclusively from high office ended up reinforcing its subordination to Sánchez. Díaz’s main task became balancing the competing demands of Sumar’s internal actors and continuing to negotiate from a position of weakness with PSOE. Without a transformative offer, she failed to build out from her pandemic-era popularity and construct a sustainable electoral brand. Sexual misconduct allegations against Errejón further undermined Sumar’s credibility, and it unravelled at striking speed.

This implosion was yet another blow for an already demoralised Spanish left. In retrospect it seems obvious that many of the strategic decisions of left populism — not just in Spain, but elsewhere in the West — were based on a fundamental overconfidence about the pace and extent of the establishment’s decline. When it became clear that the existing order could stave off collapse, the left found itself disoriented, and struggled to develop a more durable approach to institutional politics. It was one thing to channel outrage at elites during a moment of crisis, but another to create mass identification with a political project while putting down the territorial roots and extra-parliamentary structures needed for sustained electoral engagement. 

The result was that Unidas Podemos was already in retreat as it entered cabinet. Though it exercised significant influence in certain areas of government policy, the main political beneficiary was Sánchez — who made a show of standing above the tense negotiations between his ministers and acting as the final arbiter. This allowed him to tack left in response to public pressure without giving elites much cause to worry. He struck a delicate compromise between the different elements of the wider governing bloc, carving out greater autonomy from the right of his own party, while advancing or frustrating the left’s priorities as circumstances required. Sánchez broke with the continent-wide assault on migrants and implemented the Podemos policy to secure their status, welcoming 1.5 million new arrivals within three years. He courted major investments in renewables, greening the Spanish energy sector more rapidly than its European peers and lowering utility bills. And he vowed to ‘defend the welfare state tooth and nail’ against cuts and privatisation. On his watch, tax revenues and public spending have soared, while the economy has grown faster than any other major eurozone country.

Yet Sánchez has also thwarted every part of the Podemos programme that relied on confrontation with the Spanish power structure. Even as he and his family became the targets of a concerted lawfare campaign, the PM refused to rein in the reactionary judiciary or democratise the state, for instance by removing the Francoist Official Secrets Act or restrictions on public protest. He has repeatedly shied away from challenging the rentier interests who dominate the property market, allowing the country’s affordability crisis to deepen as young people continue to be priced out of decent housing. His government has been mired in corruption scandals, with senior figures accused of influence peddling and skimming money off state contracts. The limits of his reform agenda are, predictably, being exploited by the right bloc — which has won a series of regional victories, and is determined to dislodge PSOE in next year’s general elections.

Yet perhaps the most consequential change to have taken place under Sánchez is the direction of Spanish foreign policy. With much of Europe’s political class lying supine before Trump II, Sánchez is one of the few Western leaders to have openly challenged Washington: rejecting its calls to raise defence spending to 5 percent, pushing the EU to end its association agreement with Israel, refusing the use of Spanish bases for the war on Iran, and forging closer ties with China and nations of the Global South — with investment in electric vehicles, batteries and other green technologies aimed at unleashing a new phase of industrial development.

This is not an index of Sánchez’s radicalism so much as his wager that Spain has more to gain from adapting to the new geography of global economic power than it does from clinging to the old Atlantic order. There is a certain irony here. Although the left populism of the 2010s drew inspiration from Latin America, its main focus was the gulf between masses and elites within the Spanish nation-state. Sánchez’s social democracy, by contrast, has no Third Worldist influences — it is a simple outgrowth of the PSOE tradition that emerged after the dictatorship — yet it has been effective in grappling with the changing international balance of power. Its willingness to reimagine Spain’s role in the global order and reject the logic of the New Cold War is its most consequential feature, which may have major implications further down the line.

More than a decade after Tsipras and Iglesias electrified the crowds in Athens, we now see Sánchez embracing Lula da Silva at the first ever Spain–Brazil summit in Barcelona — the two leaders promising to build an anti-war, anti-Trump bloc that will unite progressive governments across the planet. This is not an image of rebels primed to storm the heavens, but of statesmen offering protection from the excesses of a dying empire. Instead of a war on the establishment, the new centre left offers a refuge from the brutalities of neofascism. Their ambition for the existing order is not destruction but revivification. In a world sliding towards chaos, it’s easy to see the appeal.