Is the far right winning, and what’s the prize? We sent our reporter, Sian Norris, to the Political Network for Values’ seventh annual transatlantic summit in Brussels to find out. Little known outside the world of anti-gender activists, the PNfV has racked up political successes that other far-right groups can only dream of. In her piece, Sian pairs her reporting from the conference with a dive into the Epstein files to reveal the truly networked nature of the right.
Meanwhile, as the Trump presidency continues to lay waste to the global order, our Latin America correspondent, Angelina de los Santos, reports on how Latin America interprets what’s unfolding in Venezuela, while Paul Rogers explains that Iran has more options than Trump and Netanyahu imagine.
Finally, I know this newsletter goes on a lot about the coarsening discourse around migration (and I can imagine you, dear reader, are fatigued by this subject), but I can’t help observing that this week saw Manchester’s favourite Monaco tax resident Jim Ratcliffe claim that the UK was being “colonised by immigrants”. To be honest, on weeks like this, I’m at a loss as to what we at openDemocracy should do to support a sane conversation. Do you have any thoughts? Is our coverage missing something?
Write to us, we’d love to hear them.
Inside the summit uniting the world’s most successful far-right activists • Sian Norris
On a rainy Tuesday last week, Chile’s president-elect José Kast took to a stage in the European Parliament to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump’s White House.
“We’ve worked together for so many years and generated links on both sides of the pond,” the incoming far-right president told his audience, hundreds of sharply dressed politicians, special advisers, think tank staffers and political influencers. “We want to see that alliance between the USA and Europe.”
In one month, Kast will be in power, having sold a now-familiar cocktail of populist anger, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-gender messaging around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. In Brussels, his speech was both celebrated and echoed. “Freedom lovers around the world must work more closely with the US,” said Brazil’s former minister of foreign affairs, Ernesto Araújo, when he was given the microphone. “This needs to be a transnational fight.”
Trump may spearhead that fight, but it’s a global war...
What Latin America’s press misses about Venezuela • Angelina de los Santos
Before US helicopters landed in Caracas to kidnap Nicolás Maduro last month, Venezuela occupied an intermittent place on the international news agenda – even in Spanish-language media. Its political, economic, and humanitarian crises surfaced only at moments of high impact – elections fraud, protests, migration spikes – before fading back into the global background hum.
“This is the first time in a long while that so many voices are commenting on, opining about, and analysing what is happening here,” Venezuelan journalist Valentina Gil, who specialises in fact-checking and digital content production, told openDemocracy.
Latin America’s Spanish-language media is incredibly diverse and reflects the region’s complex history and the multitude of present interests. There are national outlets and regional outlets in each country, but also a wide array of Hispanic media based in the United States, the region’s military hegemon, ‘media in exile’ scattered through North and Central America and Europe and also the major Spanish-language online newspaper from Spain, the region’s former colonial power...
Not just oil, the Venezuela invasion is about preserving the petrodollar • Natalie Alcoba
“We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. We have plenty of oil in the United States,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told an NBC interviewer the day after US troops snatched Nicolas Maduro from Caracas last month.
“What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States,” Rubio added, going on to name the US’s list of usual suspects: China, Russia, Iran. “They’re not even in this continent; this is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live.”
While it is indeed unlikely that Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela was intended solely to open up access to the country’s deep oil reserves for American companies, the oil factor speaks to broader forces that are also at play. Specifically, experts openDemocracy spoke with pointed to oil’s role in weakening the US dollar’s position as the financial instrument of choice on the international stage, which is in turn reducing the US’s global economic dominance...
Iran has more options up its sleeve than Trump and Netanyahu assume • Paul Rogers
Are the US and Iran headed for all-out war? Binyamin Netanyahu is undoubtedly hoping so. With a general election looming this year, the Israeli prime minister certainly believes it is vital to convince Donald Trump that the US should force Iran to cease its nuclear programme entirely and stop developing and deploying ballistic missiles that can reach Israel.
Having confirmed he will seek re-election, achieving these aims would give Netanyahu a much greater chance of presenting himself as a victorious leader, regardless of the suffering inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
To that end, Netanyahu visited Washington this week to join Trump’s Board of Peace, the newly created US mechanism to settle the war in Gaza. He was not due to travel to the US until the board’s first official full meeting next week, but his trip was unexpectedly brought forward due to the US/Iranian negotiations over the latter’s nuclear weapons programme, with the next round of talks likely to take place next week...
