The left fights back: Change or lose may be the lesson

In 1944, when the Allies’ grandees were shaping the post-war world Joseph Stalin interrupted one of Winston Churchill’s sweep-of-empire monologues, in which he argued that Catholic Poland should be treated well so as not to alienate the Vatican, with one of his infamous invocations of realpolitik: “How many divisions does the Pope of Rome have?”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón may not have many divisions — military ones anyway — but in the darkening world of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orbán and those who would ape them, their victories are a reminder that the forces of the worst kind of insular, nativist nationalism — which should never be confused with patriotism — can be resisted.

In an irony that Stalin might have enjoyed, it is possible that many of those Americans, Mexicans or Spaniards who would usually reject the left voted for one of that trio rather than endorse increasingly strident, bellicose right-wing candidates.

This weekend Mexico — population 128m — elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a 64-year-old known as Amlo, as their next president.

Amlo got 53% of the vote but in another defeat for the status quo José Antonio Meade, who represented the party that ruled Mexico for most of last century, got a paltry 16%.

Caught between frightening drug wars and a hostile American administration Amlo faces huge challenges. Only time can tell if he is equal to them.

It is just a month and a day since Pedro Sánchez became prime minister of Spain. He replaced the conservative Mariano Rajoy who was swept aside over a corruption scandal that riddled his People’s Party.

Not yet 50 Sánchez, like Macron and Varadkar, is representative of Europe’s new generation of leaders.

Austria’s chancellor Christian Kern, who is not yet 32, is a contemporary but that he is the only hard-right leader among his contemporaries must mean something.

Christian Kern

Amlo and Sánchez may have had to travel difficult paths to leadership but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, had a far more daunting journey.

She confronted and defeated the established order of the Democratic Party in New York.

She won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district, defeating the incumbent, Democratic caucus chair Joseph Crowley. Crowley, showing Clintonesque disdain for the bedrock constituency of his party, sent a proxy to a debate with Ocasio-Cortez.

That, at 56, Crowley was regarded as “new blood” by the Democratic Party is another of the very many reasons that Trump is in the White House.

Already Ocasio-Cortez is a figurehead for those Americans determined to ensure that Trump is a one-term president.

These swings and roundabouts seem significant even if far away but what messages to they offer? Could the core message be that politicians must change or be swept away?

Could it be that politicians can only run with the hare and hunt with the hounds for so long?

Could it be that unless our politicians confront the sectional interests groups behind our dysfunctional health system, our housing crisis and the lobby responsible for our climate change denial that they will join Rajoy, Crowley and Nieto in the hall of has-beens?