Sánchez plans to impose this increase by decree, bypassing the normal budgetary process, underscoring how militarism and war are inseparable from a drive to dictatorship at home.
This move by the PSOE-Sumar government is a blatant act of intimidation and criminalisation of youth opposition to fascism and war.
The participation of Sumar in the war plans underscores the political complicity of middle class pseudo-left parties in European plans for war with Russia.
Sumar, the PSOE’s junior coalition partner, known for offering mild criticisms of government decisions, on this occasion eagerly backed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
M23 now controls nearly all of North Kivu and the province’s vast mineral wealth—including tin (cassiterite), tantalum (coltan), tungsten (wolframite), and gold, which are critical for global electronics and industrial production.
The conflict comes amid rising global tensions after Donald Trump’s election, especially between Washington and Beijing, over control of strategic minerals like those present in the Congo.
Driven by internal crises and faced with the rapidly declining position of US and European imperialism on the world scale, the African continent and its rich resources are increasingly seen as a necessary means for their other war fronts.
The development of the revolutionary socialist movement was inseparably bound up with the struggle against imperialism.
The conference’s proceedings, discussion and conclusions made clear that the continent’s rich resources and human labour were to be exploited for profits. Its mountains, lakes, rivers, canals and coastlines were now geostrategic enclaves in the competition for world hegemony.
Amid growing protests and political dissatisfaction across southern Africa, the NPA is intervening to promote right-wing bourgeois parties and thus block a broader, united offensive in the working class for socialism.
SWAPO’s decline and that of other anti-colonial national movements have exposed the organic incapacity of Africa’s bourgeois nationalists to realise the aspirations of the African masses for freedom from foreign domination, democracy and social justice.
The official inaction at the floods that cost at least 223 lives also exposes the political complicity of the CCOO and UGT union bureaucracies, who are tied to the ruling PSOE and Sumar parties.
Scientists long warned Spanish and EU authorities of the need to protect Valencia from floods, but masses of people received no warning until walls of water broke over their homes and workplaces.
Spain’s worst flood in decades is a social disaster driven by the ruling elite’s inability to plan policies to halt climate change, or even to devise basic disaster management plans advocated by scientists.
Notwithstanding WSWS’ well-documented differences with Errejón and Podemos, it unequivocally condemns this baseless and reactionary witch-hunt against him.
The longstanding ties of Podemos and Sumar with German middle class politicians now developing explicity xenophobic policies exposes their own reactionary, nationalist politics.
The law and order speech Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave in Dakar, Senegal could have been given by any right wing politician.
Fourteen months ago, Sumar was presented with great fanfare as the new “left” party of government to replace Podemos, but it implemented the same policies of war, austerity and attacks on immigrants.
Madrid’s entirely empty endorsement of the ICJ aims not to stop the genocide, but to cover for its decision to continue shipping weapons through Spain to Israel for use against Gaza.
On Saturday, the Revolutionary Left (IR) group posted a statement calling for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk—a Trotskyist opponent of the fascistic Zelensky regime, and the NATO-instigated Ukraine-Russia war, now threatened with life imprisonment.
