The Daily Beast: Fish and Fascism: How Italy Is Turning the Tide Against the Far Right

The movement started in Bologna just one month ago when Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini held a rally promising to draw 6,000 people to spread his anti-immigrant message and capture the city ahead of regional elections in January. A group of four friends started sending messages on social media to stage a counter protest and “pack the piazza like sardines” to stand up to Salvini. Nearly 15,000 people showed up, and the movement was born. [...]

One of the group’s founders Andrea Garreffa, a 34-year-old tour guide, said Saturday that the group is more of a phenomenon than a real political movement. They just want to start a conversation. “We are trying to get people to start talking about the direction of this country, to get them involved in politics and not give up,” he said. [...]

Whether the sardines can really turn the tide is yet to be seen. The Five Star Movement, which is currently in power and was previously aligned with Salvini, started in the country’s piazzas just like this and grew against all odds to a mainstream political party that has fallen as quickly as it rose.

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The Guardian: Tactical voting was set to be Remainers’ saviour, so what went wrong?

Why so few successes? It was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority. [...]

Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn. These Tories preferred a Brexit Britain governed by Johnson to a stop-Brexit government led by Corbyn.

The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. This was the case with Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in 1997; it was not with Corbyn and Swinson last week.

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Politico: The Labour civil war has already started

The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.

Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.

After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]

The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.

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statista: An election battle drawn on Brexit lines

As this infographic shows though, parties whose stance was either anti-Brexit or pro-second referendum actually won a majority of the votes - 51.2 percent. The parties looking to 'get Brexit done' - based either on conviction or the desire to honour the referendum - garnered just 46.8 percent. That though is of course irrelevant in practical terms and something which will be made very clear in the coming weeks as Boris Johnson and the Conservatives press on with their now large parliamentary majority.

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The Atlantic: Russia’s Twin Nostalgias

Long before Stalin’s rule, the Russian elite would relax here, valuing the distance from Moscow both geographically (it is about 1,000 miles away) and culturally (it lies a short distance from what is now Georgia, and across the water from Turkey). Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s widow, Anna, moved to Sochi to escape violence in St. Petersburg surrounding the Bolshevik revolution, buying a piece of land on the outskirts of the city where she built a house and planted a garden, calling her little retreat “Joy.” (Dostoyevskaya lost that home soon after she moved in, when a soldier attacked her as part of the Bolshevik campaign against property owners, saying the house now belonged to the working classes, and forcing her to flee once again. Along with the personal cost to her, she also lost a part of her husband’s archive—handwritten copies of The Brothers Karamazov are still missing as a result.)

After coming to power, Stalin in 1926 ordered his commissars to plant botanical gardens here. Hoping to curry favor with the leader, each one—among them Kliment Voroshilov, Genrikh Yagoda, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze—also built and ornately decorated hotels in their name. These structures included enormous neoclassical columns, pompous arches, grandiose fountains, and statues of naked Greek gods next to busts of Soviet heroes. In less than a decade, a dozen such palaces emerged, each one next to the other, along Sochi’s hills, offering healing mineral water, spas, and baths. [...]

After that, the city cultivated a reputation as a vacation destination for workers across the U.S.S.R.—thanks to state-provided packages that included stays at health resorts and various healing programs. Miners, engineers, or factory workers as far away as the northern reaches of Siberia knew that after a year of hard work, they would be able to take a month-long break here. Millions living in grim industrial cities dreamed of warm Sochi nights, where the tropical air added to the sense of excitement. Here, residents of closed and secretive towns could even see foreign tourists visiting from Eastern Europe, or African countries allied with Moscow, all together on open dance floors. For locals, Sochi was a beloved place, its quiet and romantic embankment populated by old people playing chess, the city’s pace relaxing and peaceful.

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