A new international political situation

21 October 2025
Jordan Humphreys
Protesters at a Palestine solidarity rally at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, 24 August 2025 CREDIT: Joel Carrett/AAP

It has been an extremely tumultuous year in world politics. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, and the strengthening of the far right across the globe have shaken up politics in country after country. Tensions are mounting as the US and China increasingly manoeuvre against each other on the world stage. Russia presses on with the war on Ukraine, taking advantage of divisions within the Western bloc. Meanwhile, Europe is going through its largest rearmament project in decades. The international so-called liberal order, already in decline, has fragmented further in the face of these developments.

At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of the global movement in solidarity with Palestine, which has radicalised a whole generation of young people around the world. Over the last two years, we’ve had massive protests, university occupations, the disruption of arms factories, civil disobedience, flotillas and now blockades and strikes for Palestine.

All of this has strengthened the already existing polarisation across the world between progressive left-wing people who want to free Palestine, reject the far right, and abolish the billionaires, and those who look to ultra-reactionary nationalist politics as a solution to the crisis of the global liberal order.

While these developments have been gestating for years, their combination at this particular moment, alongside new developments such as the nature of Trump 2.0 and the impact of the Palestine movement, has created a new international political situation. In many ways this is a build-up of quantitative changes turning into a qualitative shift. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but it is important to recognise that we are entering into a new emerging political period.

The crisis of the global liberal order

In the last twelve months, there has been a significant retreat of liberalism and centrist politics around the world. Trump’s return to the White House, the Biden-Harris debacle, the backlash against identity politics, and liberalism’s contortions over Gaza have all fed into a feeling that liberalism is incoherent in the face of a rapidly transforming world.

This crisis of liberalism isn’t reducible to the state of the global economy. The inflation surge and subsequent steep rise in the cost of living that began in 2021 have slowed down in most countries. This hasn’t stopped the advance of far-right forces whose momentum has gained a political dynamic of its own.

However, it would be wrong to see the crisis of liberalism as just a superstructural crisis of ideology and political culture. It is underpinned by very real contradictions within the material structures of global capitalism.

The global liberal order constructed in the wake of the collapse of the USSR has clearly exhausted its ability to contain the mounting pressures undermining its ability to produce a relatively safe and stable world for capital accumulation. This, in turn, has destabilised the systems of political representation that were constructed on the basis of this liberal order, particularly in the Western world. While each has its own dynamics, the result has been crises in the parties of conservatism and liberalism across the globe.

This is largely a problem of the system’s own making. The neoliberal boom years of the late twentieth and early 21st centuries were primarily underpinned by the explosive growth of production chains in Asia, particularly in China and India. As is well known today, this laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of a multipolar imperialist system that has, in turn, undermined American hegemony.

“The postwar global order is not just obsolete”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed, “it is now a weapon being used against us”. The Trump administration’s solution is to break apart this global order and reconstitute it on a more aggressively pro-US basis.

This isn’t just rhetoric. Trump has undermined the power of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other multilateral institutions. He has wielded tariffs to an extent not seen in decades, threatening the stability of global markets and production chains. While it is still very unclear how far he is willing, or able, to actually restructure the global economy, this is the most serious attempt to do so since the advent of neoliberalism. There is also an imperialist logic to this that Trump’s ruling class critics can’t totally ignore. If a serious confrontation with China is a real possibility, then American capitalism is simply not prepared. Too much industry vital for such a war has been moved offshore, too much technological development has been shared with other nations, too many undisciplined US corporations have put their own interests ahead of American capitalism as a whole and, too often, ideological aversion to state intervention has constrained the projection of American power.

And while Trump is the most aggressive proponent of this position, versions of it have increasingly become mainstream in the US political establishment and beyond. “Yesterday’s heresy—fears that globalization would destroy U.S. workers, for instance, or that increased economic integration would turn into a zero-sum game—has become, in most quarters of Washington, today’s conventional wisdom”, explains a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. “There is little daylight on economic policy between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and the only change in Trump’s second term is how much more eager he is to jettison any remnant of the old shibboleths.”

China is seeking to ride out Trump’s action and gain influence over nations alienated by his erratic policies. They have pushed ahead with building up China’s military forces, which were put on full display at the China Victory Day Parade in September. Despite Trump’s trade attacks, China has also worked hard to both protect and, as far as possible, keep expanding its insertion into the heart of the global economy. China’s exports to the US have dropped by 15 percent, and China’s domestic economy is struggling. On the other hand, Chinese exports to Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa have continued to surge to record heights. China’s trade surplus with the world is predicted to be its highest ever this year, possibly breaking the US$1 trillion mark.

The shift towards a multipolar world also opened the space for other capitalist powers to settle old scores and flex their military might. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its provocative actions in Europe are one example. Israel’s aggression across the Middle East is another. As was the brief conflict between India and Pakistan in May, the underlying roots of which are far from resolved.

Overall tendencies towards militarism and economic nationalism are increasing, another expression of the breakup of the old liberal world order. While there was initially hope that the rest of the world would resist the allure of protectionism in the wake of Trump, this seems to be fading as more and more countries adopt tariffs. The most recent example being the trade battles over Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals and the flood of cheap Chinese goods that can no longer enter the US, into the European and South American markets.

Debates over European rearmament are another example of the shifting patterns of economic nationalism. Germany’s leaked procurement plan is based on massively expanding European weapons manufacture, with only 8 percent of new spending being used to buy US weapons. Governments around the world are discussing how they can rebuild domestic industry geared towards military production.

The pressures undermining the global liberal order go well beyond the geopolitical. While the global economy is growing, the cumulative impact of years of increasing inequality and job insecurity, punctuated by periodic economic crises and surges in inflation, has shattered people’s confidence that economic globalisation can continue to produce a higher standard of living. The stock market might rise or inflation fall, but most people don’t think their lives are going to get much better any time soon.

This has intersected with the protracted crisis in political parties and governments across the globe. Establishment parties of both the centre right and centre left have collapsed or been radically transformed in country after country, while the space for new parties of various political hues has increased. All of this makes the business of political governance extremely unstable and complicated. The traditional capitalist parties of conservatism and liberalism have largely been taken over by the hard right with their liberal wings either sidelined or breaking away. Or else they have been eclipsed by new far-right parties. This is what happened with Reform UK and the Tories, and with the French Republicans and National Rally.

Across all classes in society there is a deterioration of traditional political loyalties (or in the case of younger generations a total absence of loyalties). Beyond political parties, there is a deep cynicism towards anything that smacks of defending the status quo or the establishment. The lack of faith in the mainstream media, public health and social organisations of all kinds is prominent—as is the ability of mass protests, on either the left or the right, to occur without established institutional support.

Outside of the advanced capitalist countries, the contradictions are even deeper. Faith in the ability of global economic forces to drive forward development and living standards in the Global South has collapsed. Instead, a post-colonial capitalist class has enriched itself while dismantling what little protections existed for workers. The gulf between yesterday’s promises of prosperity and the reality of the present has underpinned social struggles over inequality, corruption and democracy in Morocco, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere this year.

Considering all of this, it should be no surprise that the centrist political parties and institutions—which staked their legitimacy on the ability of globalisation to enrich larger and larger sections of the population, mitigate against wars and genocides, and produce a multicultural cosmopolitan world—have suffered the greatest crisis of purpose.

This doesn’t mean that centrism, liberalism and what remains of social democracy are finished, but it does throw up questions about their future development. Keir Starmer’s UK government is trying to combine elements of standard Blairite politics with greater scepticism about globalisation, a turn towards state intervention and stronger lurches to the right over racism and opposition to trans rights. It is notable that the increased use of state intervention is primarily about toughening national borders and expanding military production. This is combined with vague promises of domestic industries providing better wages one day and steep cuts to social spending today. All guns and little butter seem to be the agenda. Whether this marks a new trajectory for centrist politics globally remains to be seen. What it does show is the difficulties for centre and centre-left parties in this transition period.

The consolidation of the far right

Far-right organisations have taken advantage of this crisis. And their success has intensified the crisis within the global liberal order as they seek to reshape the world in line with their agenda.

Trump’s administration, with its control over the most powerful state in the world, has been a key factor in driving forward the far right’s project. His electoral victory and presidency have opened the floodgates for the mainstream legitimation of everything from crank theories of autism to conspiracy theories about the UN and George Soros. More importantly, Trump has used the power he wields to enact far-right policy. With the Republican Party firmly in the hands of the far right and with Vice President J.D. Vance being promoted as Trump’s successor, there is no chance of this changing any time soon.

During Trump’s first presidency, significant sections of the US ruling class were willing to stand up to him. Now, they have overwhelmingly fallen in line behind the White House. With the forces of liberalism substantially weaker, this means Trump’s impact has been more far reaching and destructive.

The far right is also a major political force across Europe. The Prime Minister of Italy is Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy. In France, Marine Le Pen, the leader of National Rally, has been the runner up in the last two presidential elections, receiving 41 percent in the 2022 runoff and increasing the representation of her party in the National Assembly from seven to 120 in the last three years. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland has gone from success to success despite embracing more and more radical right-wing, if not openly fascist, positions. In the elections at the beginning of this year, it came second, winning 21 percent of the vote. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party is currently polling at around 30 percent, the highest of any party, as support for the Starmer government collapses. The attendance of more than 100,000 people at a rally organised by Tommy Robinson in London was another sign of the strength of these forces.

As these examples make clear, the far right is a significant political force in the very heart of European power and capital. These are just the more prominent examples. Across Scandinavia and Central Europe, the far right is also strong, and is gaining ground in more left-leaning Southern European countries as well.

Then there are influential currents within the more mainstream conservative parties that are very close politically to the far right. And, on the other hand, we have seen even more extreme far-right figures and organisations emerge or expand their influence that criticize the larger far-right parties for not going far enough. Several countries have seen the growth in far-right-led violent demonstrations, most notably in Northern Ireland and in the UK. And surrounding this are the broader networks of far-right social media personalities and influencers.

The outcome of this is that, in many countries, the far right often sets the tone of mainstream politics. In England, widespread sexual abuse of children is exposed, and the far right transforms it into a crusade against migrants and refugees. In France, the so-called Great Replacement theory, which claims that millions of Muslims are invading the country to seize control, is treated as a serious point of discussion. In Germany, almost all of the political parties now agree that former Chancellor Angela Merkel should never have allowed Syrian refugees into the country in 2015— a position originally only really argued for by Alternative für Deutschland.

For years, we have noted the “rise of the far right” around the world. What we have seen this year is something qualitatively different. While the 2010s marked a period of political flux, in which far-right influences battled with traditional conservative forces over the future of right-wing politics, this has come to an end in most countries. It has resulted in what is likely a permanent right-wing shift in the traditional right-wing parties, combined with the solidification of far-right electoral forces either within them or in new stable formations. In the process, the whole structure of American and European politics has been transformed.

The connections between the failures of global capitalism, the breakdown of the liberal order and the rise of the far right have become much more obvious and penetrated into global political discussion. For example, Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved The Way To Fascism is an international best seller. The Global Progress Action Summit (featuring Albanese, Starmer and the leaders of Spain and Canada) was (hilariously) filled with calls for the centre-left to avoid being seen as defenders of the neoliberal status quo if they have any chance of defeating the far right. Too often, such connections are used as evidence that support for the far right is simply a confused but legitimate response to the crisis of global capitalism, and that the way to defeat fascism is to adapt to far-right concerns over the impact of migration and other issues.

The consolidation of the far right doesn’t mean that it is undefeatable. Trump’s popularity remains low. The fact that right-wing governments are in power and are now responsible for managing the system opens greater possibilities for popular discontent. The entrenchment of the far right into positions of power does mean that dislodging them will require much greater levels of struggle and organisation than in the recent past. In most countries, we are well past the days when the radical left could nip the far right in the bud by disrupting their relatively small street marches. Instead, taking on the far right means thinking in terms of social struggle, general strikes, creating a left-wing electoral alternatives and eventually building mass socialist parties.

The space on the left grows

The consolidation of the far right, the genocide in Gaza, and the inequality and alienation of modern capitalism have also created a larger audience for left-wing politics. While this has been building for a while, 2025 saw strong signs that this audience has grown substantially.

The shift to the left has been strongly reinforced by the crisis of official liberalism and what remains of social democracy. Gaza exposed deep divides between establishment liberalism and its more left-wing variants. The clash between the Democratic Party leadership and young left liberals over the Gaza encampments in the US last year was one expression of this. In the UK, Starmer’s war against pro-Palestine sentiment, including the left wing of his own party, led to expulsions and resignations of large chunks of the Labor membership and elected representatives. This has fuelled the rise of the UK Greens and Your Party. Several prominent left-wing writers, such as Owen Jones and Yanis Varoufakis, have hardened their criticisms of the centre left. After briefly being a part of the New Popular Front, the French Socialists are now backing Macron’s unpopular neoliberal government, providing the necessary votes for his new prime minister in the face of widespread outrage from the country’s left. With the partial exception of the Spanish Socialist Party, the old continental social democratic parties are exhausted and weak.

More broadly, the idea that centrism, liberalism and the centre left have paved the road for the triumph of the far right and Israel’s genocide has become a lot more mainstream on the left. While simplistic, it’s not for nothing that "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” has become a popular meme. While Gaza brought these tensions to a head, they have been developing over a long period and around a range of issues. Young left-wing people want to fight the far right, the billionaires, Israel, militarism, racism and war, at the same time as establishment liberalism is moving to the right on all of these questions.

In some countries, new, or at least newer, left reformist parties have started to fill at least some of this space. La France Insoumise has shifted left in recent years and consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe with almost 400,000 members. The German Die Linke has grown from 58,000 to 112,000 this year. Around 800,000 people have signed up for Your Party in Britain. The growing confidence of a left liberal section of the Democrats around Sanders, AOC and Mamdani is another, albeit much shallower, expression of this phenomenon.

However, the polarisation of a section of society towards the left has been expressed far beyond people signing up for left reformist parties.

This year, the global Palestine movement intensified, culminating in general strikes for Palestine in Italy, Greece and Spain, and enormous worldwide demonstrations supporting the Gaza flotilla. Earlier this year, Germany had the largest demonstration since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which took place in opposition to the normalisation of the far right. Alongside this, there have been impressive blockades of far-right conferences involving tens of thousands of activists over the last two years. Despite Trump’s election victory, millions have taken part in the No Kings protests across the US. There have been flashpoints of resistance to his anti-migrant policies in LA, Chicago, Portland and elsewhere. In France, opposition to neoliberal attacks continues with the “Block Everything” protests and strikes. In Greece, there have been two massive general strikes against new anti-worker laws. In Belgium, a national strike against austerity measures in October resulted in clashes with police in Brussels.

Across the Global South, there have also been the “Gen Z” protests. While these rebellions take place in countries that rarely have much of a left or a workers’ movement, they are strong signs of discontent existing in country after country. There are echoes of the cycle of revolts that took place in 2018-19 before that wave was closed off by the pandemic.

This has all been a positive development. The Gaza ceasefire plan reveals, though, that the political situation is also incredibly volatile and unstable. So it is likely that further developments on the left will be uneven as well.

For revolutionaries, a key task is building socialist organisations that can combine firm Marxist principles with a strategic flexibility to relate to unstable political developments in a rapidly changing world. This is no small challenge when the revolutionary left is coming out of a difficult period and also confronts a situation with few useful historical analogues.

In the past, the left was dominated by mass social democratic parties and trade union leaders who organised working-class action and broader social protest, while seeking to contain this struggle and, in particular, the actions of its most radical activists. In this situation, a key task for the revolutionary left was to seek out the most radical elements of this broader movement and convince them of the need to form a revolutionary Marxist party separate from the reigning reformist behemoths.

While building a revolutionary organisation remains crucial, the context today is very different. What remains of the traditional social democratic parties are very rarely the organisers of struggle, even in the compromised way they were in the past. The trade unions at least have links to their working-class members, but they have become far more conservative as well. Instead, the revolutionary left is mostly confronted by a growing sea of unorganised, polarised left-wing people with little to no pre-existing political framework outside of shaky commonsense liberal sentiments subconsciously internalised.

This can make it difficult for revolutionaries to orient. At the same time, though, it is a historic opportunity for the revolutionary left. The decline of the old social democratic forces opens the possibility to shape the ideas of a new generation of radicals in a way that has been impossible for many decades. This places a big responsibility on the shoulders of the revolutionary left. Marxists have to show why revolutionaries have the answers to the problems of today, not just why everyone else is wrong. We have to explain why revolutionaries can lead struggles to victory, can intervene principally but effectively into elections, can build a militant workers’ movement and, ultimately, a mass revolutionary socialist party that can fight for human liberation. If we are to shape the politics of a new generation, then that will mean putting revolutionary Marxist politics to the test. And as the revival of European left reformist parties shows, the space on the left won’t be relatively open forever.

The world is rapidly changing—2025 has provided us with the strongest signs in years that the space for socialist politics is opening. Now is the time to seize the moment.


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