Spain’s PSOE-Sumar government to impose unpopular €10 billion military spending hike by decree

Alejandro López

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks with the media as he arrives for an EU Summit at the European Council building in Brussels, Thursday, March 6, 2025 [AP Photo/Omar Havana]

The Spanish government, a coalition of the social-democratic PSOE and the pseudo-left Sumar, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has announced a record €10.47 billion increase in military spending for 2025. The measure aims to meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP target—first demanded by the Trump administration and fully upheld by Biden. “This plan will help us meet [the target] in record time,” Sánchez declared. “Spain will contribute to defending Europe.”

Sánchez plans to impose this increase by decree, bypassing the normal budgetary process out of fear that he lacks the parliamentary support to pass it through a full vote. This authoritarian manoeuvre underscores how militarism and war are inseparable from a drive to dictatorship at home.

This escalation is being implemented as workers face soaring inflation, rampant housing insecurity, and precarious employment. It is an act of class war. The bulk of the funds are earmarked for offensive military hardware: tactical radios, the MC3 command system, a spy satellite, an electronic warfare ship, modernisation of F-100 frigates, a new support ship, the FCAS future air combat system, tracked vehicles, and seven amphibious firefighting aircraft. This is not for domestic safety, but for war.

The plan also includes measures to boost the Ministry of the Interior’s cyber intelligence and critical infrastructure capacities, tools that will be used to suppress anti-war and anti-austerity opposition.

In a warmongering address, Sánchez justified the spending by invoking a Europe surrounded by war. “The enemies of Europe,” he said, “are not just using missiles… They’re using drones, cyberattacks, and AI to sabotage our supply chains and polarise society.” Sánchez was clearly referring to Ukraine.

This is the largest rearmament initiative in Spain’s modern history. It reveals the advanced state of European imperialist war preparations, which are not only directed at Russia and China, but also at the United States, as Washington intensifies its trade war tariffs against the EU.

The announcement elicited the usual pro-forma criticism from Sumar, PSOE’s junior coalition partner. Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, Sumar’s de facto leader, condemned the plan as “a proposal born in the United States” and lamented the absence of “coordination at the European level.” She added, “Our model is a coordinated European defence project that does not involve increasing budgets.”

Díaz’s reference to the proposal’s US origins follows a recent visit by Spanish officials to Washington, where US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanded Spain boost military spending and scrap the digital services tax on U.S. tech giants. This came days after Sánchez visited Beijing, making him the first Western leader to do so since the US escalated its global trade war. In response, Bessent warned that aligning with China would be “like cutting their own throat.”

Sumar’s posturing is cynical. While decrying NATO’s “arms race,” it continues to rule alongside PSOE and implement NATO’s agenda. Díaz’s complaint is not about rearmament itself but the manner and origin of its orchestration. The real concern within Sumar and its Stalinist Communist Party (PCE) allies is the growing public opposition to war, not the war itself.

Enrique Santiago, PCE leader and Sumar coalition member, cynically claimed opposition to rearmament “not for personal or ethical reasons,” but because “the immense majority of society does not want to be complicit in genocides or rearmament.” He is not in principle opposed to imperialist militarism, but fears opposition to it on his left, from the working class. A November 2024 CIS poll found that only 14.2 percent supported increased military spending, while 50 percent demanded more health investment and 42 percent prioritised education.

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Podemos, now out of cabinet but still supporting the government in parliament, joined the charade. It denounced Sánchez for running a “government of rearmament and war.” Former Equality Minister in the PSOE-Podemos government (2020-2023) Irene Montero declared, “This is not what people voted for,” accusing PSOE of betrayal. Montero said the spending “will compromise people’s well-being” and “will lead to cuts,” making it impossible to continue “advancing feminist, anti-racist, social rights and security. That’s why it’s so important for people to take to the streets and mobilise to say, ‘No to war,’ ‘No to rearmament,’ and to strengthen the forces of peace,” she added in her statement.

Yet Podemos, like Sumar, is thoroughly complicit in the militarist agenda. Since 2020, it has backed every major military escalation, endorsed NATO’s war in Ukraine, and upheld arms sales to Israel. These parties have long served to provide a left cover for Spanish imperialism.

Speculation is mounting that the internal tensions may provoke a government crisis, potentially toppling Sánchez’s coalition. But even if PSOE falls, the militarist drive of the ruling class will not end. It would merely allow Sumar and Podemos to rebrand themselves as anti-war while continuing to advance a nationalist, militarised agenda from the opposition benches.

Podemos’ agitation against US imperialism is not anti-imperialist. It champions “European strategic autonomy,” a euphemism for creating a rival imperialist bloc. Its project divides the working class along national lines and severs solidarity with the millions in the US who are now protesting the fascistic policies of the Trump administration and the rule of the oligarchy. Rather than building international unity, Podemos sows divisions that bolster war and repression on both sides of the Atlantic.

This policy of “strategic autonomy” is aligned with the militarist ambitions of Europe’s capitalist class. It entails vast rearmament, the construction of a European military-industrial base, and proposals for a continental-wide nuclear deterrent. This is not an alternative to US domination, but another front in the deepening inter-imperialist conflict that twice plunged the world into global war.

The WSWS has consistently warned that Spain’s pseudo-left—Sumar, Podemos, the PCE—are not opponents of capitalism or war, but agents of imperialism. They speak for a privileged layer of the upper-middle class, fully integrated into the capitalist state, and are hostile to any independent mobilisation of the working class.

Their betrayal is most stark in Spain’s ongoing complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Despite public claims of suspending arms sales, the Sánchez government continues to procure Israeli military hardware “combat-tested” on Palestinians. The Civil Guard’s Economic Affairs Headquarters signed a contract for 15 million 9mm bullets, worth €6.6 million, with Guardian Defense & Homeland Security S.A., a subsidiary of an Israeli ammunition firm. The deal was discreetly published over the Easter holiday to avoid public backlash. Despite these efforts, the news became public and sparked widespread outrage. Yesterday, the Sánchez government was forced to rescind the contract, amid new revelations that Spain has awarded 46 contracts to the Israeli military industry worth over €1 billion since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The Guardia Civil is a paramilitary police force responsible for, among other things, maintaining public order. It operates with sweeping powers across rural areas and border regions and includes specialised units tasked with suppressing mass protests and strikes. That it sought to procure millions of bullets from an Israeli arms supplier, whose products are “combat-tested” on Palestinians, speaks volumes about the Spanish state’s preparations for internal repression amid mounting class tensions. Even if the bullets are now sourced from another supplier, the purpose remains the same: arming the repressive apparatus of the state against the working class.

The right-wing opposition Popular Party has made a show of demanding clarification, but it too supports rearmament. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo declared that his party “supports the Armed Forces.”

The PSOE–Sumar government’s war preparations mirrors developments across Europe. Nominally “centre-left” parties such as Scholz’s SPD in Germany and the Labour Party in Britain have been the chief parties in preparations for war and militarism. Billions are being funneled into the military while public services are gutted and democratic rights are suppressed.

Massive blackout paralyses Spain and Portugal

Alejandro López & Alex Lantier

People wait outside a closed train station, during a major power outage in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, April 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti]

A massive blackout on Monday brought Spain and Portugal to a virtual standstill, affecting tens of millions across the Iberian Peninsula. Subway networks, hospitals, airports, traffic lights, ATMs and telecommunications systems collapsed in scenes that brought a 21st-century population back to 19th-century conditions.

The outage, which began shortly after midday, left major cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Seville and Valencia paralysed. It also led to smaller blackouts and internet outages in parts of Morocco and southern France. As of nightfall yesterday, electricity grid operators had reportedly only been able to reestablish service for 20 percent of the population in Spain, and 10 percent in Portugal.

Social and economic life ground to a halt across the Iberian peninsula. Water mains and cell phones ceased functioning across much of the peninsula. Traffic collapsed into gridlock as non-functioning traffic lights turned roadways into death traps. In Madrid, Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida ordered the closure of the four main tunnels of the M-30 ring road. Adif, Spain’s state rail operator, suspended all services “until further notice” after trains and subways stopped, leaving masses of people trapped, many underground, in the dark.

Spanish Transport Minister Oscar Puente said the “main priority” was rescuing those trapped in trains, and that train stations would remain open “to help the lives of people who had to take the train and have no other choice than to spend the night there.”

Emergency services had to mount numerous operations to rescue people trapped in elevators that also suddenly stopped amid the blackout. In hospitals, only backup generators prevented disaster. Non-urgent interventions were suspended, and medical staff scrambled to maintain critical surgeries, life-support systems and patients relying on oxygen machines, who cannot survive long without electricity.

Industry and commerce collapsed. Shops and supermarkets were forced to close or operate cash-only as card payments and ATMs failed. In Terrassa, near Barcelona, shops selling generators were stripped bare by desperate residents. Across Spain and Portugal, industrial giants including Seat, Ford, Repsol and ArcelorMittal suspended operations—an economic shock compounded by widespread retail closures and disrupted supply chains already affected by Washington’s trade war tariffs.

Airports in Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon were plunged into chaos, operating on emergency generators as flights were delayed or cancelled. TAP Air Portugal instructed passengers not to come to the airport. Dutch tourist Marc Brandsma, stranded in Lisbon, told the Associated Press: “We haven’t seen any plane arriving or departing in the 50 minutes we’ve been waiting here.”

In the meantime, electricity companies are scrambling to reestablish service. Spain’s Nuclear Safety Council stated around 5 p.m. yesterday that Spain’s seven nuclear reactors were not in danger of overheating, despite the cutoff of electricity. Three reactors were offline, and the remaining four were automatically disconnected from the grid; emergency generators switched on to ensure the continued functioning of essential cooling and maintenance systems.

France’s Electricity Transport Network (RTE) said it was working with its Spanish and Portuguese counterparts to transmit first 750MW and then 900MW of electricity into the Iberian peninsula. This will facilitate restarting production, as plants across the peninsula are brought back online gradually, to avoid overloading connections inside Spain and Portugal.

Both the Spanish and Portuguese cabinets convened emergency sessions as they scrambled to contain the fallout. Amid unsubstantiated rumors of a Russian cyberattack that could have caused the outage, Spain’s intelligence services, including the National Centre of Cryptology and National Centre of Intelligence, launched an investigation into a possible cyberattack. There were also reports of a fire in southern France that could have taken out key electricity distribution interchanges with Spain.

As of this writing, however, Spanish and Portuguese authorities have said there was no evidence of a cyberattack. Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said there was “no indication” of foreign interference, in a speech in which he announced a state of emergency to allow for the state to send available electricity to the most vital consumers, such as hospitals.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that the Spanish government had assumed direct management of the blackout response in three regions: Andalusia, Extremadura and Madrid. Speaking from his official residence at La Moncloa, Sánchez warned: “We still do not have conclusive information about the causes of this outage, so I ask citizens to get their information through official channels. It is better not to speculate, we do not rule out any hypothesis.”

He urged Spanish people not to go out in their vehicles and to limit their use of electrical devices, adding: “We must focus on restoring the supply of electricity.”

While it is too early to determine with certainty what caused the blackout, initial analyses of the electrical grid suggest that the blackout had natural causes that interacted with a broader failure to make sufficient investments in the grid.

Portugal’s National Electricity Network (REN) issued a statement declaring: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, told the Guardian that this led the grid frequency to fall below the European standard of 50Hz, with “cascading disconnections of power plants.” He added that putting more renewables like solar and wind plants onto the grid, with more intermittent and unpredictable power output, requires more investment to ensure that this intermittency does not disrupt the grid frequency: “You cannot ignore it. You need the tools to keep the system running.”

The blackout has exposed the fragility of Spain and Portugal’s privatised electricity infrastructure. There have been warnings since the beginning of the year that Spain’s energy grid was suffering chronic vulnerabilities created by decades of deregulation and the chaotic expansion of renewables without investment in stabilising infrastructure. As El Economista explained earlier this year, Red Eléctrica had long been struggling with “elevated voltage oscillations” due to the combination of falling energy demand and the massive integration of renewable energy.

The situation became critical enough that the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) warned in January, “The system is losing margin for action in exceptional situations, with voltage levels reaching or even surpassing regulatory limits at certain points.” Indeed, a recent electrical incident in Madrid, where control problems disabled one of the most important train stations in the country, Chamartín, prefigured Monday’s national-scale collapse.

These blackouts expose the failures of capitalist electricity policies in Europe, which prioritise market deregulation and “green” investment profits over system resilience and public safety.

Tanzania’s CCM government suppresses the main opposition CHADEMA

Alejandro López

Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan and the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution—CCM) are intensifying their repression of the main opposition party, CHADEMA (Party for Democracy and Progress).

CCM, one of the longest-ruling parties in Africa, traces its roots to Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the bourgeois nationalist movement that led the country to independence from Britain in 1961 and governed under a one-party system for decades.

President of Tanzania Samia Suluhu Hassan [Photo by Scottish Government / CC BY 2.0]

On April 9, 2025, opposition leader Tundu Lissu, CHADEMA chairman and presidential contender in the upcoming October elections, was arrested after addressing a rally in Mbinga district. Lissu had been leading a nationwide campaign under the slogan “No Reforms, No Election,” demanding changes to the electoral process. He was charged with treason, a capital offense carrying the death penalty, for inciting rebellion and calling for election disruption.

Days later, Lissu was disqualified from contesting the 2025 general elections and CHADEMA was banned from participating in elections until 2030, citing its refusal to sign a code of conduct. At a sham court appearance in Dar es Salaam, Lissu was barred from entering a plea on the treason charge but pleaded not guilty to a separate accusation of publishing false information. Two senior party officials, Deputy Chairperson John Heche and Secretary General John Mnyika, were arrested en route to the hearing and released the following day. At least one party member was reportedly killed by police outside the courtroom, while dozens more were detained as police in full riot gear violently cracked down on protests.

Tundu Lissu addressing the parliament of Tanzania in Dodoma in 2017 [Photo by Likumbage / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Last September, a senior CHADEMA official was abducted and brutally murdered amid a wave of abductions targeting government critics. During the November 2024 local elections, CHADEMA reported that thousands of its candidates were barred from standing, as the ruling party claimed 98 percent of the seats.

Mounting repression and attacks on democratic rights in Tanzania is part of a broader authoritarian turn across East Africa and globally. In Uganda, the regime of Yoweri Museveni denied bail to opposition leader and four-time presidential candidate Kizza Besigye on fraudulent treason charges, after kidnapping him in Kenya and transferring him to Kampala for a military trial. In neighbouring Mozambique, FRELIMO has overseen the violent suppression of protests against its half-century rule, leaving over 350 dead. In Kenya, President William Ruto continues to escalate repression following the brutal suppression of protests against IMF-backed austerity measures that left over 60 dead and hundreds injured. Abductions and extrajudicial detentions of protestors have become routine, openly supported by the military and endorsed by the trade union bureaucracy. Even children’s school plays have been targeted.

These developments reflect the global resurgence of authoritarian rule, driven by the intensifying crisis of capitalism and accelerated by the attempts of Donald Trump administration to impose a dictatorship in the United States with attacks on migrants, anti-genocide protesters, and even sections of the judiciary. Across the globe, ruling elites are responding to deepening inequality and mass opposition with repression, censorship, and militarisation.

In Tanzania, repression unfolds against a backdrop of worsening social conditions for the working class and rural masses. Despite boasting annual GDP growth of over 5 percent, fuelled by foreign investment in mining, energy, and infrastructure, the majority of Tanzanians remain mired in poverty. The country is rich in natural resources vital to the global economy: it is one of Africa’s top gold producers, has significant offshore natural gas reserves at Songo Songo and Mnazi Bay, and boasts rare minerals like tanzanite, alongside substantial deposits of diamonds, nickel, coal, and uranium. Fertile agricultural land supports exports of coffee, cashew nuts, and cotton.

Regions of Tanzania [Photo by TUBS/GNU Free Documentation License / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Yet, 43 percent of Tanzanians still live below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day. Over 65 percent of the population is employed in agriculture, overwhelmingly in informal or subsistence conditions. Meanwhile, the working class, concentrated in the service, mining, and construction sectors, faces chronic underemployment, low wages, and precarious conditions.

The richest strata grow ever wealthier. Mohammed Dewji, CEO of Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited—a conglomerate operating across 11 countries—has amassed a net worth of $2.2 billion, equivalent to about 3 percent of Tanzania’s GDP. Rostam Aziz, with interests spanning telecommunications, energy, and mining, has a net worth of $700 million, while Said Salim Bakhresa, founder of the Bakhresa Group, holds $400 million.

Foreign investors, particularly in the mining and tourism sectors, extract billions of dollars in profits annually, while the Tanzanian state receives a pittance in royalty fees. These crumbs are bitterly fought over by rival factions within CCM, whose internal battles revolve around control of rent-seeking and bribe-taking schemes connected to mining and government contracts.

Tanzania’s trade unions, grouped under the 320,000 strong Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA), are entirely subordinated to the state. Nominally representing workers in various sectors, from education and health to mining and communications, they ensure that labour struggles are episodic while strikes are routinely criminalised.

CHADEMA has become the vehicle through which many workers, sections of the middle class and youth have sought to express their opposition to the CCM. It has performed well in elections, particularly in urban areas such as Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Mbeya, Mwanza, and Dar es Salaam. In January 2025, Lissu was elected chairman of Chadema, beating the incumbent Freeman Mbowe who favoured a more moderate line towards the government.

A lawyer by training, Lissu entered parliament in 2010 and ran for president in 2020. He was shot 16 times in a 2017 attack most likely orchestrated by the government. After losing the 2020 election to John Magufuli, who had served as Tanzania’s president from 2015 until his death in 2021, Lissu fled the country to Belgium. He returned in 2023, amid speculation that Magufuli successor, the current President Samia Suluhu Hassan was moving to relax restrictions on the opposition and the media.

But CHADEMA represents a faction of the elite that complains of being excluded from power and wealth under the TANU/CCM rule. Founded in 1992 during the transition to multi-party democracy, CHADEMA’s leaderships consist of many former CCM politicians and government officials. One of the most prominent is Edward Lowassa, a former prime minister and high-ranking CCM member, who defected to CHADEMA in 2015 after failing to secure CCM’s presidential nomination. His move brought a significant number of former CCM members into CHADEMA’s ranks.

CHADEMA is a pro-business party. Its 2023 election manifesto called for measures like a reduction of corporate tax from 25 percent to between 15 and 20 percent. On mining, oil, and gas, the party called for a “conducive environment for investors.” Its proposed reforms include privatizing the energy sector and making state-owned enterprises more “efficient”, a code word for privatization.

Across East Africa, similar bourgeois opposition movements have already exposed their bankruptcy. In Kenya, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) of billionaire Raila Odinga, long trading on calling protests for “more democracy” and “anti-corruption” has integrated into Ruto’s corrupt and brutal regime, as it intensifies repression against workers and youth opposing IMF-backed austerity.

The same fate awaits those who place any confidence in CHADEMA or other capitalist parties in Tanzania. Their function is to channel mass discontent back into the safe confines of capitalist rule, preserve the profits of foreign investors, and maintain the subordination of Tanzania to imperialism.

It is sixty years since the launch of Ujamaa, the so-called “African socialism” championed by Julius Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Workers and youth must reject the dangerous illusions that Ujamaa represents a model to which they can return.

Nyerere’s African socialism had nothing to do with socialism. It was a nationalist project, utterly dependent on Western aid and designed to prevent a genuine social revolution. Far from challenging imperialist domination, Nyerere became a favoured ally of the World Bank, securing aid to maintain a limited system of patronage that enriched a narrow elite while leaving the masses impoverished.

When Cold War priorities shifted in the 1980s and aid dried up, Nyerere and his successors in the CCM capitulated without resistance to World Bank and IMF diktats, initiating decades of privatisation, deregulation, and the deepening the poverty of the working class and rural masses.

Liberals win Canadian federal election dominated by Trump’s threat to annex the country

Roger Jordan

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney in London, England, Monday March 17, 2025. [AP Photo/Jordan Pettitt]

Liberal Party leader and former central banker Mark Carney will continue as Canada’s prime minister after his party won Monday’s federal election. The Liberals have fallen three seats short of the 172 needed for a parliamentary majority. However, their continued rule is not in doubt due to the support of a much-diminished New Democratic Party (NDP).

Carney will head a vicious right-wing government that will pursue rearmament for imperialist world war, work with the European imperialist powers to ensure the war with Russia in Ukraine continues, and mount brutal attacks on the social and democratic rights of workers at home to bolster the “competitiveness” of Canadian capitalism. His Liberals are pledged to raise military spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2030, although much of the corporate elite and national security establishment are urging a quick move to 3 percent or more. Even the lesser figure will entail huge attacks on social spending to cover the tens of billions in additional defence expenditure needed every single year.

In early January, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced from office, the Liberals were trailing the Conservative official opposition in the polls by more than 20 percentage points. However, on Monday under Carney they won 43.7 percent of the vote, an 11-percentage-point increase from the 2021 election, and 169 seats, up from the 160 they captured four years ago.

The Tories, whose far-right leader Pierre Poilievre failed to win his Ottawa-area riding, also increased their share of the vote. They finished with close to 41.5 percent, an increase of 7.5 percentage points, and 144 seats, a gain of 25. Poilievre’s personal fate, as well as the Tories’ failure to secure the thumping victory projected only a few months ago, reflects widespread hostility in the working class to the program of oligarchic rule, dictatorship and war represented by Trump and by Poilievre, who is widely viewed among workers and young people as the advocate of a Trump-style program for Canada.

The two main parties gained ground primarily at the expense of the social-democratic NDP and to a lesser extent the Bloc Quebecois. Together, the Canadian ruling class’s traditional parties of government secured more than 80 percent of the total vote for the first time since 1958.

The social democrats suffered an historic debacle, hemorrhaging both seats and votes. They captured just seven seats, down from 25 in 2021, a result that was decisive in the Liberal victory, and took just 6.3 percent of the vote, barely a third of their 17.8 percent share in 2021.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh resigned on election night after finishing a distant third in his Vancouver-area riding of Burnaby Central. Having failed to win the required minimum of 12 seats, the social democrats will no longer enjoy official party status in the House of Commons.

The election campaign was dominated by US President Donald Trump’s initiation of trade war against Canada, America’s supposed “free trade” partner in the USMCA, and his threats to use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st state—a demand he repeated on election day. Carney launched his election campaign by declaring that the vote was about securing Canada’s continued existence as an independent state. All of the parties, supported by the trade union bureaucracy and corporate media, have responded by whipping up Canadian nationalism to corral workers behind Canadian imperialism in the trade war with the US. Summing this up, Singh asserted near the beginning of his resignation speech late Monday evening, “Tonight, we’re all on Team Canada.”

Carney, in his election night victory speech, felt compelled to outline from the standpoint of the interests of Canadian imperialism that the partnership between Ottawa and Washington and the broader post-war capitalist order on which it rested have broken down.

“As I’ve been warning for months,” said Carney, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.”

Prior to Monday’s vote, both major party leaders had agreed to negotiations with Trump after the election. Remarking on his approach to talks with Trump, Carney declared:

We are once again at one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade, anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that while not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for our country for decades, is over.

He claimed that he would be negotiating an “economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations,” before adding that the talks with Trump will be conducted “with our full knowledge that we have many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians. We will strengthen our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.”

For Carney and the ruling class, the task they confront is imposing the cost of the deepest crisis of Canadian and world capitalism since World War II on the backs of the working class. The Liberal prime minister alluded to this when he declared, “We will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

How the unions and NDP helped elect the central banker Carney and the big business Liberals

Substantial sections of workers and youth voted for Carney to express their hostility to Trump, whose drive to establish a presidential dictatorship in the United States, and reorder the global economy and redraw the map of the world in the interests of US imperialism is deeply unpopular. The erroneous belief that, in spite of everything, the big business Liberals will in some way take the interests of working people into account in contrast to the right-wing Tories has been cultivated by the trade unions and NDP for years.

For the past three decades, the NDP and its union backers have trumpeted the line that the only way for workers to fight the right-wing Tories is by supporting “progressive parties,” i.e., the Liberals and NDP, at elections. The trade union bureaucracy’s subordination of the working class to the “left” parties of the capitalist establishment has gone hand-in-hand with their systematic suppression of the class struggle, thereby preventing workers from intervening independently into the political situation by exerting their tremendous social power to beat back the onslaught of corporate Canada on their wages, working conditions, and on the public services upon which they depend.

Since late 2021, Unifor, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), and its member unions have sabotaged one struggle after another by workers in a major strike wave that has swept across the country and all parts of the economy. Last December, as the Trudeau government was imploding with the resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) ran roughshod over the sentiments of rank-and-file postal workers and forced them to surrender to a patently illegal Liberal government back-to-work order.

The bankruptcy of the strategy of voting “progressive” is laid bare by the NDP’s election result. In the face of a fascist-minded President Trump in the White House itching to take over the country and a Trump-style demagogue at the head of the opposition Tories in Canada, the main beneficiary was a multi-millionaire former central banker and investment executive who has spent his entire adult life catering to the interests of the financial oligarchy.

The Liberals, the Canadian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government, gained ground at the NDP’s expense, especially in British Columbia and to a lesser extent in Ontario.

What’s more, the systematic smothering of worker opposition to austerity and war by the unions, and the NDP’s complicity in implementing these policies through its support for “progressive” governments, drove some workers into the arms of the far-right Poilievre. Like Trump, Poilievre was able to use a demagogic social appeal to some effect, exploiting workers’ anger at the indifference of the “left” and “liberals”— in the US, the Democrats, and in Canada the NDP-supported Trudeau government—to mounting economic distress.

The Conservatives won seats in traditional manufacturing areas that were previously considered NDP strongholds, like Windsor and Hamilton, Ontario, a development aided by the support of a section of the trade union bureaucracy extended to Poilievre during the election campaign.

The NDP’s collapse is the product of its unstinting support for the pro-war, pro-austerity Liberal government, which was given with the enthusiastic backing of the trade union bureaucracy. Since 2019, the NDP has propped up successive minority Liberal governments in parliament. It kept the Liberals in power as they oversaw the ruling class’s profits-before-lives pandemic policy; massively hiked military spending; played a leading role in the US-NATO instigated war with Russia over Ukraine; backed Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians; oversaw inflation-driven real wage cuts; and “reinterpreted” the labor code to arrogate the power to break strikes by government decree. Just one month after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Singh struck a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with Trudeau to keep the Liberals in power until 2025 for the purpose, as Singh himself admitted, of ensuring “political stability.”

Workers must oppose Trump and all rival factions of the Canadian bourgeoisie

Key sections of the bourgeoisie swung behind Carney, promoting him as a tested leader, because they view him as one of their own. He is considered a “safe pair of hands” who could reach a deal with Trump to bring Canada within a Washington-led “Fortress North America,” so long as its role as a junior partner of US imperialism is duly recognized. Despite Trump’s threats, the Canadian ruling class would prefer to revive and retain its more than eight-decade-long military-strategic partnership with Washington to pursue its global imperialist interests. It also considers Carney’s track record as a central banker for the oligarchy as a guarantee that he will impose the cost of the capitalist crisis on the backs of workers, which he has underlined during his brief prime ministership by shifting government policy sharply to the right.

In the less than two months since he took over from Trudeau, Carney has abandoned a proposed capital gains tax hike and pledged in the name of “free trade” between the provinces to abolish numerous labour regulations and other restrictions on business by Canada Day (July 1).

Nonetheless, it is a reflection of Canadian imperialism’s deepening crisis that support for Carney within ruling circles is far from overwhelming. The Globe and Mail, the mouthpiece of Bay Street, endorsed Poilievre on the eve of the election as the best instrument for imposing savage austerity and gutting all regulatory restraints on capital. The Conservatives also enjoyed the staunch support of much of Canada’s resource sector, especially Alberta’s oil and gas barons.

The breakup of Canadian imperialism’s traditional alliance with Washington and Trump’s threat to take over Canada have deepened longstanding regional tensions within the ruling class, which found expression in the election and could assume more malignant forms in the coming months. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, where Premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe have been critical of the official “Team Canada” response to Trump and pressed for a separate deal with Washington, the Conservatives won close to two-thirds of the popular vote and the Liberals barely more than a quarter.

While the Liberals gained ground from the separatist Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, the BQ still secured 22 seats and will return to parliament as the third-largest party. Quebec Premier François Legault and his right-wing Coalition Avenir Quebec government, with which the BQ has declared its affinity even though its formal provincial ally is the opposition nationalist Parti Québécois, has issued strident demands for Quebec’s interests to be recognized in any talks with Trump. Legault has also pushed for the development of new economic ties with the European imperialist powers, especially in the defence and mineral extraction industries.

As these competing and contradictory interests collide, and are exacerbated by the pressure sure to be applied by Washington during negotiations between Trump and Carney, the one certainty is that the ruling class in Canada will seek to offload its crisis onto the backs of the working class. The financial oligarchy wants the evisceration of workers’ democratic and social rights, the abolition of all regulatory restraints on corporate profiteering and environmental protection, the slashing of business taxes, and a massive increase in military spending to secure Canada’s interests in the global redivision of the world that is well underway.

Carney intends to deliver this program in close cooperation with the Liberals’ trade union partners, upon whom they will continue to rely on as they did under Trudeau to strangle opposition in the working class. As Carney put it Monday, he will be focused on “bringing together labour, business, and civil society to advance the nation-building investments we need to transform our economy.”

Pakistan warns Indian military strike “imminent,” as tensions between South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed powers flare

Rohantha De Silva

Indian paramilitary soldiers patrol as they guard at a busy market in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Tuesday, April 29, 2025 [AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan]

Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif warned Monday that an Indian military strike on his country is “imminent,” adding that Islamabad would respond with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons only if “there is a direct threat to our existence.”

Asif’s claim of an imminent attack was amplified by Pakistan Information Minister Attaullah Tarar late Tuesday. He said there was “verified intelligence indicating that India intends to carry out a military operation against Pakistan” within the next 24-36 hours.

Tarar went on to vow that Pakistan would respond to any Indian attack in kind, raising the spectre of a rapid descent into all-out war between the two countries. “Any military adventurism from India will receive a certain and decisive response,” declared Tarar. “The international community must recognise that responsibility for any catastrophic escalation will rest solely with India. The people of Pakistan will defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity at all costs.”

Tensions between South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed powers have been aboil since India’s government, led by the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), blamed Pakistan for a brutal April 23 terrorist attack near Pahalgam in Indian-held Kashmir that killed 26 tourists.

New Delhi has offered no proof for its claim of Pakistani state involvement in the Pahalgam atrocity, and has rejected out of hand Islamabad’s calls for an international investigation into the attack.

Instead, the Indian government has taken a series of provocative “reprisals,” and given every indication that it is preparing a cross-border strike on Pakistan—potentially even larger than those it mounted in 2016 and 2019, after similarly holding Pakistan responsible for the actions of Islamist insurgents in Indian-held Kashmir.

In recent days, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior government leaders have made repeated threats against Pakistan, pledging to smite the “masters of terror” and the “organizers,” not just perpetrators of terrorism, without directly naming the country.

Meanwhile, in the name of “hunting militants,” Indian security forces have launched a campaign of mass repression in Kashmir so harsh and indiscriminate that even pro-Indian politicians from the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) National Conference and the J&K People’s Democratic Party have been forced to criticize it.

On Tuesday, according to a Press Trust of India source, Modi gave India’s armed forces complete “operational freedom” to determine the “mode, targets, and timing” of India’s response to the April 22 attack, at a meeting with the heads of the country’s national-security establishment. Those said to have participated in the meeting include Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan, and the heads of the army, navy and air force.

Pakistan is likewise preparing its military for combat. Speaking with Reuters on Monday, Defence Minister Asif said Islamabad had placed its forces on high alert and implemented measures to counter and respond to an Indian attack. “We have reinforced our forces because it is something which is imminent now. In that situation, some strategic decisions must be taken, so those decisions have been taken.” Indicating the state of tensions and the possibility of an Indian strike triggering a cascade of escalating tit-for-tat military reprisals, Asif went on to raise the issue of what threat level would trigger a Pakistani resort to its nuclear arsenal.

Every night since last Thursday has seen what is described as cross-border small arms fire along parts of the Line of Control (LOC). The LOC is the boundary that demarcates Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir, pending final resolution of their competing claims to all the territories of the former British Indian princely state of Kashmir.

On Tuesday, Pakistan’s military boasted it had shot down an Indian quadcopter surveillance drone along the LOC, “thwarting a violation of its airspace.” It has also seized an Indian Border Security Force soldier who reportedly strayed across the LOC while accompanying local farmers who were tending to their crops.

The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and more broadly power and influence in South Asia is a reactionary conflict between rival capitalist powers. Its roots lie in the communal partition of South Asia into an avowedly Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India in 1947-48.

With the aim of securing geostrategic and economic advantages and as a means of directing class tensions outward and dividing the workers and toilers through the incitement of communalism, the capitalist elites of Indian and Pakistan have perpetuated the conflict over the past eight decades. Untold human and material resources have been squandered in multiple wars, declared and undeclared, and numerous border skirmishes and war crises, and in procuring and developing armaments, including, since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons.

The BJP government, aided and abetted by the corporate media and the opposition parties, is using the Pahalgam atrocity to whip up bellicose nationalism, stoke communal reaction and launch fresh attacks on democratic rights.

Right-wing Hindu organizations that enjoy the patronage of the governing BJP have launched attacks on Kashmiri students studying elsewhere in India, forcing hundreds to flee to their native region. On Tuesday Modi met with Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu supremacist RSS, reportedly to discuss India’s response to the Pahalgam attack. The BJP is an offshoot of the RSS, which has a long bloody record of communalist incitement.

When the head of a major Indian farmers’ organization voiced opposition to India’s provocative announcement that for the first time ever it is suspending its participation in the Indus Water Treaty, because it would harm Pakistani farmers, he was widely pilloried, with a BJP leader accusing him of “speaking the language of Pakistan.”

On Monday, the government cut off access to more than a dozen mainstream Pakistani YouTube media channels, including Dawn News and Geo News, on the grounds they were airing “provocative content” and “misinformation on India, its Army, and security agencies.”

Last Thursday, the leading Stalinist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, participated in an all-party meeting convened by the BJP to help stampede the population behind its exploitation of the terrorist attack to whip up reaction and launch military action against Pakistan. The CPM has criticized none of New Delhi’s “retaliatory” actions against Pakistan, including the expulsion of all Pakistani nationals in India save diplomatic personnel, and the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, which threatens, especially over the longer term, Pakistan’s access to water vital for its power grid and irrigation.

Over the past two decades, the India-Pakistan conflict has become ever more entwined with that between US imperialism and China, adding a massive new charge to both.

Washington’s drive to build up India as a counterweight to China, which has included granting India a raft of strategic favours, has upset the balance of power, or more appropriately balance of terror, between New Delhi and Islamabad.

This has emboldened India to try to effectively change the rules of the game in its relationship with Pakistan, with the aim of asserting itself as the regional hegemon. Like its US and Israeli allies, New Delhi has asserted the “right” to stage illegal cross-border attacks on Pakistan. When it did so in 2016 and 2019, it received Washington’s backing under Obama and then Trump.

Pakistan has responded by doubling down on its “all weather” strategic partnership with China, further straining relations with India and the US.

In 2019, the Modi government sought to strengthen its grip over Jammu and Kashmir and its hand against both China and Pakistan by illegally abolishing the Muslim-majority territory’s special autonomous constitutional status and reducing it from a state to a central government-controlled Union Territory. At the same time, it spun off Ladakh, which borders Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin, from Jammu and Kashmir, so as to facilitate the region’s militarization.

On Tuesday, China for the second straight day expressed alarm about the heightened tensions between India and Pakistan.

While Iran and Saudi Arabia have sought to engage both sides, and the United Nations and European Union have called for restraint and dialogue, Washington has said next to nothing, and is certainly not intervening to restrain its ally India.

Supreme Court bars Trump deportation flights

Patrick Martin

U.S. Supreme Court police officers outside of the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington. [AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana]

In an emergency order issued between midnight and 1 a.m. on Saturday, the US Supreme Court halted an attempt by the Trump administration to ship dozens more Venezuelan migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador under an executive order in which he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The action—rare in both its timing and its evident distrust of the executive branch—led to at least one busload of migrants turning around as it reached the airport in Abilene, Texas and returning to a detention camp run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Just as extraordinary as the late-night issuance of the order was the dissent filed by the two most fascistic justices on the high court, written by Samuel Alito and endorsed by Clarence Thomas. The two denounced the seven-member court majority—which apparently included all three justices nominated by Donald Trump—because they had acted on warnings by the American Civil Liberties Union that the mass deportation was only hours, or even minutes, away. That these warnings were true was apparently of no concern to Alito and Thomas.

A rapid-fire series of legal maneuvers began Wednesday when lawyers for two Venezuelan migrants held at Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas filed habeas corpus motions against deporting their clients, following the procedure laid down by the Supreme Court last week.

Federal Judge James Hendrix, appointed by Trump during his first term, denied the motion the next day, stating he had received assurances in which the government had “answered unequivocally” that it did not intend to deport the two men. Their attorneys appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative in the country, but the appeals court turned them down.

Also Thursday, immigration lawyers learned that a group of more than two dozen Venezuelan migrants had been moved by ICE from all over the country to the Southern District of Texas. They had then been bused to the Bluebonnet facility, in the Northern District of Texas, evidently to evade a restraining order against deportation flights issued in the Southern District.

In a further demonstration of duplicity, ICE gave each migrant a notice, in English only, which many cannot read, declaring that he would be deported immediately. This was an effort to comply with the Supreme Court directive while robbing it of any substance, since the notice did not even inform the migrants that they could file an appeal against their deportation.

On Friday, ACLU lawyers appeared again before Judge Hendrix, but with an unusual request: that the judge issue his ruling, for or against their clients, by no later than 1:30 p.m., so they would have time to appeal it before any deportation flight could take off.

When Hendrix failed to meet this deadline, the lawyers for the migrants filed an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, with the same declaration of urgency: rule quickly, so that an appeal can be filed with the Supreme Court. The ACLU attorneys then went directly to the Supreme Court, and the court majority took it up, bypassing both the Fifth Circuit and the justice who is assigned to oversee it, Samuel Alito, and acting before the Department of Justice could even file a response on the issue.

Given these circumstances, the decision of the Supreme Court to take up the matter at all, and then to issue an emergency order temporarily stopping the deportation flight until the matter could be considered by the lower courts, is unusual, perhaps unprecedented. The decision was made so rapidly that the order was issued before Alito could finish writing his five-page dissent. He only declared that his dissent would be coming, and published it later in the day.

As Mark Allen Stern, the legal commentator at Slate magazine, observed:

The majority’s decision to wade in straightaway points to a skepticism that the Justice Department was telling the truth. It’s damning, too, that the majority did not even wait for DOJ to file a brief with the court before acting. The only plausible explanation for the court’s order is that a majority feared the government would whisk away the migrants to El Salvador if it did not intervene immediately.

This fear was well-founded. NBC News reported Sunday it had obtained video of several ICE buses full of Venezuelan migrants headed towards Abilene Airport on late Friday evening, about 30 miles from the Bluebonnet Detention Center, with an escort of nearly two dozen police vehicles. The video shows the motorcade passing the Abilene Airport, looping around it, and then returning in the direction of the ICE prison.

“These men were close to spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had any due process,” Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU immigration attorney, said after the ruling. “The case has a long way to go. But for now, we are relieved that the court has not allowed the Trump administration to hurry them away in secret.”

The Supreme Court intervention is only a temporary reprieve, even assuming that the Trump administration abides by it. White House officials have already voiced their ire over the ruling, with Trump himself, in a post on Truth Social, sarcastically wishing “Happy Easter” to “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue…”

The Department of Justice filed a motion with the Supreme Court later Saturday asking the justices to lift their own emergency order, but suggesting that, in the interim, the Trump administration wanted to shift the legal basis on which it claimed authority for the deportation flights. It sought to use other anti-immigrant laws, while litigation over the Alien Enemies Act continues.

“The government has agreed not to remove pursuant the AEA those AEA detainees who do file habeas claims,” wrote US Solicitor General D. John Sauer. “This court should dissolve its current administrative stay and allow the lower courts to address the relevant legal and factual questions in the first instance—including the development of a proper factual record.”

This language is remarkable as well, since it effectively admits that the government was prepared to ship dozens of migrants from Venezuela to a prison in a third country, El Salvador, without having provided the necessary legal and factual basis for doing so.

In this photo provided by El Salvador's presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S. to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP) [AP Photo]

Moreover, in the most high-profile deportation case, that involving Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration did not make use of the Alien Enemies Act. ICE agents simply seized the immigrant worker, who has lived in the US for half his life and is married to a US citizen with whom he has three children, and put him on one of the earlier deportation flights to El Salvador.

Media attention over the case has focused on the visit by Maryland US Senator Chris Van Hollen to El Salvador, where he was able eventually to meet with Abrego Garcia, confirming for his family that he was alive and healthy.

Van Hollen, a Democrat, was featured on virtually every Sunday morning television interview program, where he denounced the Trump administration’s lawless anti-migrant policy and called the denial of due process for Abrego Garcia a threat to the democratic rights of all Americans, citizens as well as non-citizens.

This is certainly true, but neither the courts nor the Democratic Party should be relied on to defend these rights. The perfidy of the Democrats was indicated, even as Van Hollen was visiting El Salvador, when California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom criticized the focus on Abrego Garcia as “the distraction of the day,” saying that Democrats should instead draw attention to the economic consequences of Trump’s tariff war.

Referring to Trump and the Republicans, Newsom said, “This is the debate they want.” Democrats look like they are “defending MS-13” and “someone who’s out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador.”