Wednesday, April 08, 2026

LA Teachers Strike: 68,000 Education Workers in 3 Unions Set to Walk


Glenn Sacks
 April 8, 2026

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Image by LaTerrian McIntosh.

Three unions representing 68,000 education workers are set to strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District beginning Tuesday, April 14.

United Teachers Los Angeles has been working without a contract for nine months, in contravention of the long-held labor position of “no contract, no work!”, and we have been negotiating for over a year. Service Employees International Union Local 99 and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles have also been unable to reach an agreement with LAUSD.

In 2019, UTLA struck alone. In 2023, SEIU, which represents LAUSD bus drivers, special education assistants, custodians, and cafeteria workers, launched a three-day “Unfair Practice Charge” strike, and UTLA, refusing to cross their picket lines, conducted a three-day Solidarity Strike.

This time the three unions plan to strike together.

What Is This Strike About?

LAUSD claims it is in a financial crisis and doesn’t have the money to pay the salaries and other provisions the three unions want. UTLA and its allied unions believe LAUSD is vastly overstating its financial challenges.

LAUSD started this school year with a $5.03 billion reserve, its highest ever. In fact, LAUSD has greatly underprojected reserves every year from 2013 to 2025.

Moreover, the percentage LAUSD holds in reserve is often double or triple that held by other major California school districts. Legally, LAUSD is required to hold only 1% of its budget in reserve ($188 million).

To Be Fair to LAUSD…

…the district does face real problems, as the unaffordability ​of housing and changing demographics have combined to shrink LAUSD enrollment, and federal immigration actions have stemmed the flow of new students into LAUSD.

Yet LAUSD attempts to link these problems to contract negotiations and greatly exaggerates its challenges in order to mislead Los Angeles education workers into accepting an inferior contract.

LAUSD Negotiator: Teachers Take Away Money from Our Students

At a recent LAUSD-UTLA session, a consultant employed by LAUSD actually told the many educators present “all teachers are taking from their students to fund teachers’ healthcare.”

As charming as this accusation was, it isn’t an outlier. In recent months LAUSD has tried to make it appear as if UTLA’s demands are outlandish, and has implied that they can’t be met, or can only be met at the expense of others. Those others include:

Younger teachers, who LAUSD implies may be displaced or laid off due to UTLA’s demands

Non-UTLA education workers, such as those at LAUSD’s central offices (aka “Beaudry”)

Students, who will lose out as money is diverted away from them and towards educators

None of this is true, but it makes good PR.

And the Master of PR Is…

…LAUSD’s Alberto Carvalho. As the battle heated up late last year and early this year, Superintendent Carvalho, having fed the media LAUSD’s financial distortions and gotten headlines screaming “Layoffs, Cuts and Closures Are Coming” and “LAUSD warns of layoffs and cuts”, etc., did a Clinton-style “I feel your pain” routine, telling reporters that when it comes to losing teachers, he cares deeply and is “working around the clock to minimize any and all impact.”

The message is: LAUSD is in deep crisis but our superintendent is doing everything he can to save teachers’ jobs and (sigh) UTLA leadership just refuses to be reasonable and understand the position he and LAUSD are in.

Except the only “crisis” is the one he’s manufactured and then is swooping in to “save” us from. This man is talented.

Will LAUSD Bring Carvalho Back?

Carvalho was put on administrative leave by LAUSD on February 27 after his home and office were raided by federal agents as part of a Department of Justice investigation into the failed artificial intelligence company, AllHere, that the district contracted with for a chatbot called Ed.

Carvalho has recently expressed a desire to come back to work, but his return in the near term seems unlikely. He is a charismatic leader, and leaving him out of the picture disrupts LAUSD’s leadership. Nonetheless, LAUSD has good reasons to leave him on the sideline.

For one, he and the story surrounding him would be a distraction, and during last-minute negotiations or a strike there could, at any moment, be a disruption from new raids, a criminal indictment, or a public revelation of more damaging information.

Also, while it is certainly possible that in the end Carvalho will be cleared of wrongdoing, there’s no doubt his starpower has been dimmed by the scandal. For LAUSD, this diminishes the potential value of his return.

While I don’t wish Carvalho any harm personally, his demise, or at least his temporary demise, is a break for UTLA. He’s very skilled at public relations and working the media, far more so than our 2019 adversary, then-superintendent Austin Beutner. Also, in a school district filled with immigrant families, he has his own heroic undocumented immigrant story, and speaks fluent Spanish. I was not looking forward to going up against him in a strike.

Carvalho has been replaced, for now, by Acting Superintendent Andres Chait.

Mr. Chait, That’s an Odd Thing to Say for a Guy on the Eve of Provoking a Strike…

On the one-month anniversary of becoming LAUSD Acting Superintendent, Chait sent LAUSD employees an email emphasizing, “We are Los Angeles UNIFIED” and tells us “From our students and families to our teachers and staff, from those who support our classrooms to our civic and philanthropic partners, we are one Los Angeles Unified.”

Why Doesn’t LAUSD Make AALA a Better Offer?

It’s indicative of how unreasonable LAUSD’s bargaining position has been that they’ve even managed to alienate their own partners in management. I assume that one reason for LAUSD’s surprising intransigence with its management partners is that whatever raise AALA gets, UTLA and probably Service Employees International Union will demand at least as much.

Still, strategically LAUSD has put itself in a bad position. In the pre-strike/strike public relations contest in the media, how can LAUSD claim they’re being reasonable when even their own school-site management is against them?

For many years, LAUSD avoided disputes with AALA because AALA had the so-called “me too”, whereby whatever pay raise UTLA won, the administrators got it too. Many in UTLA have long complained about this, but I’ve always ​disagreed.

“Me too” divided administrators’ loyalties, particularly during contract negotiations and strikes. One could see this in 2019 and 2023–while LAUSD principals and vice-principals followed LAUSD’s directives, for the most part their hearts were clearly not in it.

In 2023 LAUSD Labor Relations removed the “me too” clause from compensation negotiations.

Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents principals and assistant principals, is only being offered a 7% pay raise over two years–4% for 2025–26 and 3% for 2026–27.

AALA: a Prediction

As it stands right now, according to Chait, schools will be closed during the strike. He explains:

“When you have three unions, UTLA, SEIU and AALA, who have all indicated that they would strike together, it is exceedingly difficult, if not nearly impossible, to maintain schools open during that scenario.”

I think LAUSD is being foolish, and I expect they’ll make AALA a decent enough offer that they won’t strike with us. I hope I’m wrong.

Striking Alongside Our Bosses?

Striking alongside our bosses is new in LAUSD labor relations, and it does feel a little odd.

The other day my principal said, “It looks like you and I will soon be on the picket line together.” I put my arm around his shoulder and said, “Yes, all of us, comrades fighting for the proletariat against the bosses, the very essence of class struggle–I can hardly wait!”

I’m not sure how comfortable he was with the idea when it’s put that way…

LAUSD–They’re Underpaid, So You Should Accept Being Underpaid

In lecturing us on why we shouldn’t get a bigger raise, LAUSD says, “Over the past 10 years, the 20 biggest school districts in California gave an average pay raise of about 30%. During that same time, LAUSD gave a 36% increase—the highest among comparable districts in the state.” But teachers throughout the state–throughout the country–are underpaid. Because others are underpaid, should we accept being underpaid too?

It’s reminiscent of the famous story about baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio’s salary negotiations after his stellar sophomore season in 1937. DiMaggio demanded a $40,000 salary. Yankee business manager Ed Barrow told him this was impossible, after all, even Yankee Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig, Barrow claimed, wasn’t making $40,000.

Barrow expected that DiMaggio, just 22 years-old, without an agent, and in an era where baseball players were bound to their teams in perpetuity by the infamous reserve clause, would quickly fold.

Instead, the young DiMaggio looked at Barrow and plainly stated, “Then Mr. Gehrig is a badly underpaid player.”

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was recently recognized by LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner for “exceptional levels of performance.”

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Carney attracts a 5th Conservative lawmaker to Canada's Liberal Party

The Liberals now have 171 Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. They need 172 to secure a majority government, which would allow them to unilaterally pass any bill.

ROB GILLIES
Wed, April 8, 2026 
The Canadian Press / AP


Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers some remarks as MP for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong Marilyn Gladu looks on during an event in his office in Ottawa, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. (Adrian Wyld /The Canadian Press via AP)


Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with MP for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong Marilyn Gladu in Ottawa, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. 
(Adrian Wyld /The Canadian Press via AP)


TORONTO (AP) — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has attracted another opposition Conservative lawmaker to the Liberal Party, further assuring that he will soon have a majority government.

Ontario Member of Parliament Marilyn Gladu alluded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to Canada’s sovereignty and economy for her decision to defect to the governing Liberals. Trump has talked about making Canada the 51st U.S. state and has applied punishing tariffs on certain key sectors.

“We need a serious leader who can address the uncertainty that has arrived due to the unjustified American tariffs,” Gladu said Wednesday, alongside Carney in his office.

“We need a global leader with a plan to make a more resilient Canada, a stronger Canada, a more self-reliant Canada, for this critical moment and that man is our prime minister Mark Carney.”

Gladu is the fifth Canadian lawmaker to defect to Carney and the fourth Conservative. She called it a “large Liberal tent” and said that she'd rather be inside it than outside.

“She is going to be a great member of our team,” Carney said. “This all comes at a time when the country as a whole is uniting.”

Her defection puts the Liberals on the verge of having a majority government and being able to pass any bill without opposition party support.

The Liberals now have 171 Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. They need 172 to secure a majority government, which would allow them to unilaterally pass any bill.

Carney has called special elections for three districts for Monday that would give the Liberals a majority government if his party wins one of them.

The prime minister announced on March 8 that votes will be cast April 13 in the Toronto-area districts of Scarborough Southwest and University-Rosedale, which are considered safe seats for the Liberals, and in the Montreal-area riding of Terrebonne, which is considered a toss-up.

The three other Conservative legislators who defected from their party to join the Liberals in recent months were Chris d’Entremont, Michael Ma and Matt Jeneroux. One member of the leftist New Democrats party, Lori Idlout, also defected to the Liberals.

Jeneroux referenced Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as helping his decision. In the speech, Carney condemned economic coercion by great powers against smaller countries and received widespread praise and attention for his remarks.

Carney, the former head of the Bank of England as well as Canada's central bank, has moved the Liberals to the center-right since replacing Justin Trudeau as prime minister in 2025 and winning a national election.

Gladu's defection is another blow to Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who lost the previous national election last year and even his own seat in Parliament. He has since rejoined the House of Commons.

Poilievre won a party leadership review earlier this year, but continues to have problems controlling his lawmakers.

“Mark Carney is seizing a costly Liberal majority that voters denied him, and doing so through backroom deals,” Poilievre said in a post on social media.

Poilievre said that in January, Gladu said that floor crossers should face voters in a special election to give voters the final say.

“She should honor her word and let voters decide,” he posted.

Gladu, the member of Parliament for Sarnia-Lambton near the U.S. border, served as the Ontario co-chair for Poilievre’s 2022 leadership campaign.

“This is stunning, not only because Gladu is the fourth Conversative member of Parliament to cross the floor to join the Carney Liberal caucus since the fall, but also because she had been a Conservative member of Parliament since 2015 and that she had strongly criticized the Liberals in the past,” said Daniel Béland, a political-science professor at McGill University in Montreal.

“Gladu was not typically seen as one of the most likely Conservative MPs to jump ship at this time so it must be quite shocking for many Conservatives," Béland said.



Canada's Carney on verge of majority government after another opposition member joins ruling Liberals

By David Ljunggren and Maria Cheng
Wed, April 8, 2026 
REUTERS


Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney looks on before making an announcement at the new and currently under construction Embleton Community Centre and Park, in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, April 7, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

FILE PHOTO: Marilyn Gladu, a Conservative member of parliament at the time, holds a Tim Hortons cup as she arrives at a national caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada January 24, 2020. REUTERS/Blair Gable/File Photo

OTTAWA, April 8 (Reuters) - A Canadian opposition legislator defected to the ruling Liberal Party on Wednesday, leaving Prime Minister Mark Carney on the verge of a parliamentary ‌majority that would make it easier to push through his agenda.

The centrist Liberals, governing with a minority ‌after the April 2025 election, need opposition support to pass key legislation. Carney says he needs a majority to deal with U.S. President ​Donald Trump's trade measures.

The prime minister welcomed the defection by Marilyn Gladu - a longstanding member of the right-leaning Conservatives - saying it would help the government at a time of global uncertainty.

Gladu is the fourth Conservative legislator to defect to the Liberals since November. A member of the small left-leaning New Democratic Party joined the Liberals last month.

"We need ‌a global leader with a plan ⁠to make a more resilient Canada, a stronger Canada, a more self-reliant Canada for this critical moment and that man is our Prime Minister Mark Carney," Gladu said during a ⁠meeting with Carney.

The Liberals now have 171 seats in the 343-seat House of Commons, one short of a majority, and look set to gain at least two more in special elections due to be held on Monday to fill vacant seats.

Conservative ​leader Pierre ​Poilievre accused Carney of "seizing a costly Liberal majority that voters ​denied him, and doing so through backroom deals." ‌He said in a statement that Gladu should step down and face voters in a special election.

Only the governments led by John A. Macdonald and Jean Chretien have seen more politicians defect to the ruling party, including five legislators who joined Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, in a single day in 1869.

Semra Sevi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said the number of defections to Carney's government was "extraordinary by any historical ‌measure."

"Switching in the 19th century occurred in a system where party ​labels barely registered with voters," Sevi said in an email. In ​the modern era, she said the number of ​politicians from opposition parties who have now jumped to Carney's government "is without precedent at this ‌rate and in this compressed a timeframe."

A majority ​would open the way to ​Carney serving until October 2029.

According to Nanos polling from late last month, Carney was the preferred prime minister of 54.5% of Canadians, with Poilievre scoring 22.9%. Carney has said he has no plans to call ​an early election.

The latest defection will ‌put more pressure on Poilievre, who survived a leadership review in January after he blew a large ​lead and lost the 2025 election. The party was not immediately available for comment.
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The backlash against the backlash: Socialist feminism & left politics in a time of reaction

By Diana O’Dwyer
Published 

feminism versus far right Rupture

First published at Rupture.

After every crisis of capitalism comes protest and social upheaval — of a progressive or reactionary character. The 2008 crash was followed by a decade of progressive mass movements: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, feminist movements for abortion rights and against gender-based violence, and revolutions and near-revolutions like the Arab Spring. In Ireland, we saw mass movements against water charges, for marriage equality and abortion rights and progressive legislation on gender recognition. Just like in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the civil rights movement was followed by second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War and May ‘68, the mass movements of the 2010s sparked other mass movements.

Unfortunately, both waves of progressive mass protest were also followed by, first, a global economic crisis and then a conservative backlash. In the 1970s and ‘80s, this meant the oil crisis, Reagan, Thatcher and neoliberalism. In the 2020s, the Covid crisis accelerated a growing far-right backlash and ushered in a new phase of reaction across the world. If you were looking to pinpoint a date when the anti-feminist backlash took off, it would probably be Trump’s first election as US President in November 2016. A rapist running on an anti-choice platform, Trump promised to overturn Roe v. Wade. This ultimately happened in June 2022, shortly after the Depp vs. Heard trial sounded the death knell for #MeToo. Trump’s second Presidency has put the backlash into turbo drive. The most powerful man on earth is again a known rapist. DEI programmes have been decimated, reproductive rights are under attack and traditional gender roles are being forcibly reaffirmed.

The seeds of the backlash were already there pre-Covid, but lockdown isolated people from real life, and the algorithm enticed them into noxious online echo chambers. This created the perfect environment for a paranoid conspiracy theory pipeline, leading from Covid denialism and anti-vax propaganda to racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. We all have friends, family members or co-workers who have lost their minds since Covid - their brains swamped by a never-ending flood of shit.

To paraphrase Marx and Engels, no matter how much progress we make under capitalism, short of a revolution, we cannot finally rid ourselves of the “muck of ages” — it will re-emerge in various forms until the whole rotten system is overthrown. This is painfully apparent in two of the main fronts in the current anti-feminist backlash — reproductive rights and the family — and gender-based violence.

Reproductive rights & the family

Historically, fascists were notorious for burning books. Now they want to burn contraceptives as well. It was reported in July1 that the Trump administration had decided to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives earmarked for USAID programmes in Africa. A State Department official referred to them as “certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts” because the stocks included IUDs and emergency contraceptives.2 This is connected to the dismantling of USAID — but the reason the Trump administration wanted to burn the contraceptives rather than sell them or give them away is clearly ideological. Blocked by laws in Belgium (where the contraceptives are stored) that prohibit incinerating reusable medical devices, the plan now seems to be to allow them to expire. Planned Parenthood estimates this will lead to 174,000 unintended pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions.

This literal destruction of reproductive rights is going hand in hand with the rise of a reactionary pro-natalism — championed most notoriously by Elon Musk, the slayer of USAID, who has fathered fourteen children with at least four different women. Outside of Musk’s tech bro weirdness, pro-natalism is more usually associated with the valorisation of marriage, the traditional nuclear family and rigid gender roles. It is intrinsically bound up with racism; its raison d’etre is to avoid immigration - the only other way to grow the labour supply.

The “tradwife” phenomenon is part of this. Sophie Lewis3 analyses it as an attempt to escape the “double shift” of paid and unpaid work. Women’s participation in the workforce has meant they end up doing two jobs instead of one, while their wages are swallowed up by housing and childcare costs. People cannot afford to have children until their 30s or 40s and so end up having fewer children or none at all. Parents, especially women, are exhausted by this double shift.

The far right’s response to this crisis of biological and social reproduction under capitalism is to blame it on feminism — just like they blame the housing and cost of living crisis on migrants. They say that a man’s wage used to be able to support the whole family. But now, because of feminism, everyone has to work. So it’s feminism that is destroying families, driving down birth rates and driving up the cost of housing because mortgages are now based on two incomes rather than one.

This narrative exploits a sense among some men that they are being brought down to the level of women or even below — for instance, through the decline of male manual labour and feminisation of professional jobs. Of course, this ignores the fact that women are still significantly poorer than men. The hourly gender pay gap is around ten per cent but the lifetime earnings gap is much wider; women take more time out of the workforce for childcare and are more likely to work part-time. Women also do twice as much housework as men, even when both are working full-time.

Men’s loss of privilege is in no way absolute; it’s just less than it used to be. This sense by men of a loss of privilege relative to women and a desire to reassert that privilege is fuelling the rise of the far right — just like a loss, or perceived loss, of relative superiority among white people is fuelling racism. Right-wing demagogues fan the flames of this fratricidal resentment, identifying it as the perfect way to prevent working class solidarity against the billionaires they represent.

Richard Seymour writes that the “loss of distinction” is experienced by the supporters of the far right as a massive impoverishment, “tantamount to the downfall of civilization”.4 Women or black and brown people doing less badly than white men than they used to might not sound like a good enough reason to burn things down. So conspiracy theories like the “Great Replacement” are required to link it all into one great big imaginary disaster. That’s why the language of the far right is so ludicrously apocalyptic.

The politics of gender-based violence

Lurking barely below the surface of the backlash is the threat of violence. The far right cynically exploits increased concern about gender-based violence to justify pogroms against “military-aged” foreign men. Yet those involved are often perpetrators of violence against women themselves. Half of those arrested recently for racist rioting in the North of Ireland had previously been reported to the police for gender-based violence.5

Reported rates of gender-based violence are on the rise, too. This is partly due to greater awareness post-#MeToo, but the apparent proliferation of sexist attitudes since the 2010s suggests it’s also a real increase. Some studies have found worsening sexist attitudes among young men. For others, it's not so much that young men have become more sexist but that young women have become more progressive.

Research by Women’s Aid has found that 67% of young men hold, or don’t disagree with, traditionalist sexist attitudes about masculinity, compared to 40% of men overall.6 This includes beliefs like: “men who don’t dominate in relationships aren’t real men”; “Men should use violence to get respect if necessary”; “A man’s worth is measured by power and control over others” and “Real men shouldn’t have to care about women’s opinions or feelings”. Feminists often point to the growth of the manosphere as increasing sexist attitudes among young men. A study by Dublin City University7 found that within hours of setting up a social media account more than three-quarters of content recommended to 16-18 year old males on TikTok and YouTube was masculinist, anti-feminist or otherwise extremist. Big tech companies know that people watch extreme content for longer, which means they see more ads and buy more stuff. So the proliferation of the manosphere is directly driven by the attention economy big tech profits from.

Beyond the instinct to rubberneck, something else in the manosphere is appealing to young men. Women’s Aid describes influencers like Andrew Tate as “discuss[ing] themes around traditional masculinity, independence, and resilience”. Part of the reason this resonates is that the economics of late capitalism have robbed young men of autonomy and control over their own lives that would have been taken for granted in previous generations — for instance, being able to move out of their parents’ house. The average age for moving out of home is now 28.8

Men have also lost economic control over women. Increased female participation in the workforce has made women less financially dependent on men, which makes it harder for some men to form or maintain relationships. On top of this, women have more sexual freedom due to changes in attitudes towards sexuality. A Gallup poll last year found that 29% of Gen Z women in the US identified as LGBTQ+ compared to 11% of Gen Z men.9 In this context, manosphere content around working out, physical and emotional strength and dominating over women may give men back a sense of control.

As with reproductive issues, the far right speaks to real issues and anxieties but provides reactionary, sexist solutions: restoring traditional gender roles, returning women to the home, using male violence supposedly to protect us, denying us economic and biological freedom. Instead of addressing real economic causes and providing affordable housing or public childcare, the far right’s “solution” is to restore distinction and division among the working class and leave the class system intact. Ours is to abolish both distinction and the class system by fighting oppression and exploitation at the same time. That is the only way to unite the working class and end the rule of capital.

The backlash to the backlash

After several years when the far right seemed to be growing almost unopposed, there is now a growing backlash to the backlash. In the last year, we have seen renewed movements on gender-based violence, including protests in support of Nikita Hand, marches of thousands on International Women’s Day and smaller marches against the manosphere to the headquarters of social media companies. Women are also to the forefront in countering racism and in the Palestine solidarity movement, including through groups like Mothers against Genocide. An exit poll10 from the General Election last November showed twice as many women as men voted for People Before Profit, with 7% of women voting for the Social Democrats compared to 4% of men.

We can also see signs of a backlash to the backlash in recent positive election results for the left in Ireland and internationally. Catherine Connolly won the Presidential election by the largest ever margin, running on a progressive left platform that opposed imperialism and war, championed the “meitheal”11 and spoke out against the rise in anti-immigration sentiment as “misplaced” “anger … channelled to the wrong people.”12

Die Linke performed unexpectedly well in the German elections in February, running on an economically left, anti-far right platform13 and outpolling Sahra Wagenknecht’s economically left but socially conservative BSW. Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain are signing up to join Your Party and the leftward-moving Greens. Zohran Mamdani has just won the New York mayoral election on a cost-of-living-focused left platform, which included universal free childcare as a core demand and defended trans people’s right to healthcare.14 Rather than deciding “woke is dead” and throwing trans and racialised people under the bus, like some on the left have been tempted into doing, Mamdani’s success showed that it is possible to “bake in” socially progressive politics alongside a “bread and butter” left economic programme. Significantly, in addition to increasing turnout, he flipped 15% of Trump voters into supporting him.15

A notable feature of the backlash years has been a growing political gender divide internationally, from Ireland16 to the US, Europe and South Korea. This can be seen as a problem for the left because we obviously need both men and women to succeed — especially in relation to the global ecological crisis. It’s also a massive opportunity: to recruit more women and redress the historic gender imbalance across most left activist organisations.

There are also reasons to be hopeful that the gender divide is more a case of young women politicised by a decade of feminist movements moving left, than it is of young men moving right; that young men have mostly been more apathetic than radicalised.17 This is important because it means organisation and mobilisation can move young men leftward, like it has young women.

Mamdani’s election is interesting here, bucking the trend by attracting roughly equal support from women and men18 while also winning 81% of LGBTQ+ voters.19 What unites all of these recent left electoral successes is a massive youth vote. Die Linke was the most popular party for 18-24 year olds,20 62% of young voters under 30 chose Mamdani,21 and two-thirds chose Connolly.22 After several years of almost uninterrupted gloom and a seemingly inexorable drift to the far right, there is reason to be hopeful again, if we keep on fighting.

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