CP of Venezuela, PCV statement on the May 25 regional and parliamentary electionsThis Sunday, May 25, regional and parliamentary elections will be held in Venezuela in a profoundly anti-democratic context marked by the absence of electoral guarantees, institutional opacity and a repressive escalation unprecedented in recent history. This new process has been called by a National Electoral Council (CNE) lacking all legitimacy after its direct participation in the cover-up of the results of the presidential elections of July 28, 2024. The electoral maneuver attempted to be imposed this May 25 cannot be disassociated from that inconclusive and fraudulent process that culminated in the unconstitutional and unlawful inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, who has been usurping the Presidency of the Republic since January 10. The CNE, controlled by the leadership of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), has made its hallmark the flagrant violation of the processes established in laws and regulations, as well as the lack of transparency. A few days before the elections, the official schedule has not been published in the Electoral Gazette; the right to freely run for office was not guaranteed either: electoral tickets were eliminated without any explanation and numerous opposition candidates were arbitrarily disqualified. It should be recalled that the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), as well as various organizations of different political tendencies, has been subjected to judicial intervention, which has prevented our organization, as well as all the revolutionary and popular forces from presenting the Venezuelan people with an independent electoral option.
http://www.solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Venezuela-PCV-statement-on-the-May-25-regional-and-parliamentary-elections/ Serbia: on the demand for new elections The students leading the ongoing protests across Serbia recently announced that they are demanding early parliamentary elections, in which the students will propose their own list of candidates. All opposition media outlets loudly reported this statement, and the masses expressed their support out of trust in the students. Some activists have gone as far as to say that anyone who is in favour of bringing down the regime of Aleksandar Vučić will support this demand. The long-awaited political expression of the movement in Serbia is finally taking shape, due to awareness that the current regime will not bring justice to the victims of the canopy collapse in Novi Sad, which sparked the current protests. Rather than joining the chorus of praise for this move, as part of a comradely and democratic debate on this issue, we want to highlight how the movement went from rejecting elections to demanding them, and what contradictions this demand entails.
https://marxist.com/serbia-on-the-demand-for-new-elections.htmWill Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not. : Review of Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (HarperCollins, 2025) and Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin, 2025) At their heart, neither Fight, nor Original Sin, nor the scandal itself are really about Biden’s infirmity. The United States is not the first country, and the Democrats are not the first party, to wind up with a leader who is unfit, unpopular, and incapable of continuing to lead. But other political parties are able to swiftly and ruthlessly change their leadership when the time comes. Not so in the case of the Democrats, who the four authors show not only struggled to do anything about Biden even when they knew full well he was taking them all off a cliff, but then begrudgingly replaced him with a leader they had equally little faith in. That speaks to a dysfunction at the core of the party that’s much bigger than one sick leader. Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden. And yet, as each book recounts, she quickly locked up full party support anyway, and Democrats simply swapped out one candidate they desperately didn’t want for another. Part of it was the same cowardice that paralyzed them to move against Biden. Another part was Biden’s ego, the president quickly agreeing to endorse her to validate his own political judgement. Still another was the crude and shallow style of identity politics that, for all their attempts to pin it on the Left after the election, has always been most dominant among the party’s corporate elite: the Clintons still wanted to see a woman become president and quickly backed Harris; key leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Jim Clyburn wouldn’t countenance letting the party pass over the first black, female vice president; while others feared that doing so would lose them African-American votes. But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.
https://jacobin.com/2025/05/democratic-party-joe-biden-decline