Progressives face the urgent challenge of defending democracy without reinforcing the very divisions that fuel its decline.

After the elections in eastern-German Länder and ahead of those in Austria, Robert Misik casts an unsentimental eye on far-right voters.

The elections might see not only gains for the right-wing populists but also, Robert Misik warns, a relapse into austerity.

We should counter the radical right, Robert Misik writes, not with left-wing populism but the power of reason.

Robert Misik steers a path between Germans hunting ‘anti-Semites’ everywhere and being seen as accomplices to an ‘Israeli genocide’.

A state that protects—and a bulwark for democracy and modernity. Is this, Robert Misik asks, the new paradigm of the democratic left?

The messy struggle for leadership of Austria’s social democrats, Robert Misik writes, nevertheless has echoes for others.

The Austrian social democrats are heading into a leadership contest, Robert Misik writes. For the SPÖ it could get bumpy.

Democratic socialists must take back the concept of freedom from the libertarians, Robert Misik writes.

Robert Misik argues today’s extreme right is sponsoring a brutalisation comparable to historical fascism.

Amid burgeoning crises, Robert Misik writes, the left finds itself assuming the mantle of responsibility.

Now Austria’s SPÖ too has left its competitors far behind, Robert Misik asks: is the Zeitgeist moving to the left?

To change the pessimistic Zeitgeist, left-wing politics and radical art must renew their alliance, Robert Misik writes.

In his first Social Europe column, Robert Misik explains how the SPD prevailed in the Bundestag elections—and what follows.

The resistible rise of the Far Right in Austria. The presidential election is on a knife-edge before the deciding round of at the end of May. It did indeed come as a shock that moment when the blue bar on the TV screen last Sunday at 5 pm shot upwards: 35 per cent of the […]

The fact that western capitalism is in a severe crisis is now so commonplace that it’s become almost a cliché. In 2008 the global financial system stood on the brink of collapse and the rescue measures undertaken by panic-stricken governments will burden their economies for years to come. Economists and analysts of a neo-conservative, economically […]

We’re sitting on the roof terrace of a restaurant at the foot of the Acropolis, with the brightly lit temple above us. But the mood among the company this evening is far from good. “I’ll never forgive those Syriza guys to the point that, thanks to them, I almost want the Conservatives to win the […]