Hamburg after Bologna, or glimmers of hope when prospects are dire

With the far right dominant in so many countries, we need to take what pleasure we can from the glimmers of hope that show up every now and again in certain places.

I wrote recently about the surprising but heartwarming achievement of a popular movement called the ‘Sardines’ in keeping the hard populist right out of power in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. That’s the area that includes Bologna and Parma, and I’d learned to respect it already as the home of Bolognese sauce, Parmesan cheese and Parma ham.

“Also the best mortadella,” my wife Danielle admonished me, when I made the mistake of buying some of the Spanish variety in our local supermarket.

Emilia-Romagna doesn’t have a coastline, so I wouldn’t have expected sardines from there. The human variety, however, so-called because their rallies are so well attended they have to squeeze into public squares, have proved even more appealing than the mortadella.

Their impact? Matteo Salvini, homophobic and xenophobic leader of the far right League movement, was denied a much anticipated victory in the region despite having personally devoted significant time and prestige to the campaign. A rare upset to a rampant right, still in the ascendancy across a world where even someone who has done as much as Donald Trump to torpedo his own prospects, nonetheless stands a good chance of re-election.

This week produced another glimmer of hope to set alongside Reggio Emilia. Another regional election, this time in the great German city and federal state of Hamburg, on 23 February.

SPD members celebrating the Hamburg results

Curiously, the standard party of the centre left, the Social Democrats or SPD, lost four seats. They were left with 54 out of 123 seats in the state chamber, eight short of a majority.

That, however, was more than made up for by the Greens gaining an extraordinary 18 seats, more than doubling their representation to 33.

The party of the far left, simply called ‘The Left’ (Die Linke) also increased its presence by two seats to 13.

If you’ve been adding up these numbers as we go, you’ll have seen that the three parties of the Left between them accumulated 100 seats, a huge majority of the Chamber. So what happened to the Right?

The traditional conservative party, the Christian Democrats or CDU, lost five seats to emerge with just 15. That was the CDU’s worst-ever result in the city. It was probably being punished for having flirted with the far-right Alternative for Germany party or AfD in another State recently. 

The party that likes to present itself as liberal, the Free Democrats or FDP, was reduced to a single seat. 

But the best result of all was what happened to the hard-right AfD itself.

Far from making any advance, it lost a seat to just seven and its vote share fell to 5.3%. The threshold for a party list to win any representation is 5%, so it is teetering on the brink of exclusion from the State Parliament. That was the price of having maintained unremitting anti-immigrant rhetoric which was rightly seen to having contributed to a right-wing terrorist attack in Hanau a few days earlier. 

Mourning the ten victims of right-wing terrorism in Hanau

That made the slap in the AfD’s face all the more deserved. And all the more welcome. Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch.

Two such results so far this year. It’s not much. Straws in the wind and no more. But they’re encouraging straws in a wind blowing in the right direction.

They show it can be done. Which means we can do it again.

How Italian sardines kept the left's wall solid

A triumph for the left it maybe wasn’t. But a colossal setback for the hard, populist right it certainly was. And that’s the next best thing.

Demonstration in Rome by the Sardines movement
Mobilising against Salvini and showing him the door in Emilia-Romagna

Matteo Salvini is the leader of the populist, right-wing Italian party, the League. Until last year, he was deputy Prime Minister in a coalition, but then he pushed his luck too far. He brought down the government in the hope of precipitating an election he looked set to win, but his coalition partners switched to working with Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD), roughly equivalent to British Labour, though substantially more centrist.

Salvini is on record committing that he would “defend the natural family founded on the union between a man and a woman”. He also declared that he was “sick of seeing immigrants in the hotels and Italians sleeping in cars”. Or again, “The problem with Islam is that it's a law, not a religion, and it's incompatible with our values, our rights, and our freedoms.

On Sunday, elections were held in Emilia-Romagna, the region around Bologna, in north-central Italy, a longtime bastion of the left. It is rather like the “red wall” on which Labour counted for decades in the North of England, and which suffered such heavy losses at the election in December: seats fell to the Tories that had been Labour since they were first created.

Curiously, the PD uses rather similar language. But it’s in a position to apply it in very different circumstances: after the results came in, they could declare that “the wall held”.

The governor of the region was re-elected, and with a small but absolute majority. Stefano Bonaccini took 51.4% of the vote, his nearest rival 43.6%.

Salvini had spent much of his time in recent months campaigning around Emilia-Romagna. He claimed he was about to ‘liberate’ the region. But after the elections, Bonaccini could reply that the region had already had its liberation, 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War – since when, in one form or another, the left has been in unbroken power there.

To what does he owe his success?

To start with, the PD is no party of the hard left, and Bonaccini is certainly no Corbyn. He’s a moderate leftist who can attract voters from the centre, rather than frightening them into the arms of the right. That’s important when you’re trying to protect you wall from a determined onslaught by the hard right.

But something special came out of the campaign in Emilia-Romagna. It led to the emergence of the kind of mass, popular movement that Corbynism inspired. Known as the ‘sardines’, from their ability to fill public squares to capacity at their rallies, they generated a huge momentum for the left – or at least against the right – that had been the exclusive preserve of right-wing populism in the past.

That combination, a moderate leader who could draw votes from the centre, with a groundswell of popular support from below, proved unstoppable in Emilia-Romagna. Even more encouraging, in December the sardines brought together a rally of 100,000, in Rome, a long way from the region where the movement was born. It may begin to make itself felt at national level now.

It’s far too early to be thinking of victory over a vicious, far-right movement in Italy. The national government, where the PD is in an unstable coalition with the bizarre and declining 5-star movement, could fall and let Salvini in. But the result on Sunday does at least give a glimmer of hope that he can be kept out.

And there’s a lesson for other countries too. Combine electability in the leader with a dynamic, mass movement and you can get the far right on the run. That’s the elusive formula we need to find in the US, in the EU, in the UK.

In Britain, in particular, it means that we too have a historic chance. If we replace Corbyn by an electable leader of the Labour Party, and Keith Starmer, the front runner for the moment, seems to be just that; if that leader can then retain and sustain the movement that Corbynism built; then we too can in time drive out the hard-right government Corbyn let in last December.

The movement doesn’t have to chant “Oh, Keir Starmer”, like it used to chant “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”. There was something repellent about that cultish behaviour. Instead, it just needs to be as effective as the Sardines have been in Italy.

And working for a leader who can command real electoral support

Hell's just some people

‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Sartre.

My own feeling is that in reality it’s only certain other people that are hell. And some of them one can adapt to.

For instance, crying babies in planes used to drive me crazy until I had my own children, at which point my attitude went through a complete reversal. Now, when I hear a child crying I just feel sorry for the parents. I know how embarrassed, upset and impotent they feel, as they struggle with an impossible task, quietening an unhappy child. Or an angry one.

I was reminded of that today when I heard a baby wailing in a flat next door to us. It didn’t last all that long, but while it was going on it was clear that the parents were completely unable to calm him. He wanted something, he wanted it now, they weren’t able – or perhaps willing - to supply it, and he was making his displeasure fully known. Not to just to them but, as in our case, to the neighbours too.

He knows he wants something and he knows he’s not getting it.
That annoys him. But at least he has the potential to learn

Still, the noise didn’t irritate me. I’ve been there, held a wailing child, wandered around in the moonlight with him on my shoulders at 2:00 in the morning. I know what it’s like and can’t work up any annoyance, just some fellow feeling and a trace of ‘thank God that’s not me any more’.

In any case, it’s easier to forgive noise from babies because they are creatures of pure potential. Who knows what they may turn into. And, above all, they could well learn self-control.

It’s far sadder when the noise is being made at the other end of life, when there’s so little less to hope for. Visiting my mother in hospital, where she’s struggling against a battery of conditions that tend to afflict a 93-year old, is pretty depressing and not just because of her state. On one visit, when I arrived in the ward I could hear a woman down the corridor shouting quite as loudly as the baby next door today.

‘Help me! Someone help me! I need help! I need it now!’

I was there for nearly two hours and the shouting never stopped. People in the nearby beds must have found it insufferable. She was surrounded by nursing staff who were, clearly, helping her, but her problem wasn’t physical, it went far deeper, to an area within her well beyond their reach. Like the child, she knew she needed something, and knew that no one was providing it, but had lost the capacity to comprehend that they could do nothing so that continuing to clamour was ultimately pointless.

What made things worse was that before I even left the four-bed bay where my mother was sleeping, the woman diagonally opposite her also started to cry out.

‘I need help. Now. Urgently. I need to see a doctor. Straight away. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. Come now and get me a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

The litany went on and on. At one point she spotted me.

‘You there. Yes, you. The man sitting in the corner. Bring me a phone. I’ll phone for an ambulance. They’ll get me into hospital.’

‘Err…’ I replied, ‘you’re in hospital.’

Not useful, I know, but I’m not much good in these situations. But simple pragmatism? It clearly wasn’t going to put her off.

‘I need a doctor. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

Then she decided to adopt a new tactic.

‘I’m getting out of bed now. I’m going to look for a doctor.’

She made ineffectual moves towards leaving her bed.

‘Now, Sylvia,’ said a nurse, ‘you stay in bed. You might fall down and hurt yourself.’

‘I need a doctor,’ replied Sylvia.

‘A doctor will come and see you. But the doctors are busy just now. They’re in the Emergency Department.’

‘Well, I’ll get up and fall down. Then they’ll have to see me.’

She may have been not entirely conscious, but I have to say, her logic was impeccable.

The sad thing about these older women was that, unlike the child, there was little hope of their getting better. Of developing new self-control. Like the child, they wanted gratification immediately, and they’re unlikely to learn what the child may, that there’s much to be said for deferring gratification. If only, to avoid immediate disappointment.

That makes their protests harder to bear than a baby’s. Though they’re still not the least bearable of all. Those are the wailing cries of entitlement that come from people who are technically adult and who have neither the excuse of the child who hasn’t yet learned, or the older person who’s losing the lesson.

One of the saddest aspect of the world today is just how many of such people are in positions of power. Supported, apparently, by growing movements, in nation after nation: nationalists in Italy or Hungary, backing Brexit in Britain, voting for Erdogan in Turkey, supporting Trump in the US.

Now those adult babies really are insufferable.

He wants gratification. He wants it now.
And there’s no prospect of his learning better.

Bride of Belsen

It takes a lot to survive a concentration camp, so to survive three is practically miraculous. All the more so if you live through a death march as well. If, finally, you turn that experience into a life-enhancing event, rather than a crushing blow, then you’re a remarkable person indeed.

That was the case of Gena Turgel who died earlier this month.

Gena Turgel meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace
on 28 May 2015

She was born Gena Goldfinger, on 1 February, in Krakow. That’s a wonderful, vibrant, exciting Polish city even today. Back then, it was little different, though in those days some of that vibrancy was doubtless supplied by the city’s large and active Jewish community – then some 60,000 strong but down to 500 today.

When the Nazis occupied the city, Gena’s family was forced to give up its textile business and move into the newly designated ghetto. One of her brothers was shot there and another escaped, but no one heard from him again. From the ghetto, the survivors in the family were moved to Plaszow labour camp, made famous – or infamous – by the film Schindler’s List.

Her sister and brother-in-law were caught by the Nazis trying to smuggle food into the camp and executed by them.

From there, Gena was marched in 1944 to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but instead of being gassed was sent on a death march to the camp at Buchenwald. She survived that too, and was finally moved to Bergen-Belsen.

There she nursed Anne Frank through the typhus that killed her.

Appalling experiences that no human should suffer, especially when they are completely unnecessary and merely inflicted by other humans. That is, humans who have lost their humanity.

Fortunately, she didn’t lose hers. Among the first allied soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen was a young Jewish sergeant in the British Army, Norman Turgel. I assume he was really a Nathan, like my grandfather, who was also often called Norman by his gentile friends (or non-friends). Norman met Gena in the Infirmary. He apparently found her attractive enough to want to invite her to dinner.

The dinner was in a British Officers’ mess. The tables were covered with crisp white linen, shining cutlery and vases of flowers. For someone who had spent over five years in concentration camps, the sight was difficult to take in. But Norman had an explanation ready. 

‘This is your engagement party,’ he told her.

As Gena would tell the story, he had decided on first meeting her that they would marry. As indeed they did, within six months, and, by special permission, inside the Bergen-Belsen camp. That won her the title she kept ever after: the Bride of Belsen. She even had a silk wedding dress, made from a British army parachute.

Norman and Gena Turgel
He in battledress, she in the parachute-silk wedding dress

She spent the rest of her life working constantly to spread awareness of the Holocaust, its causes and its victims.

She died on 7 June this year, at the age of 95. Having lived a long life marked by early and terrible suffering. But which she turned to great value.

My thanks to the BBC, via my wife, who heard it on the radio. At a time when we have an Italian Interior Minister prepared to leave people to drown in the Med rather than let them land, and a US President who sees nothing wrong in forcibly separating children from parents and keeping them in cages, we badly need to be reminded of humans who kept their humanity.

It’s a wonderful relief.

The parachute-silk wedding dress
Preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London