The Reactionary International advances in many forms. Sometimes through a ballot. Sometimes on the blade of a bulldozer. Sometimes, as a budget line for weapons.

In Peru, it advances under the name of order. At the time of writing, the country’s presidential election remains unresolved: with 100% of tally sheets processed, Keiko Fujimori leads Roberto Sánchez by just 4,209 votes, while 1,551 tally sheets, each usually containing 200-300 votes — enough to decide the presidency — still await review. One of Latin America’s most violent authoritarian inheritances now sits within a margin small enough to fit inside a few ballot boxes.

Fujimori calls her programme “Peru with Order.” Peru has experienced Fujimorista order before. Her father’s regime shut Congress, dismantled the constitution, ran the state through intelligence services, oversaw massacres and forced sterilisation, and made corruption a method of government. Keiko Fujimori has embraced that inheritance: promising a “frontal war” against crime, expanded roles for the military and intelligence services, and a return to the security logic of the 1990s.

In Albania, order gives way to another promise: development. There, the Trump-Kushner world of inherited wealth, state access and private luxury has arrived on the coast. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have become the faces of a resort project threatening Vjosa-Narta and Sazan Island: a landscape of lagoons, dunes, flamingos, seals and turtle nesting grounds now marked by fences and construction equipment.

Fences and heavy machinery have already entered the protected area. Preparatory work began before planning permission or a formal environmental impact assessment. The European Commission has warned Tirana to “act without delay” or risk breaching the environmental rules required for EU membership.

The slogan of the protest movement is simple: Albania is not for sale.

The movements in Peru and in Albania are both fundamentally struggles for sovereignty. Fujimori offers order, and Kushner offers development, promises that conceal a common agenda of private capture, deregulation, and surrender to foreign corporate interests. Both see democracy as an obstacle to their agenda.

Treat these episodes separately, and the pattern disappears.

Last week in Brussels, the Progressive International, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and transform! Europe convened the first working conference of the Reactionary International Research Consortium. Researchers, journalists, jurists, data scientists and policymakers gathered to map the machine: the technology stacks, financial flows, think tanks, media networks, electoral operations, security alliances and corporate interests that connect reactionary forces across borders.

The Reactionary International is not centrally commanded. But nor is its rise accidental. Money, media, litigation, platforms, courts, police powers, land deals and arms budgets move in the same direction: to capture public power, privatise social wealth and prevent the people from getting in the way.

The Brussels conference delegates discussed how the Reactionary International is powerful, but not invincible. Its money can be traced. Its legal vulnerabilities can be tested. Its information strategies can be decoded. Its coalitions can be split. Its machinery can be dismantled. The work now is to move from exposure to disruption, and then from disruption to construction.

On Sunday, the streets of Brussels showed the other side of that work. Under the banner of “Welfare not Warfare,” thousands marched against militarisation and the EU’s plans for an €800bn arms spending surge while public services, healthcare, education, climate action and social protection are told to wait.

Militarisation is not separate from the Reactionary International. It is one of its purest forms. The threat and application of military force are always its backstop, ready to assault and dismantle any budding revolutionary process that does not readily yield to other strategies of subordination.

From Lima to Vjosa-Narta to Brussels, the pattern is familiar: the old colonial powers are rearming, reasserting their control over the Global South, and dismantling the social democratic order that has always been at odds with capitalist rule.

Our task is not only to denounce these manoeuvres. Our task is to expose, disrupt and defeat them by building a counter-international strong enough to confront them.

The Reactionary International is organised. We must be organised too.

In solidarity,

The Progressive International Secretariat

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Latest from the Movement

Nigeria’s informal workers demand real democracy

On Nigeria’s Democracy Day, the Progressive International’s newest member, the Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisations of Nigeria (FIWON), took to the streets against poverty, unemployment, insecurity and kidnappings. FIWON warned that Nigeria’s security crisis cannot be separated from the exclusion of informal workers — 93% of the workforce — from pensions, healthcare, safe work and social protection. For millions who keep the country running, democracy has too often meant “the freedom to struggle alone.” They demand a democracy that protects workers, rescues the abducted and guarantees dignity for the majority.

Make Amazon Pay for worker safety

In Haldwani, India, Narendra Prasad, 35, and Amit Arya, 25, died after a fire tore through an Amazon warehouse. Police say their bodies were recovered from inside the building after the blaze was brought under control. Amazon India Workers Union president Dharmendra Kumar reports that a fact-finding team found no emergency exit, no exhaust vent and no way for smoke to escape. “We are not asking for the impossible,” Kumar writes. “We are asking for fire exits.” Through their unions and the Make Amazon Pay campaign, workers in India and around the world are demanding what Amazon’s profits should already guarantee: safe warehouses, collective bargaining, and the right to refuse dangerous work.

South Africa’s shack dwellers march against criminalisation

Progressive International member Abahlali baseMjondolo marched in Durban, Johannesburg and Mpumalanga on Friday, 12 June against South Africa’s proposed PIE Amendment Bill — a law the movement warns would criminalise the poor for occupying land while leaving the housing crisis untouched. The Bill would expand powers against “illegal occupations” in a country where apartheid’s land dispossession remains unresolved, and millions still live without secure housing. Abahlali’s answer is land, housing and dignity.

Kenyan police raid Mathare organisers before book launch

Police raided the offices of Progressive International member Mathare Social Justice Centre ahead of the launch of From Mau Mau to Ruto Must Go, a book tracing Kenya’s history of anti-imperialist resistance from the Mau Mau struggle to the Gen Z uprising against William Ruto. Officers entered the premises, interrogated organisers and disrupted preparations. The launch went ahead. The raid revealed the continuity the book records: from colonial repression to today’s attacks on social justice centres, Kenya’s rulers still fear the organised memory of land, freedom and resistance.

Our History

5 June - Jamboree in Jamba

The so-called “Democratic International' met in South-Eastern Angola on 5 June in 1985. Funded by Lewis Lehrman, a millionaire former Republican gubernatorial candidate, the jamboree in Jamba brought together representatives of the Nicaraguan Contras, the Afghan Mujahideen, the Laotian reels, and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, which hosted the gathering at its operational headquarters.

Learn more about this Cold War Reactionary International meeting with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

9 June - The Dhofar Revolution

On 9 June 1965, the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF) announced the commencement of armed struggle against the British-backed Sultanate of Muscat in Oman. Learn more about the revolution with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

14 June - Che is born

Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina on 14 June 1928.

Celebrate Che Guevara with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.