The Edinburgh Radical Review

“More people worship the rising sun than the setting sun,” a young and ambitious Roman general is said to have quipped ominously to the ageing dictator Sulla. For many in France’s Front National , the twenty-seven year old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen was the rising sun they saw as the future of their movement. But yesterday she announced her withdrawal from political life. At least for now.  On Wednesday Marion Maréchal-Le Pen confirmed that she would not be seeking re-election to the National Assembly seat she has represented since 2012 (when she became the youngest French MP since Robespierre’s acolyte Louis Antoine de Saint-Just in 1791). Instead, she would be stepping back from frontline politics in order to concentrate on being a mother to her two-year old daughter and gain some life experience outside the political arena. But the wording of her statement makes clear that, far from ending her political career, her departure is intended to enhance a future return. 

Matteo Renzi celebrates his re-election as Secretary of Italy’s Democratic Party. His two opponents left trailing in the dust, Matteo Renzi last night stormed to victory in the primaries of Italy's governing Democratic Party. Returning to the role he had stepped down from in February, the former Prime Minister succeeded in securing a resounding 70 percent of the vote, sending a clear message to his detractors that, despite being forced out of government by national rejection of his flagship constitutional reforms last December, Matteo Renzi is not yet a spent force in Italian politics.  Reported to be closely watching the rise of Emmanuel Macron in France, it is no secret that Renzi sees in the French presidential candidate a blueprint for the revival of his own fortunes south of the Alps. The adoption by Renzi’s campaign of the slogan In Cammino (On the way), an almost direct transliteration of Macron’s En Marche , has drawn many to compare the two unashamed continental

A newly elected Tony Blair arrives in Downing Street, 2nd May 1997 Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Labour’s 1997 landslide victory, the greatest ever achieved in the party’s history and one which ushered in thirteen years of unbroken Labour rule. Swept into government on a wave of optimism, Tony Blair secured for the Centre-ground a dominant grip on British politics only recently broken by Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the vote to leave the European Union and David Cameron’s departure from Downing Street. In viewing the current state of Anglo-American politics, a progressive centrist might rightly despair. Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US seem to spell the resounding rejection of Blair’s brand of third-way politics. The party of Jeremy Corbyn makes no secret of its disavowal of the New Labour legacy. Despite it being twenty years on from 1997, Corbyn’s Labour increasingly acts as if it were once again 1983 and is likely on course to earn itself a similar