As recently as a few months ago the European Left outwardly presented itself as a unified party in the EU Parliament. Most leftist MEPs were elected from member parties of the Party of the European Left (PEL), or at least observer parties, as was the case with the notable example of La France Insoumise. Moreover, their corresponding youth organizations were in a steady process of formalizing their own autonomous European organization that was to be born out of the European Left Youth Network (ELYN), a PEL working group. As of writing this article, the entire European Left’s international structure was shaken to its foundations and its very existence put in question.

The new European Left Alliance for the Planet and the People (ELA), officially formed on September 27, is a major split from PEL, taking with it the majority of the Left's MEPs. You would think that such a major split would be preceded by a huge discussion, members trying to convince each other of their positions, comrades writing in their official newspapers, leftist bubbles on social media being flooded with so-called discourse. Yet, in this case no such thing has happened! What is even more dismaying, the official announcement of the split wasn’t enough to kickstart those discussions either! Many members of the relevant parties still don’t know that such a split has happened, and the vast majority have no clear idea why it was necessary. That is the case on both sides of the split. Most of the remarks I have seen were about how no one was talking about it.

Is this how a healthy movement acts? With all important decisions pertaining to the international structures taking place behind closed doors, or worse yet, in private messages between representatives? And further, what would a principled reaction to this look like?

What Was The European Left?

Let’s establish what the organizations involved in the split looked like in the first place. As noted before, PEL consisted of the majority of the parties of the Left in the European Parliament, which itself is purely a European parliamentary grouping, though the two are not officially linked. Among other things it’s responsible for hosting two annual events, European Forum and European Summer University. I myself was a delegate for ELYN from Akcja Socjalistyczna at the European Forum in Budapest this year.

PEL was a very hands off europarty. It didn’t require that its members follow a specific political line and, in general, it was a very broad tent. From what I gather it’s supposed to function primarily as a platform to exchange perspectives, it published statements and managed a think tank named transform! europe. Perhaps this is not enough, but we will save that question for later; I would argue that even in these roles PEL didn’t function properly—if it was a working discussion platform then we would definitely know a lot more about the ongoing schism.

I have a more direct experience with the European Left Youth Network (ELYN). One relevant point to note here is that it had a somewhat wider membership. In addition to youth organizations linked with PEL member parties, such as the German linksjugend which is linked with Die Linke, it also included some with mother parties in other groups, like Catalan Jovent Republicà, the youth wing of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya which is in the green europarty. Some organisations without mother parties involved in any europarties, such as Razem Youth and Akcja Socjalistyczna, both from Poland, also participated in ELYN. This is to say it was an even more diverse grouping.

As stated before ELYN was, for the time being, only a PEL working group, though at a meeting at the European Forum in 2023 it was decided that a new, autonomous organization would be formed out of it in the future. At the time this was an uncontroversial decision, it was a part of a larger effort to increase the activity and cohesion of ELYN. Formed a few years earlier, it hadn’t been the most lively operation, with most of the work being done during the two annual events previously mentioned. Other than that, the daily communication on Discord and the occasional Zoom meeting didn’t receive a lot of attention from most member organizations. The internal working groups were also almost completely inactive. It’s a minor miracle that it ever managed to release even a few statements online. However, despite its shortcomings, there was potential, and the hope was that if those growing pains could be overcome the autonomous organization could become a healthy and important instrument in the hands of the working class.

As of the time of writing this article, ELYN is still a nominally unified organization, out of the ELA-affiliated youth organisations only the Finnish Left Youth having announced their departure. That being said, the work on a separate ELA youth organization has already started which puts the organization on a straightforward path to a split.

Now, what is ELA? It’s a europarty consisting of 7 national parties, 6 of which have europarliamentary representation, which is the exact amount needed to receive funding. For full membership, they only accept parties with national parliamentary representation, since they criticized PEL for putting too much power in the hands of marginal groups. Its platform, the only real political document they published as of this date, is in fact closer to a list of moral principles rather than a real program, and it’s in fact very similar to statements made by PEL.

The Non-Debate

At this point, you’re likely asking why the split in the party occurred. That is a good question to ask. This schism puts the Left in a very precarious situation, since both of the groups are now dangerously close to the threshold of obtaining funding from the EU. It is unfortunate neither side has a common, agreed upon answer to this question.

There were no publicly available documents explaining why the ELA parties thought it was a necessary move besides a single resolution from the Portuguese Bloco, which sadly only vaguely mentions how PEL was a failure and hostile environment.^[1] Then, there was the announcement of the platform of the new europarty, which itself fails to mention the other group even exists, as is par for the course in leftist splits.^[2] There are a few short articles, mostly in the bourgeois press, most of which fail to go much further in detail than “it happened, here are the parties involved.”^[3] In the arguments I have witnessed personally there are broadly three axes of disagreement given: a difference in foreign policy, a left-right difference, and a dissatisfaction with the organizing structure. These are also the reasons the president of PEL, Walter Baier gave when he tried to explain the split in the mother parties to the ELYN assembly at the European Forum on November 9, 2025. That being said, these arguments are applied extremely selectively depending on who’s saying it and in large part the first two are, in my opinion, clearly post facto justifications rather than real reasons for the necessity of a split.

The first point of disagreement was the foreign policy angle. The argument usually goes that the old and rotten PEL either held some sympathy for the Russian government or was too dogmatically pacifist to recognize the right of Ukrainians to self-defense, thus preventing the Party from supporting arms sales to Ukraine. This allegedly necessitated a split in solidarity with Ukraine.

Putting aside the correctness or incorrectness of any of the possible stances, PEL did not prevent any of the parties from pursuing their different policies on the matter and even after September, it still includes parties with very diverse views. It also condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What’s really important, though, is that the new ELA is not unified on the question of the Russo-Ukrainian war either! The Polish Razem, the group that’s probably the most militantly supportive of shipping arms to Ukraine, now shares a europarty with the Spanish Podemos, which holds a polar opposite stance.

They themselves of course know they are being selective. In one of the few longer form publicly available sources about the ELA, a GilotynaTV podcast interview with Zofia Malisz,^[4] a Razem Party member responsible for its international relations, she brings up how she understands why Podemos has to have a different stance on the conflict because of their direct ties to Latin American political movements. Apparently this understanding only applies to them.

The second rift was over a somewhat complicated self-perception crisis on the European Left. There are some within the new ELA who want to shift the Left away from the label “communism.” They argue that PEL, with its multiple communist member organizations, notable examples of which are the French, Spanish and Austrian communist parties, has its roots in the so called “communist tradition,” and that their new group is either more of a successor to the “socialist tradition,” or is a completely new type of organization, liberated from “the tradition of all dead generations…”

I would argue that, especially in Europe—those labels and traditions have largely lost any specific meaning, assuming they ever had one to begin with. There is no “communism” particle, just as there is no “socialism” particle or a “European Left” particle. All of those labels came from somewhere–they were promoted by mass parties as their own. Without those parties, they cease to have relevance. In places where those parties still exist, they come to mean different things. Most of those communist parties don’t advocate for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they participate (or at least aspire to participate) in coalitions with bourgeois parties in bourgeois parliaments, and their main practice orbits around the protection of the capitalist welfare state. Those positions landed somewhere on the right wing of the Second International, and they certainly would have never been admitted to the Comintern.

So, are those labels an important factor? A reason to split? Not at all. What matters are the programmatic commitments and the practice of those parties. In any case, if the split really revolved around labels, the new group could perhaps choose a more distinct name.

But you might say that political tradition is not just about labels and policies. If that were the case, though, then ELA would definitely qualify as a successor of the communist tradition. Three out of seven parties in ELA are direct continuations of respective “official” communist parties, while the Portuguese Bloco is a remnant of a merger of various Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist groups. All of ELA’s member parties, perhaps besides Razem, also contain large membership fractions who identify with communism.

What this “communism vs. non-communism” argument does is shift the blame for the split from a complex patchwork of conflicting interests to a simple left/right split. However, it’s not that simple. When it comes to foreign policy, for example, the Austrian and German PEL parties have been busy fencesitting on the question of Palestine—to the right of many ELA parties. Claiming the Greek Syriza (PEL) as being to the left of a party such as the Danish Red-Greens (ELA) also seems questionable.

Liberum Veto

In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Liberum Veto was a rule allowing any member of the parliament to veto decisions, effectively halting all decisions if one person disagreed. While it was intended to protect individual freedoms and prevent tyranny, it often led to political gridlock and instability. The veto was frequently used as a political weapon to effectively maintain arbitrary minoritarian rule and attempts to bypass it only created more turmoil. Over time, the inability to make decisions or pass reforms contributed to the collapse of the Commonwealth.

As someone who grew up in Poland, the fact that PEL (and by extension ELYN) uses a similar system is extremely aggravating. In the PEL they call it the “consensus mechanism,” the term itself originating in the anti-democratic rules of the EU. This, among other structural questions, was the last point of divergence noted by Walter Baier. He hand waved that point, saying that all the internal elections were still done by voting and that this system was put into place to ensure that debates happen. In effect, veto powers ensure quite the opposite—minorities can simply veto any decision forever, and so they don’t have an incentive to engage in discussion, whereas majorities have no way of actually changing the course of the party if that minority is unwilling to listen.

In a voting system where decisions are made by a simple majority vote a minority has a much easier time of passing reforms because it’s easier to convince 50% than 100%, and so discussion is incentivised, whereas majorities also have to defend their position since it becomes much easier to lose power in such a system. This, of course, does not guarantee good debates; no mechanism does. But it is obviously a better system than minoritarian decision-making that assures nothing drastic ever changes in the organization.

While I cannot personally confirm that veto powers were abused in PEL, I experienced a couple of such examples in ELYN. For example, in regards to a proposed statement on Palestine, even though the majority could almost certainly agree on a decent position, the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) de-facto vetoed any discussion by stating that accepting any statement would be impossible because the conflict has already caused so much internal turmoil amongst their ranks. There wasn’t much that the pro-Palestinian majority could do. Solidarity with the Palestinian cause is the most important task of the international left, and yet to this day ELYN has not released any statements on it.

Another example happened in August. We had scheduled a general meeting, with one of the eight points on the agenda relating to the rules of procedure of ELYN (yet another strange and unclear aspect of ELYN’s internal structure that I don’t have the time to focus on) and another on possible cooperation with ELA (this was, of course, after we got wind that ELA was in the process of forming). The meeting was announced weeks before and the agenda was available a week in advance, and yet just hours before the scheduled meeting two coordinators were able to veto the entire agenda and the meeting itself (not just the two points they had issues with). They said they wanted to hold a talk between the coordination and PEL to ask some formal questions, before our ELYN meeting. I am still not entirely sure what they wanted to sort out through such a talk. When, three weeks later, that talk didn’t happen, we had to reschedule again. Finally, after a month we were finally able to have a meeting, but because of the confusion the attendance was tiny and we couldn’t properly discuss the points anyway. We decided to postpone all important discussions to the ELYN general assembly at the European Forum.

In this case the veto powers effectively paralysed ELYN activity for over a month. I hope the conclusion here should be obvious: “...don’t listen to any more experienced member who tells you that this represents some higher form of democracy. Trust your instincts. What’s going on is exactly what it looks like.”^[5]

And yet, is this a reason why ELA split? Partially. I have no doubt the real reasoning behind it is more of a mixture of this genuine and valid dissatisfaction with PEL, combined with a hope of fulfilling individual sectarian interests, including the access to and division of the funding from the EU. For one example of the latter, Razem comrades don’t shy away from claiming that the new situation will put them in a better position on the international stage.

The byzantine internal structure of PEL certainly doesn’t inspire courage, but in equal measure so does the new ELA, forged behind closed doors, in an atmosphere of confusion and secrecy. It certainly is a far cry from a really participatory and democratic vision of a Europe-wide socialist party. They really cannot demand that we view them as more democratic if this is how the leadership treats decision making. Those who do not analyse the groups they split from tend to replicate the same practices and I’m afraid this will in large part happen to ELA.

European Forum

During PEL’s European Forum this November, another schism was essentially guaranteed, in large part because of a failure in communication and understanding between ELYN delegates. After the ELA split, ELA’s youth organizations stayed in ELYN in the hopes that a repeat of the split in the mother parties could be avoided. As noted before, ELYN was to become an autonomous youth organization, so in the understanding of these comrades it could cooperate with both PEL and ELA on the same level. That was their proposal during the ELYN general assembly on November 9.

It was made very clear to me before the meeting that if this proposal was not passed, an ELA youth organization would emerge. Besides a general lack of enthusiasm for ELYN, the ELA youth organizations said that they didn’t want to put their efforts into an organization where they would become second-class participants, since they would lack representation on the “adult” level, which by all means seems like a reasonable concern.

The assembly began with PEL president Walter Baier and Ismael González of the Political Secretariat explaining the split in the mother parties from their point of view. This was highly unusual, since the assemblies never garnered much interest from PEL leadership. They were quite defensive, but their explanation left much to be desired—they essentially told us that they themselves knew very little about the true reasoning behind the breakup.

When the actual debate on cooperation with both parties started, everyone initially seemed to be on the same page on the need for unity and on how the ELA/PEL split was unnecessary. There were some calls that this discussion was unnecessary since it somehow distracts us from our work. The debate lasted over five hours, but it did not become clear what the lines were until very late.

There was a difference of opinion over the meaning of “autonomous” in our decision to form an autonomous organization the year before. Some comrades, notably the delegate from the Spanish Jóvenes de Izquierda Unida, thought ELYN couldn’t make a decision to cooperate with both europarties on the same level without asking PEL for permission, whereas others, including the German delegates and myself, thought the term “autonomous” meant we could make all the decisions ourselves.

Some of the delegates also thought it was too early to make a decision because ELA hadn’t had the time to show what they’re all about. This is despite ELA having already published their platform, despite ELA member parties having been members of PEL before, and the broad agreement in the room that the schism in the europarties did not happen around questions of policy. I could relate to their skepticism of ELA, but this argument also missed the key point that avoiding making a decision is also a decision—one which would lead to a split in ELYN itself.

The atmosphere became heated when the Czech and Greek delegates seemed to imply that ELYN shouldn’t cooperate with ELA because to them they appeared uncommitted to their notions of internationalism. I should note that they never said any such thing about any of the German delegates, despite their organizations’ fence-sitting on Palestine. What shocked me the most however is that they also questioned the need for unity in principle.

When we started running out of time, the decision was made to postpone any resolution on the matter and to simply hold a non-binding survey amongst the delegates. This was probably never going to satisfy many of the delegates, but the options were to either:

1. Remain linked with PEL but cooperate with organizations such as ELA (which implies a degree of imbalance and was thus insufficient to maintain unity).
2. Become linked with both PEL and ELA.

A third option was then added by a Greek delegate through Zoom, which was the same as the first option but removed mention of ELA, effectively saying that they didn’t want to cooperate with ELA.

The first option won. That evening, ELA’s youth organizations began discussing amongst themselves about the specifics of their new organization. The split became inevitable.

Before we left the general assembly, we decided to host another meeting in the next week, this time online, to talk about the other points on our agenda that we didn’t have time for. That meeting never happened and the coordination has been silent on the matter. This mirrors the silence from ELA, which hasn’t shown any signs of life since its announcement in September, even on social media. This is an organization of tens or even hundreds of thousands of members! It paints a picture of a political climate where everyone in charge of these groups is asleep at the wheel. The respective leaderships don’t take the question of international unity seriously.

For Unity!

Why do we even need international, working class unity? The experiences of the European Forum made it clear to me that this question needs to be elaborated upon. As we can see plainly, unity is not needed for parties whose horizon of aspirations only reaches the governing—usually in coalition—of modern bourgeois nation states within the framework of international capitalism. Such individual parties can campaign nationally, hope to rise in polls nationally and, as was the case the very few times the left actually led their own governments in Europe—these parties can succumb to international political and economic pressure and fall, again, on their own, nationally.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! When we, the working class, start to question that framework and begin to actually pose the idea that another world and another sort of politics are possible, the fragmentation of our efforts becomes an urgent issue that requires solving. While capitalism remains an international system, our task is to present a holistic alternative—not to retreat behind national borders—and to point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of nationality.

We need to come to grips with the fact that this question of structures and institutions is key to working class politics. Our strength as a class does not simply lie in nice sounding slogans, well-researched policies or some sort of moral superiority. It lies in our ability to organize on a mass basis to form a united force in opposition to the currently existing order.

Neither of the europarties is ever going to be enough, but it’s not a matter of simply declaring a European party separate from the already existing left, as comrades in DiEM25, for example, have tried. The working class already has existing structures in many of the EU member nations. What we lack is the sort of structures that can take on the EU itself and to actively build a workers' alternative. The existing European pseudo-parties make a mockery out of the name “party.” They must be actively replaced with an actual party, an organization with an accountable and democratic internal structure, and national branches acting as a part of a bigger, democratic whole.

However, one should not fall into the trap of searching for unity at all costs. We need an effective unity, based on working class political independence and on advocacy of radical democracy in the face of anti-democratic international structures of the capitalist order. We need unity of action and diversity of thought. This unity requires the participants to openly publish their criticisms when they arise, it requires that majorities don’t purge minorities over good-faith criticism—but more relevant in this instance it requires that minorities don’t avoid internal struggles and don’t simply leave in search of greener pastures as happened last year.

We cannot expect the bureaucracies of the already existing europarties, committed to the narrow, national vision of politics, to establish this unity for us. Neither PEL or ELA present us with much to be hopeful about, and they have proven time and time again that they do not take their historic task seriously. The struggle against the arbitrary manner in which the bureaucracies govern the europarty politics combined with the struggle for workers’ unity remain a political struggle within the workers movement, and the people who put us into this situation should face pressure.

1. “National Board of Bloco de Esquerda resolution,” June 22, 2024,

   https://www.bloco.org/media/20240622resolpol.pdf.

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2. “ELA Political Platform,”

   https://enhedslisten.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/ELA_PoliticalPlatform.pdf.

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3. Sarah Wheaton, "Will they name names?," Politico, August 30, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/will-they-name-names/; Paula Soler and Aïda Sánchez Alonso, "European Left party splits as new group eyes new central and eastern countries," Euronews, September 9, 2024, https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/09/09/european-left-party-splits-as-new-group-eyes-new-central-and-eastern-countries.

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4. "Zofia Malisz (Razem): zabrać paszport Brzosce!," October 20, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0jzBg6yTKk&ab_channel=gilotynaTV.

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5. Brian Ó Cathail, “The Origins of the Slate System,” Rupture, March 20, 2022, https://rupture.ie/articles/the-origins-of-the-slate-system.

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