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For several weeks now, Turkey has been making international headlines for various reasons. Not the least of these were the back-to-back sackings of the governor of the Central Bank, Naci Ağbal, on 19 March, followed by his deputy. Erdoğan’s move was followed by a sharp 15% one-day collapse in the value of the lira. Mainstream, bourgeois economists were aghast at what they regarded as insane, erratic behaviour from Erdoğan. But there is method in the madness. Above all, Erdoğan is terrified of a social explosion.

The second round of Ecuador’s presidential election has produced a victory for the right-wing candidate, the banker Lasso, and a defeat for the left-wing candidate, Andrés Arauz. It is important to try to understand the reasons why this happened, and the perspectives for the workers’ movement in the Andean country.

Hans-Gerd Öfinger, one of the International Marxist Tendency’s leading members in the German-speaking world, tragically passed away in March of complications resulting from COVID-19. We will hold an online memorial meeting for comrade Hans-Gerd, celebrating his contribution to the development of our organisation, and the class struggle at large.

On Sunday 11 April, the first round of the presidential elections in Peru produced a major surprise: the victory, against all the odds, of Pedro Castillo, the leader of the 2017 teachers' strike. In the second round, he will face the reactionary, right-wing candidate of Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, in a clear expression of enormous political polarisation in a country ravaged by the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last Saturday, hundreds of activists from across the world met online for the philosophy day school – hosted by Socialist Appeal, the Marxist tendency in Britain – to discuss the revolutionary ideas of Marxism: the only ideas that can help us to understand the world – in order to change it.