Corbyn’s Brexit ambiguity embodied the left’s cross-class coalition dilemma

Evidence

Iglesias’s close collaborator Inigo Errejon, long regarded as Podemos’s chief strategist, repeatedly insisted that they were operating, like the Movimento 5 Stelle, “beyond left and right.” Mélenchon campaigned under the slogan “Fâchés, mais pas fachos”—“angry, but not fascist.” Yet such overtures to conservative constituencies, in particular former industrial workers, risked alienating another crucial and highly mobilized part of the left’s prospective alliance: educated, networked, cosmopolitan millennials. Corbyn’s fate was emblematic. His ambiguous stance on Brexit stemmed, in part, from the need to reconcile two competing constituencies: on the one hand, the Euroskeptic working-class Labour base in England’s former “Red Wall”; on the other, Labour’s young, overwhelmingly pro-European supporters in London and the Momentum milieu. The institutional challenge of the 2010s—how to mobilize effectively in an era of deinstitutionalization—was then overlaid by an older social-democratic dilemma: should the left focus exclusively on its core working-class constituency or attempt to unify disparate strata from both the old and new middle classes? — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 212

Categorization

• SEED: The Red Wall versus cosmopolitan-millennial split, as exemplified by Corbyn’s Brexit fence-sitting, is a concrete case study of the mobilization dilemma central to Jäger’s whole thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Corbyn’s Labour coalition fractured along generational and geographic lines over Brexit — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 30