HAVE left-wing and progressive political parties finally learnt something from history? Results in recent elections, particularly in France and Italy, suggest they have.

In the 1930s in Germany and France, socialist and communist parties hated each other so intensely that they couldn’t unite against the fascist threat, notably from the Nazis.

It’s also true that until 1935, Stalin’s directives to Comintern forbade European communist parties to cooperate with social democrats or ‘bourgeois revisionist’ socialists.

However, after the victory of the Nazis in 1933, in Spain and France left-wing parties sank their differences (though never completely) and cooperated in what came to be known as the Popular Front.

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The Spanish and French Popular Fronts won elections in both countries in 1936 against right-wing coalitions, though the Spanish victory was overturned by a fascist military coup and civil war.

Fast forward to June 2024 and, faced with growing support for right-wing parties across Europe, like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), or Viktor Orban’s Fidesz, parties of far-left, left and centre-left in France came together in an uneasy arrangement consciously copying the 1930s. They called themselves the New Popular Front.

The arrangement seems to have paid off in last weekend’s local elections. In mayoral elections in big French cities which RN hoped to win like Paris, Marseilles and Nîmes, socialists won. In Toulon, a centre-right coalition defeated RN.

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni was defeated in a referendum to change the constitution bringing in reforms to the judiciary. Voters feared she was trying to emulate Orban in Hungary.

In Spain, Pedro Sanchez has held together a left-wing coalition led by his socialist party with seven others, including Catalans and Basques, since 2023.

In many cases it is a matter of groups, usually left-wing, but sometimes centre-right, coming together to stop a common far-right opponent getting elected.

It’s now spread to England. In the recent by-election which the Greens won, pundits say voters decided which party was most likely to stop Farage’s Reform.

The answer was Green, so former Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem voters switched their preference.

In the south, the question is can it happen in the by-elections in Dublin Central and Galway West in May?

Can the surfeit of left-wing parties who loathe each other vote left, then bring themselves to transfer to the left-wing candidate most likely to win?

They all know who that is in both constituencies. Can they accept it’s more important to stop the FFG candidates getting elected than go down to righteous defeat?

Here’s another question. Can it happen here in 2027 and 2029?

Can the progressive parties – Sinn Féin, SDLP, Green, People Before Profit and Alliance – agree in the assembly election to transfer among themselves, to keep out crackpot DUP candidates?

Can they agree to cooperate to vote against the DUP in the Westminster election?

It’s already started to happen.

Sinn Féin stood aside in Lagan Valley and East Belfast to give Alliance a clear run.

The SDLP behave stupidly and selfishly by standing everywhere, solely for the purpose of maximising their share of the north’s vote.

So they polled 617 in East Belfast (1.5%), 1,400 in North Belfast (3.5%), and most disastrously in East Derry where their hopeless intervention elected Gregory Campbell.

The UUP happily gives the DUP’s reactionary candidates a clear run. Well, why wouldn’t they, when they spinelessly endorse the DUP’s ridiculous positions?

The only place UUP voters take a rational position is in Foyle, where substantial numbers vote SDLP to stop Sinn Féin. Fair enough.

Last May, in a discussion at Westminster with Sinn Féin MP Pat Cullen organised by ‘Border Poll’, the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood urged greater SF-SDLP cooperation “outside of narrow electoral contests in the pursuit of Irish unity”.

It’s a start. He wasn’t pushing for an electoral pact, but his plea fell on deaf ears in his own party.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to see how greater cooperation could emerge if the rancour about nuisance, no-hoper SDLP candidates intervening in Westminster elections continues.

Eastwood at the same meeting suggested that arrangements by progressive parties in first-past-the-post elections could result in as many as 12 nationalist MPs at the next election.

Voters in England have got the message. Pollsters are now asking: “Which one party would you vote for to stop a Reform candidate being elected?”

Most are answering Green or Lib Dem, or in Wales Plaid Cymru, even though they may have previously voted Labour, because they believe Labour will go down the tubes.

Here it’s a different question but it could be, should be, which one party would you vote for to stop a member of one of the most right-wing, antediluvian parties in these islands – the DUP – being elected?

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