What is the most left-wing European city?

[jaymichaud]

Is Derry a contender or nah?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Derry is a stronghold of the SDLP, so no.

[Blair]

Derry is a stronghold of the SDLP, so no.

My knowledge of NI politics is shocking.

What's the reason for Derry being a SDLP stronghold?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Derry is a stronghold of the SDLP, so no.

My knowledge of NI politics is shocking.

What's the reason for Derry being a SDLP stronghold?

I think (people can correct me if I'm wrong) you've got a firmer boundary (the river Foyle) to act as the sectarian banner, rather than the multiple boundaries that divide Belfast and cause the Prods to be a much more visivle threat; you've got a more well-established Catholic middle-class than elswhere and finally you have the huge figure of John Hume, who made the party resemble a real party (which it doesn't elsewhere) that actually bothered organizing in Derry's huge estates.

[Lechasseur]

I was just thinking of it.

The Paris metropolitan area is strange compared to other large metros.

You probably both have the most conservative areas in the country (excluding maybe Provence) and the most liberal areas in the country in the Paris metropolitan area.

Even downtown Paris has both deeply conservative areas like the VIIe arrondissement and extremely liberal/alternative areas like the Marais (the Place des Vosges in the Marais is the only place in the whole country I've fallen on vegan cafés in, for example).

In terms of most left-wing places in general, the Northern suburbs of Paris I think would almost be unquestionably the most leftwing, but if you have to pick a major city, it might be Lille.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Derry is a stronghold of the SDLP, so no.

My knowledge of NI politics is shocking.

What's the reason for Derry being a SDLP stronghold?

I think (people can correct me if I'm wrong) you've got a firmer boundary (the river Foyle) to act as the sectarian banner, rather than the multiple boundaries that divide Belfast and cause the Prods to be a much more visivle threat; you've got a more well-established Catholic middle-class than elswhere and finally you have the huge figure of John Hume, who made the party resemble a real party (which it doesn't elsewhere) that actually bothered organizing in Derry's huge estates.

Also, Derry is not a very big place. It's a provincial town. Absent the sectarian strife, its demographics would not make it abnormally strong for parties of the left.

[CumbrianLefty]

Derry is a stronghold of the SDLP, so no.

My knowledge of NI politics is shocking.

What's the reason for Derry being a SDLP stronghold?

I think (people can correct me if I'm wrong) you've got a firmer boundary (the river Foyle) to act as the sectarian banner, rather than the multiple boundaries that divide Belfast and cause the Prods to be a much more visivle threat; you've got a more well-established Catholic middle-class than elswhere and finally you have the huge figure of John Hume, who made the party resemble a real party (which it doesn't elsewhere) that actually bothered organizing in Derry's huge estates.

Yes the last point is significant and often understated, in large parts of NI the SDLP were basically (and sometimes almost literally) the continuation of the old Nationalist Party - whose infrastructure generally varied between rudimentary and non-existent. Which helps explain the latter's rapid eclipse come Civil Rights agitation (and final disappearance in the 1970s)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes the last point is significant and often understated, in large parts of NI the SDLP were basically (and sometimes almost literally) the continuation of the old Nationalist Party - whose infrastructure generally varied between rudimentary and non-existent. Which helps explain the latter's rapid eclipse come Civil Rights agitation (and final disappearance in the 1970s)

On his first visit to an SDLP meeting west of the Bann, Gerry Fitt audibly muttered 'where are all the fucking socialists?'

[Cassius]

The SDLP is also loosely aligned with Fianna Fáil which, whilst it was traditionally the more ‘proletarian’ (to use an ill-fitting term) of the two main Irish parties, was never particularly left-wing (and often blatantly ‘anti-socialist’).

[Estrella]

Not to derail this tread even more, but why is it that when they were eclipsed by Sinn Féin, IPP's last strongholds were in Northern Ireland? I'd have thought that Catholics, as an opressed minority, would be more radical there.

[CumbrianLefty]

Maybe partly because SF was then suppressed (even) more there than elsewhere?

[EastAnglianLefty]

According to Wikipedia, it was due to a pact between SF and the IPP in Ulster - only the IPP candidate in Belfast Falls actually beat a SF candidate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_Irish_general_election

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Not to derail this tread even more, but why is it that when they were eclipsed by Sinn Féin, IPP's last strongholds were in Northern Ireland? I'd have thought that Catholics, as an opressed minority, would be more radical there.

They were. The IPP, especially the 1918 vintage, was to the right of Sinn Fein on a lot of issues and this included its explicitly Catholic Religious Identity and association with the ethnic exclusivist group, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (think, very roughly, a mirror image Orange Order), who campaigned for the IPP and were against Republicanism. The AoH was strongest in the North, and Northern Catholics were seen as the most religious of the all regions of Ireland.

There was also, of course, a belief in the North that a hardline position on the National Question would backfire on them, which it did, and this calibrated into local politics.