Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 9-November-2026.
A Century After the First Dáil, Five Countries Just Found the Thing That Comes After the Gun in Ireland
| Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash |
1905 and the Second Step
Return first to 1905, since the structure established then has still not fully played out. In December 1918, Arthur Griffith’s movement secured 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster, declined to occupy them, and then gathered the First Dáil in Dublin on 21st January 1919, the very day it proclaimed a Declaration of Independence that the British government never acknowledged. Thanks to Commandant General Dan Breen, of the Third Tipperary Brigade I.R.A., and comrades, the War of Independence is dated from that same afternoon. The order of events matters more than the mere occurrence: a democratic mandate, pursued and achieved, was answered by refusal, and that was then followed by armed rebellion. The violence did not replace the mandate; it arose because the mandate was denied.
That second step, which another generation of this movement could still have taken whether or not anyone today wishes it had, is now closed off. The Good Friday Agreement, now twenty eight years old as of this past April, resolved that issue both inside republicanism and beyond it. Armed insurrection in service of a political mandate is no longer a viable option, and no serious person claims otherwise. So an uncompromising question remains, one the Agreement itself does not settle: once a mandate is rejected, overlooked, or simply outvoted, and the old second step is no longer available, what remains, in fact.
This essay examines where that question has already been answered this autumn, by people who were not deliberately measuring themselves against any Irish precedent at all.
The Continent
Begin with the phenomenon that already had a label before outsiders supplied one. In the latter half of October, a loosely linked wave of mobilisations that the French press started calling the October 17th Movement spread through five countries, each driven by its own grievance and none waiting for permission from the others.
In France, the French Interior Ministry’s own statistics recorded 410,000 people on the streets nationwide on 24th October, including 110,000 in Paris. Running alongside that was a separate, longer running lycée student movement that had started in September and, by its end, had pulled in trade unions and the yellow vests: more than 2,700 arrests, over a thousand court appearances, and 217 people sentenced through fast-track trials, according to the country’s own justice minister. In Italy, “No Meloni Day” produced protests in Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples, Bologna and Florence, blending opposition to rearmament spending with more ordinary economic anger; on the twenty fourth, Italian police recorded nine arrests and 371 brief detentions across eight cities, while five hundred extra soldiers were sent to Milan alone. Spain divided into two distinct currents: disorder in Barcelona, and, separately, pensioners in Madrid marching to defend public pensions. In Albania, a demonstration that began with students in Tirana developed into an explicit call for the prime minister to resign over corruption and the neglect of schools. In Portugal, the Lisbon protests focused specifically on housing and targeted a government that was loosening rent increase limits and making it easier to evict tenants who fall behind.
Five countries, five different immediate causes, one common reality: none of this was abstract. Every one of these mobilisations confronted a named government over a concrete grievance, and the participants were prepared to be arrested for it.
The Honest Complication
The essay would be neater if the pattern applied everywhere, but it does not, and that should be said directly instead of being edited away.
On 31st October, a movement calling itself Gen Z regelt, Gen Z Takes Charge, staged demonstrations in thirty four German cities against compulsory military service and in favour of investment in education, with a spokesperson in Berlin, Lina Friedrich, describing it as a choice between “peace and freedom” on one side and “war and coercion” on the other. The organisers said they expected 182,000 people nationwide. Yet official police totals in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin combined came to about 18,000, barely more than half of even the lower estimate the organisers’ own website had settled on by the day itself. Germany’s national school student body, the BSK, publicly separated itself from the initiative, questioning whether it was truly youth-led, and instead planned its own protest day for November 20th. The federal interior ministry stated that both far-left extremist groups and organisations tied to foreign extremist movements were trying to use it to mobilise support. Barricades were ignited in Hamburg. In Berlin, businesses along Kurfürstendamm boarded their windows beforehand. Hesse’s interior minister invoked France directly as the example not to repeat.
None of that occurred in Brazil or Serbia. Nor did it occur in the October 17th countries, where turnout generally met or surpassed organisers’ expectations and the movements’ own supposed constituencies did not publicly repudiate them. Measured against a governing coalition in Berlin already in open crisis, and a far-right party simultaneously leading national polls, the honest conclusion about Germany this autumn is not that the method failed there. Rather, the method and the far right are both active at once, unresolved, and that is a genuinely different picture from the rest of this essay. That difference should be kept in view instead of being flattened into a pattern it nearly, but not quite, confirms.
The Largest Single Case
Then came 3rd November, and the United States.
Democrats regained both chambers of Congress in one of the most one sided midterm outcomes in modern American history, only the fifth time since the Second World War that either party has taken both the House and the Senate in the same midterm election. The Senate shifted by seven seats. The House reached 218 confirmed Democratic seats, setting up Hakeem Jeffries to become Speaker, and the first Black Speaker if the chamber chooses him. Early exit polling placed Donald Trump’s approval rating at 38%, the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president at a midterm.
The largest share of what determined the outcome was conventional rather than revolutionary, and it is better to be candid about that than to invent a more dramatic story than the one that actually unfolded. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the country’s first Black woman governor, and also Georgia’s first Democratic governor since 2003. Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man elected to the United States Senate, winning in New Hampshire. Jon Ossoff was re-elected in Georgia. Roy Cooper captured a Senate seat in North Carolina. James Talarico won a Senate seat in Texas, the state’s first Democratic Senate victory since 1988, on the same night Democrats took control of the Texas state House for the first time in more than twenty years. According to the New York Times’ own analysis, Democratic candidates exceeded Kamala Harris’s 2024 results in Kansas; in South Carolina, counties that had backed Trump shifted left by an average of about twenty one points. In Florida, three House districts drawn specifically to benefit Republicans still went Democratic.
That is the main picture: an exhausted governing party, rejected. Yet within it there is a sharper thread. A number of democratic socialist candidates won House contests across New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including the first Gen Z woman elected under that banner. And in California’s 34th District, a democratic socialist challenger, Angela Gonzales-Torres, defeated a sitting Democratic incumbent burdened by misconduct allegations. That outcome is not the same as the others in this essay. It is not a base defeating the other party. It is a base refusing to extend its own side’s compromise any further, and acting on that refusal rather than merely grumbling and voting the same way anyway.
What’s Actually Left
Go back to the beginning. The old second step, the one Griffith’s movement ultimately reached for after a mandate was refused, was closed off by the Agreement that is now twenty eight years old. What has taken its place, and has been demonstrated this autumn at every scale from a dispute over a march on one street to the floor of the United States Congress, is something plainer and more demanding than either violence or patience: open opposition, sustained and directed at a named target, carried by people willing to be arrested, to lose a seat, or to be disowned by the very constituency they claim to represent, rather than diluted into something easier to tolerate.
It does not always succeed. Germany is the evidence that it does not always succeed, included in this essay precisely so the rest cannot be mistaken for a law of nature. But where it has succeeded this autumn, in São Paulo, in Belgrade, on five European streets with five separate grievances, and across an entire American Congress, the shared element was never tactical cleverness. It was the refusal to soften the position into something more comfortable for the people holding it.
What any country does with that is a separate matter. This essay’s point is only that the question is real, and that answers to it, several of them, already exist in public, dated, and available for verification.
⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.
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