‘Both
Labour and US Democrats will have to challenge power if they are
going to speak for working people and change a broken system that
isn’t delivering for the majority,’ a spokesperson for Jeremy
Corbyn urged.
The British Labour Party went on
the attack after President Barack Obama criticized Jeremy Corbyn, the
party’s leader.
The spat between high-profile
representatives of the two left-leaning parties divided by the
Atlantic Ocean comes as Democrats consider their future with
President-elect Donald Trump preparing to take office and the GOP in
control of Congress and the majority of state legislatures.
During a Dec. 26 appearance on
CNN’s “The Axe Files,” host David Axelrod asked Obama if he
fears a “Corbynization” of the Democratic Party, which Axelrod
defined as the party moving further to the left politically in
response to electoral defeat.
“The Labour Party just sort
of disintegrated in the face of their defeat and move so far left
that it’s, you know, in a very — in a very frail state,”
Axelrod suggested.
Obama responded: “I don’t
worry about that, partly because I think that the Democratic Party
has stayed pretty grounded in fact and reality.”
The outgoing president suggested
the Republican Party has moved further to the right over the past
decade or two, away from “basic consensus around things like
climate change or how the economy works.”
Comparing Corbyn to Bernie
Sanders, the senator from Vermont and 2016 Democratic presidential
hopeful, Obama continued: “I think people like the passion that
Bernie brought, but Bernie Sanders is a pretty centrist politician
relative to … Corbyn or relative to some of the Republicans.”
Corbyn, who identifies as a
democratic socialist, has repeatedly been compared to Sanders since
he was elected to lead the Labour Party in July of 2015. Both are
perceived as supporters of socialist policies and opponents of modern
neoliberalism, though many would agree with Obama’s assessment that
Corbyn’s political views are further to the left. Although Corbyn’s
leadership of the party has proven controversial, over 60 percent of
party members voted to reelect him in September.
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