[Peace-discuss] Socialist Politics to Stay: Seattle Re-Elects Kshama Sawant

[David Johnson]

Socialist Politics to Stay: Seattle Re-Elects Kshama Sawant

 

Description: Socialist Kshama Sawant (L) campaigns for Seattle City Council.


 

Seattle voted for working-class politics by re-electing socialist incumbent
Kshama Sawant to City Council with a five point lead over her challenger.

 

Seattle residents will be seeing more campaigns in City Council and in the
streets to fight inequality and build social justice after the re-election
of socialist City Councillor Kshama Sawant in the city's high-profile
municipal election on Tuesday.

 

"We have accomplished something historic," Sawant said to supporters on
Capitol Hill Tuesday night as election results came in. "We have had an open
socialist re-elected to City Council."

 

Sawant, who secured a municipal minimum wage increase in her first term in
City Council, won Seattle's District 3 area by 5 percentage points over
challenger Pamela Banks, who has been known to align herself with the
business community.

 

Sawant declared the win "a strong victory for all working people, for the
socialist movement," and said that the re-election signaled that "socialist
politics are here to stay" in Seattle.

 

In November 2013, Sawant won a seat in the city's then at-large voting
system as a Socialist Alternative candidate. She became the first socialist
City Councillor elected in Seattle in over a century.

 

RELATED: The Sanders Campaign and the Revival of Socialism in the US    

 

During her first year in office, Sawant won a major campaign for working
people with the vote in May 2014 to increase Seattle's minimum wage to US$15
per hour. Despite the achievement, Sawant remained firm that the approval
was a partial victory because it allowed big corporations to phase in new
wages over a few years. She vowed as a councillor and an activist to
continue her fight for poor and low-income people.

 

Sawant has also pushed a "millionaire tax" on the wealthy and rent control
as key policy issues. She has campaigned for workers' and union rights, an
end to corporate influence in politics, affordable housing and tenant
rights, environmental policies and green jobs, and expansion of public
transit, among other issues.    

 

Seeking re-election, Sawant ran on a platform of making Seattle affordable
for everyone and building a city "free of discrimination and poverty, with
racial and gender equality, where all people can work and live in dignity,"
according to her campaign website.

 

Before running for office, Sawant was involved in Seattle's Occupy movement,
which she credited with bringing issues of class, capitalism, and inequality
into the political debate.

 

The City Council race was one of Seattle's most closely watched elections,
according to local media. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer described the
election as a kind of "referendum" on Sawant's "working class agenda."

 

RELATED: Low-Wage Workers Struggles are About Much More Than Wages    

 

The election was also the first to be run on a district voting system in
over a century. While the nine City Council seats have represented the whole
city in the at-large system in use since 1911, now seven of the seats are
elected by district. Sawant's District 3 represents the Central Seattle
area, including the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

 

A majority of women councilors make up Seattle's newly elected City Council.


 

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Socialist-Politics-to-Stay-Seattle-Re
-Elects-Kshama-Sawant-20151104-0010.html>
"http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Socialist-Politics-to-Stay-Seattle-Re
-Elects-Kshama-Sawant-20151104-0010.html". If you intend to use it, please
cite the source and provide a link to the original article.
www.teleSURtv.net/english

 

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