Introducing Frontline Notes

Across Europe, the political landscape is shifting fast. Far-right forces are gaining strength, repression is rising, and progressive movements are organising amid multiple, overlapping crises.

Whether it's the rise of the AfD in Germany, the electoral success of Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, or the spread of nationalist, anti-democratic narratives across Europe, it's clear that the political right is learning from each other, sharing tactics, building institutions, and investing across borders.

At the same time, progressive movements are fighting on multiple fronts. From defending reproductive rights, to resisting austerity, to rebuilding trade union power, to confronting authoritarianism and standing in solidarity with Palestine, organisers continue to build power under increasingly difficult conditions.

The challenges we face may differ, but many of the questions are shared. How do we build lasting organisations rather than moments of mobilisation? How do we develop leaders? How do we organise under repression? How do we win majorities without losing our politics? How do we sustain movements through defeat as well as victory?

Introducing Frontline Notes

Frontline Notes exists to support organisers, campaigners, and change-makers in sharing what they are learning about building power in real time. We aim to create a place for honest reflection and exchange, enabling us to strengthen progressive movements across Europe together.

Across our borders and languages we carry generations of experience about how power is built, lost, and rebuilt. But too often those lessons stay where they were learned. With limited resources and another crisis always emerging, organisers rarely have the time or space to pause and make sense of what they are learning.

Frontline Notes is an attempt to change that.

Resourcing those on the frontlines

We are committed to creating space for voices that are too often missing from strategic conversations: those working under repression, organising at the margins, and without institutional backing. 

We will lower these barriers through editorial support, pay, translation, and care, making participation possible for those carrying the work of building and sustaining movements.

An editorial team reflecting different regions, contexts, and struggles will help identify the fights shaping this moment, and commission pieces from across the continent. Their role is to ensure we platform those in the thick of the work, and to cover a wide range of issues and strategies.

Why now

Part of what has made the political right so effective is its ability to learn across borders. Tactics tested in one country are quickly adapted in another. Ideas, narratives and organising models travel.

Progressive movements need stronger ways of doing the same.

For years, many of us have looked to US-based platforms for strategic debate and movement reflection. And there is much to learn from that tradition. But Europe's political landscape is different. Our electoral systems, party structures, welfare states and histories of organising are not the same. The questions we face may be similar, but the answers do not always translate. 

We need spaces rooted in our own realities – spaces where the organising contexts feel much more familiar. Frontline Notes is an attempt to create that. We hope it becomes a place that organisers return to, contribute to, and see as part of their own movement infrastructure.

How can you help

Frontline Notes is still an experiment, and we're looking for people who want to help shape it.

If you're interested in pitching a piece, or supporting the project in some other way, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at team@frontlinenotes.org.

We're committed to paying organisers for their contributions and providing the editorial and translation support needed to make participation possible. At the moment, Frontline Notes has no institutional funding and is being built entirely through our crowdfunding campaign, which is still working towards its goal.That means Frontline Notes can only exist if enough people see value in it and help sustain it.

If you'd like to support the project, please consider making a donation.