It is of current usefullness that this analysis comes to us. One has only to remember the last election in Canada when many of the Left fell for the campaign of ProjectDemocracy and its web site sponsored by the editor of NOW magazine in Toronto, Alice Klein. This campaign called for a strategic vote for ‘progressive’ Liberal party candidates to forstall a Conservative Party majority. Needless to say this strategy did not suceed and various NDP (New Democratic Party) candidates lost due to this precise campaign strategy. Nonetheless the social democratic party became the official opposition and the bourgeois Liberals were reduced to the paltry few that they merit for having backed the Conservatives during 100 or more votes in the House of Commons previously.Evidently, the ProjectDemocracy strategy is that of a Popular Front. On the other hand a voting alliance with the NDP is best described by the United Front strategy of working class formations. However as an Indepdent candidate I was obliged to oppose the NDP candidate in Mont-Royal riding due to his affiliation with the sell-out Israel Labour Party that still supports the right-wing government of that State.

Thanks, Eric, for your thoughtful comment.
During his exile, Trotsky accepted asylum from governments in Turkey, France, Norway, and Mexico — quite a mixed bag politically. He was under fierce Stalinist attack for allegedly having gone over to the bourgeois camp. He had to take care to avoid any impression that he was making political concessions to these regimes because of the conditions of exile. Trotsky did comment on the importance of the Cardenas government’s radical measures. So I would not call his attitude to Cardenas ungrateful.
That said, I would like to know more about the Cardenas presidency in Mexico. We must not let labels like “popular front” deter us from inquiring into the nature of workers’ and people’s struggles in such a context.
John

Ungrateful wretch. Cárdenas was not only the one world leader willing to give asylum to Trotsky (in 1938, I think), but the last and perhaps only president with any integrity after 1917. His nationalization of oil (creating PEMEX) was a high point of Mexican self-determination and is still a proud popular accomplishment.

“Trotsky described the Cárdenas’s [sic] government as the only honest government in the world,” according to Wikipedia. Its entry on Cardenas may be overly rosy, but I still find it odd that Trotsky even politically disdained the politician who saved his life (for a time) and, perhaps like Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, moved beyond his privileged background to clearly advance the cause of the Mexican people.

Chavez said, “I follow Trotsky’s line, that of permanent revolution”, but he is copying Stalin’s disastrous two-stage Spanish civil war/ peaceful coexistence strategy.