When I was first invited to Manifesta, the annual conference of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), I had no idea what to expect. I had never heard of the PTB, and I knew very little about Belgium — still less about Ostend, the coastal city where the conference took place.

Arriving at my hotel, a grand, imposing building flanked by rows of columns that stretched along the seafront, I felt like I had travelled back in time. I have an abiding memory of walking into the high-ceilinged restaurant for breakfast to be seated at a table next to a huge mural of an old Belgian tourist advertisement for Ostend, depicting a woman sporting a billowing white dress and a parasol.

Given the air of nostalgia that pervades the town, I expected that the PTB would be no different. Most Communist parties are not, after all, paragons of modernity. As I made my way to the event, I expected to enter a dull conference in a grey, rectangular building filled with old men surrounded by earnest young radicals.

So, when I approached the gates, I was more than a little taken aback. I was greeted by a young, enthusiastic activist, who whisked me past winding queues of people of all ages. They were waiting to be waved through the gates by stern-looking security guards checking bags and wristbands. I realised that this was not a conference, but a festival.

We walked through the main gates and arrived at the top of a flight of stone steps that looked out over a vast field filled with tents, food trucks, and thousands of people wandering across the grass. The thing that struck me most was the colour. Not the grey walls flecked with red that I had expected, but an explosion of greens, blues, pinks, and yellows, interspersed with Palestinian flags and the PTB’s logo — a red heart surrounding a white star.

Manifiesta is like The World Transformed on steroids. Guests from all over the world are invited to address the ranks of the PTB, and tickets are available to the general public, too. Alongside panel discussions and political rallies, there’s art, music, sports, and even a cinema. This year, more than 15,000 people attended.

The first time I spoke at Manifiesta in 2022, I was politically and emotionally burnt out. When Jeremy Corbyn lost the general election in 2019, and the world was plunged into lockdown, I refused to mourn. I held out hope for socialist movements in other parts of the world, and I imagined that perhaps the pandemic would revive the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity that has always been the foundation of the socialist movement.

By 2022, none of these hopes had come to fruition. I finally allowed my grief to catch up with me. Maybe we really had missed our moment of opportunity. Maybe democratic socialism really was a lost cause.

What I saw in Belgium suggested otherwise. Here was an example of a party mobilising the working class in all its diversity, with strong links to the labour movement, the climate movement, and an array of social movements, and a deep sense of international solidarity. It didn’t just tick all the boxes you would hope for in a modern, left-wing party — it was actually building power.