A ray of hope for ordinary Europeans

Ultra-con­ser­v­a­tives will al­ways do what their na­tures de­mand. Given any op­por­tu­nity, they stran­gle democ­racy while at the same time claim­ing that it is democ­racy that they want to breathe life into.

The hor­ri­fy­ing re­pres­sion in Cat­alo­nia is an ex­treme il­lus­tra­tion of this and makes a per­fect ex­am­ple of right-wing crimes against hu­man­ity, but it is cer­tainly not the only cur­rent case of the most priv­i­leged in so­ci­ety mak­ing sure they stay in com­plete con­trol.

Over the bor­der in France, Pres­i­dent Em­manuel Macron (the man whose elec­tion held off a far-right Na­tional Front vic­tory) pre­sented his first bud­get. He handed a huge €7 bil­lion tax cut to the wealthy and slashed so­cial spend­ing, which in­cluded rob­bing €1.7 bil­lion from hous­ing aid and the elim­i­na­tion of 120,000 state-funded short-term job con­tracts.

In Italy, three-time Prime Min­is­ter and con­victed tax fraud bil­lion­aire Sil­vio Berlus­coni is gone but the forces he rep­re­sented are still alive and kick­ing hard. In Sicily –as with much of the coun­try– a right­ist al­liance has had con­sid­er­able elec­toral suc­cess, blam­ing their eco­nomic prob­lems and high un­em­ploy­ment on im­mi­grants.

Of course, it is ac­tu­ally the pol­icy of con­tin­u­ing aus­ter­ity that al­lows pre­cious in­vest­ment to go into spec­u­la­tion rather than job cre­ation that is truly at fault for low liv­ing stan­dards there and right across the con­ti­nent. But peo­ple can see im­mi­grants and refugees every day in the streets where they live, and the mar­ket econ­omy is harder to point at and blame. All this at a time when pub­lic health ser­vices are being sold off to pri­vate busi­ness in­ter­ests and hos­pi­tals are “‘close to col­lapse in Rome, Turin and Naples.”

In the up­com­ing 2019 Eu­ro­pean elec­tions there is a new and ex­cit­ing al­ter­na­tive for vot­ers who have seen the EU par­lia­ment as ir­rel­e­vant to our lives. Un­der­stand­ably, most vot­ers find it dif­fi­cult to even name a sin­gle one of their rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Brus­sels but until now there has been lit­tle rea­son to care. The ar­rival of aca­d­e­mic and au­thor Yanis Varo­ufakis’ Diem25 (Democ­racy in Eu­rope Move­ment) has given those with a pro­gres­sive out­look some­thing cred­i­ble to be­lieve in. Varo­ufakis has a very per­sonal rea­son to want to de­moc­ra­tise Eu­rope. The In­ter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund and Ger­man-backed troika re­fused to ne­go­ti­ate with him in 2015 when he was the new Greek fi­nance min­is­ter. Keep­ing his in­tegrity in­tact, he re­signed from that gov­ern­ment and went on to be a co-founder of DiEM25 only one year ago.

In a re­mark­ably short time, under the main slo­gan of “Trans­parency for Eu­rope” this ‘pan-Eu­ro­pean’ ac­tivist move­ment has come up with a per­sua­sive and com­pre­hen­sive man­i­festo. Their basic ar­gu­ment is that un­less Eu­rope and its in­sti­tu­tions be­come gen­uinely de­mo­c­ra­tic then it is doomed to dis­in­te­grate. Partly in­spired by the clear his­tor­i­cal suc­cess of Franklin Roo­sevelt’s New Deal in break­ing the Great De­pres­sion of the 1930s in the USA, DiEM25 has de­vel­oped its own highly de­tailed Eu­ro­pean New Deal to end the main­stream EU dogma that there is no al­ter­na­tive to more years of se­vere aus­ter­ity and se­cret back­room deals.

Varo­ufakis and his or­gan­i­sa­tion are also of­fer­ing con­crete pro­pos­als that in­clude a Basic Uni­ver­sal In­come, refugee jus­tice and cru­cially, a plan to tame cap­i­tal and fi­nance. Among other major changes, they are in favour of “reg­u­lat­ing bank­ing and es­tab­lish­ing a new pub­lic dig­i­tal pay­ments plat­form that ends the mo­nop­oly of banks over Eu­rope’s pay­ments.”

At the mo­ment, DiEM25 is in the process of get­ting votes from its mem­bers to de­cide whether to be­come a po­lit­i­cal party that will run can­di­dates in the 2019 Eu­ro­pean elec­tion. If the re­sponse is a ‘Yes’ then or­di­nary men and women across Eu­rope will fi­nally have some­thing worth­while to get be­hind and sup­port.