International

This week some 17,000 people gathered in Frankfurt to protest against the European Central Bank (ECB). The protest culminated in acts of violence which of course attracted a great deal of publicity. As for the point of the demonstration, what you mostly heard was that it was aimed at the ECB’s flash new headquarters, built at a cost of €1.3 billion. That’s $1.4 billion, or £940,000. The demo was, however, about much more than that. We have created an institution with extensive political power, an institution with no democratic input. That has to change, and soon, was the message from the demonstrators gathered under the name Blockupy, and it is a message with which I wholeheartedly agree.

During this week’s televised election debate, everyone could see that right wing Prime Minster Mark Rutte and his Labour Party deputy Diederik Samsom would have us believe that we are the finest students in the European Union, that our economy is booming and that we’re doing a lot better than other member states. But if you examine the precise statistics, little survives of this scenario. Our performance is no better than average, and there seems to be a direct link between this average performance and the Rutte government’s e obsession with austerity. Time to get rid of the coalition.

The Finance Ministers who last Friday put the Greeks under extreme pressure to push on with the old neoliberal policies of the Troika came at one point under the influence of the Tsipras government, the first Greek government to really want to deal with tax evasion and corruption. Not only in Greece, but throughout Europe, prosperous people and companies ought at last for once pay their taxes and contribute their share to the costs of restoring employment and attacking poverty. In Paris this week we will be meeting with other parliamentarians from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the group that represents developed countries – to discuss international measures to combat tax evasion. My aim is to have MPs from across the world commit themselves to a sort of manifesto and form a permanent pressure group demanding action.

The meeting between the Greek and German finance ministers was icy. The European Central Bank (ECB) is making it impossible for Greek banks to borrow cheaply. And to complete the picture, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s biggest political group, wanted the EP to adopt a resolution on the rise of extremism in the EU which would have included a specific mention of the new Greek government. It’s striking that in each of these instances the EPP, the home to Europe’s Christian Democrats and allied conservative parties, the group which includes the Dutch Christian Democrats of the CDA, played a leading role. Where we used to sometimes speak of the CDA’s ‘social face’, the mask has now fallen to reveal the grimace of merciless market fundamentalism under Angela Merkel’s command.