International

You could not take your eyes off it. Today one-and-a-half million people demonstrated in the streets of Paris, demonstrated for freedom. This was impressive. It’s Europe’s best side, the Europe of values that we hold in common and that we will not allow to be taken away by extremists, whatever their plumage. Unfortunately there’s another side to Europe: unrelenting neoliberalism, commercialisation, the decline of solidarity with those who have less than others. What would be good would be millions of people protesting in Brussels to demand an end to an icy cold, neoliberal society. That’s what I call freedom.

Just a few days left before we once again celebrate the New Year. For the European Union it’s going to be an exciting twelve months: elections are coming up in Greece and Spain, elections in which the SP’s sister parties could end up taking the helm. In many other eurozone countries, things are in a real mess. More and more people are resisting this neoliberal EU. The question is, can the eurozone remain. The establishment is running scared; you can see this in the new Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, hitting out ever more wildly. An untidy period, for sure, but also one full of opportunity. Let’s hope that by the end of 2015 we’ll have reached a turning point and that national democracies will emerge strengthened from the struggle.

President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker this week gave the Greeks a bit of unsought advice: don’t vote for Syriza (the SP’s sister party), because this will push the entire Eurozone into crisis. A statement of this kind is unprecedented from a Commission president. A European Commissioner isn’t a minister, after all, but a kind of senior civil servant whose task is to assist the member states. Juncker wants, however, to see a real politicisation of the Commission, seeing himself it seems as a sort of prime minister or possibly as president of a federal Europe. Basically, he’s gone off his head.

For years, the SP has been demanding an end to budgetary fetishism and a commitment instead to investment. Friend and foe now admit that we were right, that the current period of stagnating growth and mass unemployment is a direct consequence of wrongheaded policies that have eyes only for budgetary deficits. Even new European Commission president Jean-Claude acknowledges that something must be done. His plans for a ‘European Investment Fund’ don’t measure up, however. They lead indeed to more power for this same Commission. A clever move, with the European Parliament again cheering them on, but this is decidedly not what the electorate in general wanted to see in May, when it voted against Brussels’ meddling.