The upcoming European elections on the 23rd-26th of May 2019 are going to open a new stage in the ongoing crisis and dissolution process of the European Union. The new European Parliament and consequently EU institutions will be more fragmented than ever before.
The two traditional bourgeois political party blocs alternating in government power for decades, the Center Left social-democrats and the Center Right / Right wing, are facing a dramatic collapse of their influence because of the draconian neo-liberal “austerity” measures that they imposed on the popular masses, particularly during the last decade of crisis. They are now following the path of PASOK in Greece that led to its near liquidation.
The crisis of legitimacy of the bourgeois political system is fueled by the ongoing, protracted, so far insoluble world capitalist economic crisis that has destroyed jobs, wages, pensions, social rights, and living standards, creating millions of unemployed, and impoverished people. The result is the threatening rise of the Far Right, including of openly fascist formations, trying to demagogically exploit and disorient social despair towards their ultra-reactionary aims.
The parties and governments that had imposed the burden of the crisis on the popular masses, the culprits for the rise of the Far Right, are now calling for support in the elections against the monster of Frankenstein that they had produced in the first place. This is a recipe for disaster.
The Far Right and fascism have to be fought primarily with the methods of class struggle, by mobilization of the working class and by direct action in the streets, not by voting the political representatives of capitalism, which in its decay generates fascist barbarism. The workers’ class movement is the only force able to block the way to Le Pen, Salvini, Gauland, Strache, Wilders, Orban or the Nazis of the “Golden Dawn”. Our slogan is “¡No pasarán! - They shall not pass!”.
The world capitalist crisis which erupted in 2007-2008 had a devastating impact on the European Union, on the entire imperialist project of European capitalist integration. From the euro zone crisis to the Brexit chaos, Europe is splitting between North and South, between East and West, according to opposite national capitalist and imperialist antagonistic interests. The recent global economic slowdown and the international trade war between Trump’s US, China, and the EU have the most destructive impact on the European economy
Fortress Europe is raising walls against the refugees condemning them to drowning in the Aegean and the Mediterranean or to being prisoners in new concentration camps called “hot spots”. At the same time, although using the so-called “migrant or refugee crisis” as a scapegoat, it condemns its own citizens to social misery.
In the Eastern borders of Europe, as well as in the fragmented, impoverished Balkans reduced to a bunch of EU protectorates and NATO military bases, the policy of encirclement and isolation towards Russia pursued by imperialism and the subsequent standoff between the two create dangerous conditions that threaten war and catastrophe, far beyond the hybrid war that is already going on in the Donbass region.
The workers and popular movements are resisting and will not surrender. The Yellow Vests movement in France as well as the mass workers’ and popular movement in Hungary against Orban’s “slave law” are the first signs of a new phase in social struggles. The European Continent is soon going to become a major epicenter of the world class struggle.
The storm is coming and we have to prepare for it! All of us resisting barbarism and fighting capitalism and imperialism, workers, youth, intellectuals, left organizations and parties, social movements, we have to come together, debate the ways and means for our counter-offensive, to oppose any regression to nationalism and chauvinism, for an internationalist socialist way out of the dead-end of European and world capitalism.
The Balkan Socialist Center Christian Rakovsky and the web network RedMed have consistently fought and are fighting to bring together internationalist combative forces of social emancipation against imperialism and the ruling classes, to raise the banner for a socialist unification in our region, in the Balkans, in Europe and internationally. Now, in this crucial political conjuncture, on the eve of the Euro-elections, we are organizing a European Encounter on May 4th, 2019, in Athens, Greece, under the title “Where is Europe going?” We have to discuss the situation, to take steps for a common strategy and a plan of common actions to prepare for the historical class confrontations ahead.
Balkan Socialist Center “Christian Rakovsky”
RedMed web site
April 2019