European Left Executive Board meeting (Budapest, 15-16/4/2011)
According to our estimation, the decisions of the two EU Summit meetings in 11 and 25 March will remain in history as a historical proof of the tragic failure of the EU leaders to protect the peoples from the upcoming economic and social disaster.
The ・Pact for the EURO・, this European Memorandum, which is supported by the conservatives and the social-democrats, will continue reducing wages, on the pretext of competitiveness and pensions, on the pretext of new life expectancies.
It seems that we were accurate to say that Greece is treated like the guinea-pig of Europe. The experiment is now spreading across the Eurozone and beyond. It is the experiment of ultra-austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, the bankruptcy of society and its peoples, in order to rescue the banks and the capital.
In reality, the bail-out mechanisms that have been introduced in the EU Summit meetings, are mechanisms of punishment. Not only they do not address the debt crisis effectively, which already threatens to cause a domino effect throughout the Eurozone, but they provocatively lead to social bankruptcy and to the so-called ・controlled default・ of the economy.
The integration of Ireland and Portugal into the bail-out mechanism confirms that the debt crisis is a structural crisis of the European model. It is a systemic crisis, based on the architecture of the EURO and the EMU, and for this reason it cannot be trated without fundamental structural changes of this architecture.
It is not enough today for the European Left to seek for secondary and partial improvements. We must talk about radical changes in the structure of EMU. We need to make the demand for the refoundation of the EU more concrete. To speak again about the European Treaties, their resounding failure and to call for their radical change.At the same time, we must deal with the debt crisis, with concrete proposals.
The debt crisis is not only a problem of the peoples of the periphery. It concerns the very future of Europe and its peoples. It threatens the EURO and the Eurozone itself. And, if it is dealt through the widespread ultra-austerity, it will affect equally all peoples.So, here is the big question: Whether the crisis in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and across Europe, will be treated as a crisis of the European development model that requires a solution on a European level, or if the peoples and workers of Europe will be punished, with an unprecedented social regression in modern European history. And here we must seek for solutions on a European level.
We need to specialize our proposal for the renegotiation of the debt of countries that are the target of speculative markets, on a European level.
We need to speak about the need for the annulation of a substantial part of the national public debts and for the transfer of another part of it to the ECB.
We had the opportunity to study these proposals during the International Conference on the debt crisis, in 10-12 March, in Athens.
I propose to organize an immediate unofficial meeting of representatives from the countries that are already under the so-called support mechanism and those which are about to ask for a bail-out, in order to coordinate our concrete demands.
And I say this because we are about to witness very rapid developments in the Eurozone, because of the debt crisis, and we must be ready to prevent them.
Greece is already one step before the debt restructuring, on terms which will be, of course, determined by the financial capital and the markets. The turn of events in Greece gradually resembles Argentina. We must act immediately, in order to stop such a transformation of the whole European periphery.
Finally, the brutal neoliberal offensive against democracy, in the midst of the crisis, is a very critical issue. That is why I propose that we include in our campaign the proposal to hold referendums on the ・Pact of the EURO・ and demand the right of the people to determine their future.
Budapest, 15/04/11