[D66] With the Greek Left for a Democratic Europe!

[Antid Oto]

http://www.petitiononline.eu/petition/with-the-greek-left-for-a-democratic-europe/49

With the Greek Left for a Democratic Europe!

French and German version and list of first signatories below.

For more information please contact:

Vicky Skoumbi skoumbiv [a] wanadoo.fr

or Michel Vakaloulis michel.vakaloulis [a] gmail.com

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It is clear that the responsibility for the chain of events that in a mere three
years has plunged Greece into the abyss lies overwhelmingly with the parties
that have held office since 1974. New Democracy (the Right) and PASOK (the
Socialists) have not only maintained the system of corruption and privilege they
have benefitted from it and enabled Greece's suppliers and creditors to profit
considerably from this system while the institutions of the European Community
looked the other way. Under such conditions, it is astonishing that the leaders
of Europe and the IMF, posing as paragons of virtue and economic rigor, should
seek to restore those same bankrupt and discredited parties to office by
denouncing the "red peril" supposedly represented by SYRIZA (the radical Left
coalition) and by threatening to cut off food supplies if the new round of
elections to be held on June 17 confirms the rejection of the "Memorandum"
clearly expressed in the elections of 6 May. Not only does this intervention
flagrantly contradict the most elementary democratic norms but it would have
terrible consequences for our common future.

This alone would be sufficient reason for us, as European citizens, to refuse to
allow the will of the Greek people to be thwarted. But something even more
serious is at stake. For the last two years, the European Union, in close
collaboration with the IMF, has been working to strip the Greek people of its
sovereignty. Under the pretext of stabilising public finances and modernising
the economy, they have imposed a draconian system of austerity that has stifled
economic activity, reduced the majority of the population to poverty, and
demolished labor rights. This neo-liberal style "rectification" programme has
resulted in the liquidation of the economic infrastructure and the creation of
mass unemployment. Achieving this required nothing less than a state of
emergency not seen in Western Europe since the end of the Second World War: the
state's budget is dictated by the Troika, the Greek Parliament nothing more than
a rubber stamp and the Constitution repeatedly by-passed. This stripping away of
the principle of people's sovereignty has gone hand in hand with the humiliation
of an entire country. Here, indeed, it has reached an extreme but it is not
restricted to Greece. The peoples of all the member countries of the European
Union are utterly disregarded when it comes to imposing a system of austerity
that runs counter to any economic rationality, combining the interventions of
the IMF and the ECB in support of the banking system and imposing governments of
unelected technocrats.

On a number of occasions the Greeks have made clear their opposition to a policy
that destroys a country while pretending to save it. Innumerable mass
demonstrations, seventeen days of general strikes in two years, and
innumerable acts of civil disobedience, such as the movement of the "Indignant
ones" in Syntagma square have shown their refusal to accept the fate to which
they have been consigned without any consultation. And what was the response to
this cry of despair and revolt? A doubling of the lethal dose and of police
repression! It was then, in a context where the governing parties had lost all
legitimacy, that it was decided that a return to the ballot box was the only way
to avoid a social explosion.

Now, however, the situation is perfectly clear: the results of the 6 May
elections have left no doubt about the mass rejection of the policies imposed by
the Troika. Faced with the perspective of a SYRIZA victory in the 17 June
elections, a campaign of disinformation and intimidation has been launched both
inside the country and at European level. Its aim is to prevent SYRIZA from
being seen as a trustworthy political interlocutor. Every possible means is used
to disqualify it, beginning with the application of the label "extremist" to
place it on a par with the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn. SYRIZA has been accused of
every vice: fraud, double speak, and irresponsible and infantile demands. If we
were to believe this vicious propaganda, itself based on a racist stigmatisation
of the entire Greek people, SYRIZA poses a threat to freedom, the world economy
and the European project itself. In such a case, it would be the joint
responsibility of Greek voters and of our leaders to stop it in its tracks.
Brandishing the threat of exclusion from the euro and other forms of economic
blackmail, an attempt to manipulate the people is under way. It is a strategy of
shock by which the dominant groups seek to use every means at their disposal to
make the vote of the Greek people serve their interests, which they claim are
ours as well.

We, the signatories of this text, cannot remain silent in the face of this
attempt to deprive a European people of its sovereignty for which the elections
are the last resort. The campaign to stigmatise SYRIZA and the threat to exclude
Greece from the Euro zone must stop at once. It is up to the Greek people to
decide their own fate by rejecting any diktat, by rejecting the poisons that its
"saviours" have administered to it and by engaging freely in the forms of
cooperation indispensable to overcoming the crisis, together with other European
peoples.

We, in turn, affirm that it is time for Europe to understand the signal sent
from Athens on 6 May. It is time to abandon a policy that is bringing an entire
society to ruins and that declares a people unfit to govern themselves in order
to save the banks. It is urgent to put an end to the suicidal drift of a
political and economic construction that transfers government to "experts" and
institutionalises the omnipotence of financial operatives. Europe must be the
work of its citizens themselves in the service of their own interests.

This new Europe which we, like the democratic forces that have emerged in
Greece, wish and intend to fight for is that of all its peoples. In every
country, there are two politically and morally antithetical Europes in conflict:
one which would dispossess the people to benefit the bankers and another which
affirms the right of all to a life worthy of the name and that collectively
gives itself the means to do so.

Thus, what we want, together with the Greek voters and SYRIZA's activists and
leaders, is not the disappearance of Europe but its refoundation. It is
ultra-liberalism that provokes the rise of nationalisms and the extreme right.
The real saviours of the European idea are the supporters of openness, and of
the participation of its citizens, the defenders of a Europe where popular
sovereignty is not abolished but extended and shared.

Yes Athens is indeed the future of democracy in Europe and it is the fate of
Europe that is at stake. By a strange irony of history, the Greeks, stigmatised
and impoverished, are at the front line of our struggle for a common future.

Let us listen to them, support them and defend them!!!

(A short version of this text has been published in French by Libération on June
5th)