Red Pepper » Europe

The day Greece’s TVs went dark

admin — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:13:29 +0000

Protesters outside ERT headquarters
At 11.30 on the evening of 12 June, the TV screens in the Thessaloniki office of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) went blank. Black. For a few moments there was the silence of shock and disbelief.
A few hours earlier, when prime minister Samaras had announced his unilateral decision, taken at 6pm the same day, he’d said midnight would be the cut off moment. But this lost half-hour was not the main reason for the glum, bewildered look on people’s faces in the newsrooms and studios of the ERT in the capital of Northern Greece. Staring at the black screens where normally there would be regional news programmes, and lively educational and cultural programmes, triggered bad memories: ‘The last time public television was switched off by direct intervention by the government was in 1973 under the dictatorship of the military junta,’ said Panos Karresis, an editor in chief at the Thessaloniki office. ‘When people see the black screens, the crowds outside will grow.’
This is about democracy
Already 800 had gathered outside as news broke of the sudden closure of Greece’s only public TV station and with it the immediate loss of 3,000 jobs. Crowds of tens of thousands were gathering outside the ERT offices in Athens. And despite the pouring rain in Thessaloniki, people kept arriving. This combination of protest and solidarity with a determination to take control and thwart the prime minister’s decision is clearly about more than jobs: ‘The presence of the crowds empowers us to find other ways of broadcasting, they are encouraging us,’ said Yannis Angelis, an ERT journalist. The staff and supporters alike are clear: the fight against Samaras is about democracy.
Swelling the crowd were 200 or so from an assembly held earlier in the evening of ‘SOSte Nero’, an alliance of unions, co-operatives, municipalities against the privatisation of the regional water company. For them too the struggle was for democracy and for fundamental social rights. ‘We know there is corruption in ERT; what we are concerned to save is public broadcasting,’ insisted George Archontopoulos, president of the water workers union, who had been chairing the earlier assembly against water privatisation. ‘Three channels, local radio across the country, film archives back to the 30s. This is about democracy – all essential for democracy.’
By midnight, Panos, Yannis and their journalist and technical colleagues were back on air. The programme consisted of a panel of well-known cultural figures condemning and discussing the implications of the government’s action, with a stream of contributions from citizens coming in from the protest outside to say what they thought. Again and again the memory of the Junta was evoked in condemnation of the closure. I brought solidarity from Europe: ‘Your struggle for democracy in Greece is a struggle that concerns the whole of Europe. A threat to the freedom of expression is a threat to democracy. We will help you in whatever way we can,’ I said on air. It and all the other expressions of support were received with enthusiasm. (There are links at the end of this article to ways to help.)
News was coming in of opposition to the closure from Bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church – not a usual critic of the government. Elsewhere on the political spectrum, the KKE (the Greek Communist Party) came out in support of the protests, in an unusual show of unity. Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, made a strong speech soon after Samaras’ announcement, calling on Pasok and Dimar (a split from Pasok) to leave the coalition in protest. The leaders of these rump parties spluttered their objections but without any clear threat to leave the coalition. Opinion polls now put support for Pasok down from 13 per cent at the last elections to 7 per cent, Dimar from 7 to as low as 5 per cent compared to Syriza at 29 per cent, New Democracy at 26 per cent and the fascist Golden Dawn at 14 per cent.
Clientelism and collapse
Just a quick aside on Pasok’s decline: talking to the workers inside the ERT office in Thessaloniki, I gained a sense of the collapse of Pasok and New Democracy’s system of patronage as a system of power. ERT had been an example of clientelism at its most extreme. The metaphor which the journalists used to explain how it worked was of electric plugs, ‘visma’ in Greek. Politicians ‘plugged in’ their clients, expecting them to be their voice and do their bidding, at the risk of being ‘unplugged’. The circuits of clientelism sustained the system. Under the pressures of cuts and austerity measures this has been visibly collapsing except at what had been the top – indeed Samaras had reinforced the top with 40 extra ‘plug ins’ at a cost, it is said, of over 1 million euros.
The staff I spoke to had contempt for their plugged-in managers. ‘My supervisor knew nothing; he couldn’t even speak English,’ said Natasha, a news reporter. I asked where they were now. ‘They are here, somewhere in the building, but I can’t see them’, she replied. ‘They are the silent ones’ joked George Archontopoulos, who had come into the office to give solidarity. ‘You see, he knows,’ commented Natasha.
You could see, in these exchanges, the evaporation of fear and the creation of common bonds which were already becoming the basis of workers taking control, knowing that their fellow citizens (often themselves facing similar predicaments) are with them, ‘empowering’ them in Panos’ words.
The old clientelist system reproduced itself through fear, obligation and also separation and isolation; each little empire was a world of its own. Only the holders of the plugs knew how the circuit worked. But as the old circuits have crashed under the pressure of the financial crisis and austerity, so new connections are rapidly being improvised outside the clientelist system. These are between the people who actually know how things actually work, whether it be in the media, or water management, health, agriculture or manufacturing.
Broadcasting in defiance
It’s an uncertain process and time is short, but as the crowds remained outside the ERT offices into the early morning of 13 June, willing the journalists to remain on air, it was clear that the ability of journalists and technicians to continue to broadcast in spite of the Samaras attempt to pull the plug on public broadcasting was more than symbolic.
Indeed it is not only the ERT workers who were strategically vital here but also those who actually handle the real plugs and circuits of electricity. The electrical workers union is one of the most militant (and least corrupt) of the Greek unions. Samaras could have simply ordered the cutting off of electricity to ERT offices. The electricians made that impossible.
As I write, events are moving fast. First, Samaras is meeting leaders of Pasok and Dimar. These politicians are finally threatening to leave the government, but the prime minister knows they don’t want elections. He is an aggressive mood. He went on private television over the weekend to defend the closure of ERT. ‘He spoke not like a politician of 2013 but of the 1960, that is like the military, you know,’ says George from the movement against water privatisation. A sign of his aggression is that he successfully asked the Israeli government, which controls one satellite that ERT journalists are using to continue to broadcast, to cut off the service.
A high-risk strategy
Pasok and Dimar are demanding that broadcasting be resumed. Samaras’ compromise – totally unacceptable to the unions and to the majority of Greek people, as opinion polls over the weekend showed, is to re-open on a skeleton staff while proposals are drawn up for a new downsized and, no doubt, part-private broadcasting company to open in the autumn. Second, the Constitutional Court is gathering to consider the legality of the government’s decision to close. UPDATE: The court ruled that ERT should be put back on air, but did not reverse the decision to replace it with a much smaller state broadcaster.
Meanwhile the streets will not be empty. The KKE is planning a demonstration outside the ERT offices on Wednesday. Syriza is calling for a massive demonstration in the centre of Athens the following day.
Samaras’ strategy is high risk. Many believe it is shock tactics, to show the Troika that the government is prepared to be tough (and this makes its attempt to distance itself from the closure farcical). Others suggest wider political goals: ‘Samaras could be just testing what he can get away with,’ says Alex Benos, a professor at the university of Thessalinki university – or, he says, ‘another option is that he is preparing for elections, to get rid of Pasok and Dimar, even to do deals with Golden Dawn.’
Much will be depending on events in the next few days. What is already clear is that the stakes are very high not just for Greece but for the whole of Europe. All those who believe in democracy must everything they can to protest at the anti-democratic actions of the Greek government. We must mobilise all possible sources of support for the refusal of the majority of Greek people to be led one more step towards a return of dictatorship in a new guise.
For more information and resources for support see IFJ, NUJ and Enet

We’re striking to support the movement – interview with Turkish union activist

admin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 20:53:00 +0000

Most of us like to relax on our birthday – maybe spend time with the family or see close friends. But for Kesk union activist and socialist Ertan Elsoy, whose union has called a two day strike to support a rebellion against the government, his birthday today has been anything but normal.
‘Last night I was keeping guard in Gezi Park under intensive gas attack,’ he tells me. ‘Now I am resting and preparing for this night… Tomorrow morning I will work on the agitation and propaganda activity in the university to support the strike, because the strike on 5 June is so important.’
The Turkish government had been the subject of several complaints from international trade union bodies such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) over its treatment and in some cases imprisonment of union activists this year. But now, with reports that political activists have been shot dead and that police and Turkish state security forces are stalking the streets with long knives, tear gas and live rounds, the situation in Turkey couldn’t be any more dangerous or unpredictable for trade unionists.
Fighting the dictator
I ask Ertan if he is scared of being killed. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘But there is no choice for us except to fight for freedom, democracy and rights!’
‘They will not give us these rights voluntarily. Turkish people are now learning to get their rights. Turkish people are realizing their own power. This is very frightening for the dictator Tayyip Erdoğan.’
The use of the word ‘dictator’ is a powerful accusation, one which on the outside might look far-fetched. Prime minister Erdoğan was elected in multi-party elections and has been credited in some quarters for trying to deal with longstanding human rights abuses against the country’s Kurdish minority. However his implementation of several conservative social policies with Islamist undertones, on top of vigorous free market neoliberal economic policies, has put the prime minister on shaky ground.
The crackdown on environmental protesters in Gezi Park in Istanbul last Friday was the last straw for many thousands of people in Turkey. Spontaneous protests involving a wide range of political viewpoints have erupted across the country.
The police crackdown, and prime minister Erdogan’s insistence that protesters including trade unionists are ‘arm-in-arm with terrorism’, has only raised suspicions that the government is displaying dictatorial tendencies when faced with legitimate criticisms from the public.
Real democracy
‘We just have the right of voting in elections, no more than this. Pluralism, equity and participation are not present in Turkish democracy,’ says Ertan. ‘There are many barriers against usage of democratic rights. So it is just a stylistic democracy. We just vote for our dictators. Turkish people want a real democracy.’
‘Tayyip Erdoğan’s understanding of democracy is “If I am elected, I am allowed to do whatever I want”.’
Although largely unreported in the Turkish mass media, unofficial estimates from citizen journalists and activists put arrests of protesters at well over a thousand, with beatings, a regular occurrence over the last five days. Ertan confirms that he has been an eyewitness to ‘many people being beaten by police’, and says he has seen police use tear gas guns as missiles, firing them directly at protesters and causing them serious injury.
Ertan distances himself from what he describes as ‘marginal groups’ who have used violence during the protests. But he is clear on who started it and the need for the protests to develop further.
‘Turkish police attacked a peaceful demonstration [in Gezi Park]. And they have attacked in the early morning while people were sleeping and sitting in the park. The government and Tayyip Erdoğan are responsible for the violence. There have been neoliberal policies implemented without interruption. This has created deep, long-run unhappiness among people.
‘In addition to this widespread unhappiness, especially since the last general election, Tayyip Erdoğan’s government Islamised the daily life of people stage by stage and implements discriminatory and alienating policies.’
General strike?
Despite this political oppression, Ertan says that the response from people has not been unified nor had a clear direction.
His union, Kesk, which represents 240,000 workers, was due to strike at a later date over regressive changes in the country’s’ labour laws. But bringing it forward to today and tomorrow has prompted calls for a general strike of the country’s major trade union confederations.
‘This rebellion is not organised properly and to determine a right direction is quite difficult under these circumstances,’ Ertan tells me. ‘Trade unions and their confederations should join this rebellion by general strike in order to support and gain the initiative.
‘The organised working class has the ability to find the right way intuitively. However so far the working class have not joined the rebellion as a “political participant”.’
However Ertan is confident that this is set to change, if organised labour takes a stand tomorrow. ‘Today Kesk members have started to strike. I expect other trade union confederations cannot ignore the happenings and will join calls for a general strike in Turkey,’ he concludes.

Istanbul: a tree grows in Gezi

admin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:26:47 +0000

This is a story that spans the continents, and is spreading. The recent occupation of Gezi park in Istanbul and the ripples it has had throughout 48 cities in Turkey is filling a political space that exists between Occupy and the Arab Spring; linking them like the bridges of Istanbul that span the continents. This week we have seen the violent repression of expression that marks the fine line between democracy and dictatorship, the domination of private financial interests over the common good. We are learning each year that all of our grievances are connected.
A single tree, in a small park, in the crossroads of the world. It began.
Power is a rebel force, and here in Turkey the prime minister, Erdogan, is armed with the conviction of a religious man who has been elected. He has recently passed a series of deeply unpopular but tolerated laws. He pushed his people into a corner, and has kept pushing. Like many leaders, he is acting as if the national power is his, because the millions of people in this representational democracy had given their power to him. He has played their power like a violin – so loud he couldn’t hear there wasn’t any applause, and so long he didn’t notice the rest of the orchestra had dropped out. Maybe he is afraid of what could happen in that silence.
Pots and pans
Saturday night the silence was filled. From any open window you heard the people playing their pots and pans as if these utensils were finally freed to be the joyful instruments they had always wanted to be – singing their metal hymns for a good life. This is that sound that comes to fill the silence. People who had nothing in their hands used their hands, and sat leaning clapping from car windows and in crowds. The people had retaken the park, and it was Saturday night, so there would be too many people tonight to do what they had been doing the past nights. Saturday night felt like a celebration, in some places.
In other places the violence was still building like friction in any unoiled machine. Violence was encouraged by Erdogan himself, who broken the media blackout and had gone on TV and asked his supporters to personally stop ‘the terrorists’, who he claimed were a marginal group of radicals. A friend had seen teenagers attack a group of students because they were carrying gas masks. Erdogan is mixing strong forces, concocting dangerous politics in an earthquake zone.
These stories I share were told to me by a friend who noticed he was still trembling to speak of them. He arrived late, because he had been teargassed again, and so had to shower the chemicals from him. He told me these stories, recounting like legends in days of this same week. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Today.
The trees and the machines
Wednesday. It started with machines. The supreme court had ruled that Gezi, the last green space in the center of this sprawling megalopolis, would not be razed to make way for a new shopping center. The rogue prime minister sent the excavators anyway, but by the time they had ripped out the first of the trees, some 20 or 50 people had gathered. Some hugged the trees (perhaps the most pacifist of all possible acts), others tied themselves to the trees. They set up tents, read to the police and shared food. They called it Occupy Gezi.
Thursday. At 4am the police came and filled the air with teargas. They didn’t fire the metal canisters at the ground, they fired it at the people, at their faces, smashing holes in skulls. They burned down their tents. They kicked people from the trees they held on to. The police expected to have the park cleared by morning, but by morning 5,000 people were there. A line had been crossed – if people are not allowed to peacefully demonstrate what they believe in, and if their expression is met with such brutality, then this is not a democracy. And if one is obedient, silent or waits in hopes it will pass, than power is the only one who has freedom.
Friday. These days were battles of bravery and violence. The police surrounded the park, attacked, and refused to let anyone leave; later they wouldn’t let anyone enter. Water cannons threw people off their feet and onto their thin necks, batons cracked skulls of anyone within range, the teargas canisters littered the ground like confetti. Police fired gas into residential buildings that were helping the wounded and housing those hiding from the acid smoke. Police fired gas into a Starbucks full of people and into the Hilton Hotel. Every photograph from these days is wrapped in that tyrannical gas.
Violence vs kindness
But opposites attract, and the people who lived in the area began to leave out baskets of lemons to help soothe teargas. Old ladies lowered baskets of food from their windows by rope to support the people below – doing what they could to support those doing what they could not. Restaurants left bags of food outside their windows. The state’s violence was countered by the people’s kindness. Lovers led their gas-blinded lover through the smoke-filled streets to safety; strangers did the same.
Turkish flags with their floating moon and star sprang up everywhere, and the bridge that you cannot walk across was filled with 40,000 people walking in the space between two continents. What was 50 people in tents became 5,000, became the more than a hundred thousand that surrounded the park until they so outnumbered the police that they were let back into it, and the shade of the trees that were still standing.
Today. In this small park, a great many conflicts are colliding. There is the tree that started this, and the fight for the rights of nature against the cold machinery of progress. There is the fight to protect the commons: to save one of the few public spaces that still exist from its transformation into a private space dedicated to the production of personal capital. There is the issue of democracy: that the people have the right to speak out, and the necessity to be heard by those they have empowered. This is history, after all, and people know that if they cannot speak their mind then it is not their story.
This is no longer a story about a tree, a park, a politics or a cause. It is a story of a people, all over, knowing that they are standing on the global frontline of history. It is not a struggle to change the story, it’s the struggle to be allowed to write it.
Tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the coming days, but some of that will be determined by us. We need to make sure the world is watching the trees and people of Gezi square, and that Erdogan knows we are watching. Where do you draw the line?
Kevin Buckland is on Twitter: @change_of_art

Resist and transform: the struggle for water in Greece

admin — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:44:37 +0000

Illustration: Cressida Knapp
Privatisation and the nature of the state is moving to the centre of the struggle against austerity in Greece. The troika of the three key lenders to Greece – the European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank – is trying to speed up the sell-off of the country’s public goods and resources by putting them in one holding company to be auctioned off in quick succession. The Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED), as this company is pompously named, might as well be an auction house advertising an ‘everything must go’ clear out: ‘Greece for sale. Real estate bargains, profitable companies going cheap.’
Resistance to this handover to the corporate market faces a challenge. In 2011 a reputable polling company found that 75 per cent of Greeks believed privatisation was necessary; in 2012 it was down to 62 per cent but still well over half the population – including more than 40 per cent of Syriza voters. These same polls, however, indicate a point of vulnerability for the troika: water, the one issue on which a majority opposes privatisation. And it is on this issue that resistance is beginning to gain momentum as TAIPED announces that bids for the two state-owned water companies will be invited before the summer for sale by October.
Water privatisation has proved to be a source of fatal vulnerability for governments bent on privatisation. In Latin America victories for water as a human right, against governments assuming they could sell it on the global market, have contributed, for example, to the downfall of right-wing governments in Uruguay, in the late 1990s, and Bolivia, with the Cochabamba ‘water wars’ of 2000.
Already the strength of practical commitment to water as a common good is beginning to prove awkward for the EU members of the troika on their home ground. For example, French president François Hollande’s encouragement to French water companies to start bidding for Greek companies is hardly convincing when the municipality of his own capital city is reporting efficiency savings of £30 million in the first year through bringing water back into public hands, after managers discovered private water companies extracting extortionate profits. Paris’s ‘remunicipalisation’ is part of a trend across Europe. In Berlin, too, private contractors have been dismissed.
Germany is also the source of a direct intervention against the troika’s insistence on privatising water. At the end of February, the president of the association of public water managers in Germany wrote a strong letter on behalf of the country’s public water supply and sewage companies to the European Commission president insisting that, according to the EU’s own directive on water stipulating that water is ‘not an article of trade’, ‘the supply of water, sewage water disposal and water management cannot be privatised’.
First initiatives
The first initiatives in Greece towards politically decisive resistance over water have come from the country’s second largest city, Thessaloniki. Here the preliminary steps towards privatisation in 2007 were slowed down in part through the resistance of the water workers’ union, which staged a four-day hunger strike during the city’s international trade fair. The first tenders were eventually announced in 2009 and again the union – which, unlike most unions in Greece, had determinedly maintained its autonomy from all political parties – responded with a 12-day occupation of the company’s main building.
The reputation that the water workers’ union established with activists in Thessaloniki has proved to be a foundation on which today’s growing campaign has been able to build. Union president George Archontopoulos says that in 2009 he used to invite himself to neighbourhood groups to put the arguments against privatisation. Now, he says, ‘they are always asking us to come to them and there are many more of them.’
‘We spent more than six months trying to convince them that we act as citizens and not as workers who are afraid of losing our jobs,’ he continues. ‘The truth is that they were testing us and we didn’t know! As you know, there is a lot of mud, sometimes rightly, thrown at public servants and there can be a lot of corruption in trade unions.’
The union helped to overcome this generally negative attitude to public servants by taking a militant line not only against privatisation but also against corruption, price rises and the growing number of water cut offs. It was not surprising, then, that the new energies and convergences stimulated by the occupation of Thessaloniki’s White Tower square in 2011 should lead to discussions between the indignados and the water workers.
Initiative 136
From this came ‘Initiative 136’. The idea is that if every water user bought a non-transferable share, ‘the public could own the water company through a system of neighbourhood co-operatives of water users coming together through a single overall co‑operative’. €136 is the figure you get from dividing the €60 million for which the company is to be put on the stock market by the number of water meters in the city.
‘It would, in effect, be a public-public answer to the troika’s public-private partnership,’ explains Theodoros Karyotis, a founding member of Initiative 136 from Thessaloniki’s social movements, who has also been involved in supporting the workers of the city’s Vio.Me factory during their occupation and now their self-management of production.
George Archontopoulos describes how ‘the idea first came out of a press conference during the earlier struggles. To reinforce the argument for keeping water public we divided up the stock exchange price by the number of water users to show how the public could buy shares and keep the company in public hands. With the indignados we turned this the idea into a practical campaign.’
In reality, the practical impact of Initiative 136 has been more in its propaganda power – illustrating vividly how water can be managed as a common resource ‘without relying on either private companies or the existing state,’ as Kostas Marioglou, another water workers’ leader put it. Although co-ops have been formed in eight of Thessaloniki’s 16 neighbourhoods, and the city’s municipal council has given it a unanimous welcome, people simply cannot afford the one-off €136. And municipalities hardly have the money to keep going.
‘We are under attack on every front,’ declares Theodoros Karyotis, having just returned from a 20,000-strong demonstration against the gold mining operations of Eldorado in the nearby Kavakos mountains and the vicious police repression of anyone, including school children, suspected of protesting.
But the organisers of Initiative 136 are not giving up the practical project. They are discussing now with the influential European Public Water Network about finding the funds to turn the public-public solution into reality. ‘It’s no longer a Greek issue. It has become an emblematic issue for the European movement,’ explains Karyotis. ‘If the privatisation is not defeated, it will be a real setback for the return of water to the public, which is happening everywhere else.’
Wide coalition
At the same time as pushing ahead with finding the funds and legal structures for the co-operative, all those in Initiative 136 spend time building a wide coalition against privatisation. ‘We are working on two legs. The broadest possible alliance against privatisation is the first leg and exploring a means of direct socialisation as the alternative,’ says Theodoros Karyotis.
‘We must unite against privatisation,’ emphasises Kostas Marioglou, ‘and be able to debate the best way to manage water for the common good.’ For alongside the unity there is a heated debate on Initiative 136. ‘Why should we buy what we already own?’ argue many in Syriza. ‘The problem,’ says Karyotis, ‘is how do we stop privatisation? Lobbying, protesting on its own, does it get anywhere? Initiative 136 is in one sense fighting them on their own ground, exploiting a loophole, but this is making it difficult to stop us, if we have the funds and we have the popular support.’
‘The target is common,’ insists George Archontopoulos, who stood in the elections for Syriza, ‘even if we shoot from different directions. Let’s surround the target!’
Meanwhile, a water movement developing across Attica, the region of Athens, is converging on this same target, the imminent threat of privatisation. Like the water that it is defending, a flow of campaigns is gathering force across the municipalities of Attica and from the port of Piraeus to the largest working class residential suburbs of Athens.
A determined driver behind this is an interesting and outward looking new grouping of water workers for the EYDAP public water company of Athens. It calls itself SEKE (‘participatory unity movement’). Vasilis Tsokalis, a founder member of SEKE., describes its origins during the elections for worker representatives on the EYDAP board.
‘Suddenly last year this new organisation came together, from the left and centre left, independent of the two old parties. We wanted to get rid of the existing board members who’d been there for over ten years; one a member of PASOK and the other of New Democracy,’ he explains. ‘They had been catastrophic actually, working with management and the political parties, saying they were against privatisation but doing nothing.’
SEKE immediately won 17 per cent of the vote. ‘But we knew we could become stronger through taking action with others fighting privatisation and for a management of water in the common good,’ says Tsokalis. SEKE made contact with Save Greek Water, and together they set themselves the task of convincing all 45 municipalities to support a commitment to public water.
Citizens’ movement
Vasilis Tsokalis says emphatically: ‘This is a citizens movement.’ Theodoros Karyotis stresses the importance of the ‘autonomy of our movement from all political parties’. Their insistence comes from a history in which independent civil society has been suffocated by the two main political parties. But it also comes from a positive sense of emancipation from the hierarchies, dependencies and pervasive forms of domination associated with a state operating through clientelism.
In the past, many public servants privately tried to work outside this culture but now this individual refusal is turning into a collective creation of an alternative way of engaging with politics. In the powerful wake of the protest movement of the past two years, the flourishing of self-organised collaborations such as Initiative 136, SEKE, the factory occupation at Vio.Me and more are all evidence of this.
Nadia Valvani, Syriza MP and member of its economic committee responsible for privatisation policy, sensed this in the rise of Syriza during the first elections of 2012, when the coalition’s vote rose from the 4 per cent it obtained in 2009 to 27 per cent.
‘There was something deeper than political sympathy,’ she remembers. ‘At gatherings in people’s houses I sensed a kind of emancipation process. There were people there who were not especially left who wanted to change their whole way of life and see an end to the clientelist relation to politics. They came to us for a way out. They want to participate, not just to vote. If I hadn’t lived through this, I wouldn’t have been convinced.’
This emancipation also releases productive capacities. An engineer in a responsible position with EYDAP, Antigoni Synodinou, observes the ‘huge amount of wasted talent’ under clientelism; as a trade union leader, George Archontopoulos describes how ‘workers opinions and information are ignored’.
In other words, people are describing an economic force: social creativity, stimulated and nourished through co-operation and mutuality. Conventionally it is termed ‘social capital’ and tends to be used to encourage networks of social cohesion to cope with economic hardships, without challenging structural inequalities. More radically, with transformation in mind, this same social capacity can be understood as the productive potential of democratic, participatory economics, including in the organisation of the public sector.
Changing opinion
The polls on privatisation imply that such alternatives are essential to changing public opinion, for the same people who view privatisation as a necessity also believe that it benefits foreign multinationals and does not benefit consumers. This indicates that their view is more to do with hostility to the existing state, a state already bent towards meeting primarily private interests. The problem is the absence of any awareness of alternative management of public services and common goods.
Members of Syriza’s economics committee are attentive to the importance of the initiatives autonomous of the coalition – from citizens and workers as citizens – for developing convincing and practical alternatives. In a forthcoming book, Crucible of Resistance, one of Syriza’s economic spokespeople, Euclid Tsakalotos, points to the formative importance of debate in the early years of Syriza on ‘governmentalism’. The conclusion meant Syriza not only supported social movements but also ‘learnt from these movements about the nature of the alternative’.
Syriza’s leadership see this ideal of supporting and learning from autonomous movements at the same time as aiming for government as a central challenge as it prepares to turn from a coalition to a party. Andreas Karitzis explains: ‘Syriza is dangerous because it combines those two elements, governability and the strong connection with the social movements fighting the government. The strategy of the government is to force us to decide. I am hopeful because Syriza members, whether more revolutionary or more reformist, recognise that there is no solution if we lose one of these elements.’
If the coalition against water privatisation in Greece, simultaneously resisting and experimenting with alternatives, develops its momentum, it could mean that the troika’s attempt to sell off water will again prove to be a fatal move by the political class.
Athens will be hosting the Alter Summit on June 7-8. www.altersummit.eu

Spain: We don’t owe, we won’t pay

admin — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:43:06 +0000

Protesters target a bank – the signs say ‘Stop evictions’. Photo: Fotomovimiento
The impact on the Spanish people of the financial crisis and austerity gets steadily worse. Social and economic rights are systematically violated to prioritise debt repayments. As banks are bailed out, public debt increases, and in order to meet deficit limits imposed by the EU social spending is cut. The 2013 budget provides for a 34 per cent increase in debt interest payments, more than £32 billion, at the same time that health expenditure is being cut by 22 per cent, education by 18 per cent and the women’s equality budget by 35 per cent. The consequence is greatly increasing poverty and inequality.
Almost 1.4 million people received food aid in Spain during 2012. There has been an unprecedented increase in child poverty, with 27 per cent of children living in households below the poverty line (up from 13 per cent in 2010). Unemployment has reached 25 per cent (5.7 million people), rising to 50 per cent among the young. About 1.7 million families have no one in work, leading to huge difficulties in paying bills, especially mortgages. There are now more than 500 evictions a day, leading to an epidemic of eviction-related suicides.
These are some of the realities that can help us picture the human disaster behind the economic crisis and austerity. Beyond this foreground of despair and vulnerability, though, there lies an increasingly combative civil society that refuses meekly to accept what is being inflicted upon it.
Permanent mobilisation
The spontaneous turnout of hundreds, and then thousands, of young and not so young people who took the squares of many Spanish cities and towns on 15 May 2011 was the beginning of what became the massive 15M movement. The indignados, as the media baptised the 15M activists, provided the kick-off for a permanent mobilisation that has continued until now. Of course, the intensity is not the same as during those first few weeks in 2011. But sustained – and often massive – protests have continued, facing down austerity and the dictatorship of debt.
In many towns and neighbourhoods the 15M camps turned into local assemblies, supporting or leading local demands and protests. Joining or building from scratch consumer co-operatives, providing advice to those losing their jobs, or organising popular education events, the local assemblies are far less visible and spectacular than the occupied squares but much more closely linked to people’s everyday hardships and struggles.
Many local assemblies have developed citizen’s support networks, a space where people meet and face together the abuses inflicted on them by the crisis. Mostly working on housing and labour issues, they try to look for collective answers to people’s everyday problems. They provide support to those who are about to be evicted, or they organise collective services such as city vegetable gardens, clothes exchanges, food distribution or ‘time banking’ schemes (whereby people ‘bank’ time they can offer in a particular service or skill and receive the equivalent back). But they also organise collective direct action, such as resistance to an eviction, occupying an empty building for social use or boycotting a local company that exploits its workers. Consumer co-operatives have grown too in the wake of the 15M movement. They establish a close relationship with producers, generally local eco-agriculture or farming projects, and offer food at affordable prices in self-organised spaces.
Many of those occupying the squares joined, individually or through the citizen’s support networks, the anti-evictions movement Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (literally, ‘platform for those affected by the mortgage’, PAH). Almost daily, whenever a family in contact with PAH is about to be evicted, an open call for support is launched and dozens of activists gather to try to stop the police kicking out more people from their home. PAH has halted more than 500 evictions in this way. It has also initiated a popular legislative initiative to change eviction and housing law, collecting more than a million signatures in a few months.
Among the actions promoted by PAH have been several protest camps or occupations at banks’ offices. The objective of the camps, which have been set up in Madrid, Alicante, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and other cities, is to put pressure on the banks to offer families the chance to rent properties from which they are about to be evicted. Bankia, the Spanish bank that has received the biggest state bailout, has been one of the main targets. Coordinated #AcampadaBankia actions started in early October 2012, prior to which, on 15 May 2012, protests included setting up a living room outside a Bankia office in Barcelona, followed by a popular tribunal calling the company to account in front of the bailed-out bank’s headquarters.
The protests at Bankia offices have been effective. For instance, on 31 October last year a call from PAH led to nine simultaneous Bankia office occupations, and to successful negotiations for four families facing eviction to remain in their homes on social rents.
Civil disobedience and protest
The indignados movement has given birth to a wide range of civil disobedience and protest groups. Among them are the iaioflautas: a group of people aged over 65 who engage in civil disobedience and direct action denouncing those responsible for the crisis. Occupations of government buildings, the Stock Exchange in Barcelona and several banks have been their most visible actions. The police find it difficult simply to repress a group of older people, and the iaioflautas have drawn widespread media attention to social movements’ demands.
Other remarkable actions have been carried out by the Andalusian Union of Workers (SAT, a member of the global small-scale farmer coalition La Vía Campesina). In August last year the trade union took basic living supplies from two supermarkets, claiming them for families that could not afford to pay for their food, before its activists turned themselves over to the police. The union has also been involved in squatting houses and disused farms. Last year it occupied a publicly-owned but abandoned 400-acre farm. After negotiations with the regional government, previously unemployed agriculture workers are now growing organic food in the fields of Somonte.
Recent months have also seen an increasing number of sectoral protests. As privatisation and other reforms threaten social rights, the mareas (literally ‘tides’) in defence of public health and education have filled the streets and emptied hospitals and schools with strikes. In Madrid, where the regional government is privatising several public hospitals, health workers started a four‑day strike on 29 November that lasted for five weeks. About 400 health professionals have tendered their resignations as a protest against the privatisation; four workers even went on hunger strike. Doctors, nurses and other health workers have been camping out in hospitals in Madrid and Catalunya, sleeping in tents inside the hospitals as part of the protests.
Strikes, demonstrations and repression
In February 2012, hundreds of thousands protested in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and other major cities against spending cuts, the privatisation of public services and attacks on labour rights. This was followed by a general strike on 23 March. This was a relative success but ended with brutal police repression in Barcelona and Madrid. A follow-up general strike on 14 November was backed by around 60 per cent of Spanish workers, a much higher proportion than the previous one. Again, the massive demonstrations in the main cities faced violent police repression, in what seems to be a state-sanctioned response that Spanish activists will have to confront for as long as mobilisations continue. The government, backed by the mainstream media, has promoted an increasing criminalisation of the social mobilisations. This includes new public order laws against passive resistance and protest.
Beyond the general strikes, mobilisations and protests have continued unabated. Between 12 and 15 May 2012, marking the first anniversary of the 15M movement, tens of thousands of protesters marched all over the country. In early July, several hundreds of miners finished their march to Madrid. They met in the capital with thousands of other trade unionists on strike and tens of thousands of supporters from the 15M movement. A week later, on 19 July, more than half a million people in 80 cities protested against the austerity package being pushed through parliament.
On 15 September, the ‘social summit’, a coalition of more than 150 trade unions and social organisations, brought together hundreds of thousands in a big march in Madrid. Ten days later, tens of thousands of protesters marched on the Spanish Congress and surrounded it with the claim: ‘Democracy is kidnapped and we are going to rescue it.’ After the protesters were violently repressed by the police, a new demonstration gathered thousands of people in front of the Spanish parliament, just four days afterwards. The demonstrations at the Spanish parliament were repeated again in October as the new budget for 2013 was being discussed.
Alternative media
While mainstream media only cover the major demonstrations and strikes, a flourishing alternative media offers up-to-date information and comprehensive coverage of the mobilisations. Alternative online and print media projects such as Diagonal, Periodismo Humano and la Directa, or TV projects such as TeleK and latele.cat, which existed prior to 15M, have gained much support and visibility. But the movement has also produced new media spaces, such as the television internet channel tomalatele and the local newspaper Madrid15m, among many local media projects on radio, online and in print.
Layoffs in mainstream newspapers have also led jobless journalists to develop several media projects, such as La Marea, El Diario, Mongolia and Alternativas Económicas, some of them in the form of cooperatives. Though not activist‑led media, they do provide a social and alternative news coverage, and have a potentially larger audience than the more alternative media projects arising from the social movements. The explosion of new or reinvigorated media projects, together with the social networks, especially Twitter, have played a key role in the dissemination of information and proliferation of many of the actions and mobilisations described here.
Fighting the debtocracy
On 13 October, following the Global Noise call to action, thousands of protesters nationwide marched under the slogan ‘We don’t owe, we won’t pay’, and called for a citizens’ debt audit. The Citizens’ Debt Audit Platform (PACD) was created last March in Spain, and has since engaged in a mobilisation and popular education campaign, together with gathering and analysing information on Spanish debt. The PACD, formed by both debt and 15M activists, is working closely with other movements, providing them with arguments against the payment of illegitimate debt.
The citizens’ debt audit is conceived by the PACD as a participatory process that aims to empower people to be able to decide, in a democratic and sovereign way, what to do with the debt and our future. The PACD believes that there is enough evidence of illegitimacy in Spanish public debt to justify the non-payment of that debt. One of its objectives is to make that evidence more visible.
As more people come to understand that the cuts are being imposed to pay the debt – a debt that is being accumulated to bail out the banks – increasing numbers are joining the fightback against debtocracy.
Iolanda Fresnillo is a member of the Citizens’ Debt Audit Platform in Barcelona. Fellow PACD members Mireya Royo and Tom Kucharz also contributed to this article

How Beppe Grillo stole the left’s clothes

admin — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:53:22 +0000

Beppe Grillo. Photo: Niccolò Caranti/Wikipedia
The outcome of the Italian elections brought many surprises – though for once Berlusconi was not one of them. His vote did not collapse, as many had hoped for, but nor did it recover. His coalition lost six million votes but retained the level of support that had been expected. This decline was obscured by the poor performance of the centre left, which got a lower vote than expected, as did Mario Monti’s centre coalition.

The most commented-on aspect of the election internationally, though, has been where the remaining votes went: to the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S). It became the single biggest party in Italy, picking up 25.6 per cent of the vote.

Let us make clear that this is no victory for the left. M5S is an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. As Giuliano Santoro points out, Grillo and the co-founder of his movement, marketer Gianroberto Casaleggio, are both millionaires with a proprietorial conception of their organisation.

M5S’s constitution, written by Grillo and Casaleggio, states: ‘The name of the Five Star Movement is attached to a trademark registered under the name of Beppe Grillo, the sole holder of rights on its use.’ These rights have been consistently used to expel anyone who has tried to make the movement more autonomous from Grillo’s personal style of leadership.

A chaotic mix of left and right

Grillo claims that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are now useless categories. Accordingly, he mixes environmentalism, degrowth and anti-austerity with anti-immigration remarks typical of the far right (for example he rejects citizenship for the children of migrants). When talking to CasaPound, who are self-declared fascists, Grillo stated that ‘anti-fascism’ does not concern him and that everybody is welcome to join the movement.

As the leftist collective of authors Wu Ming noted, Grillo’s proposals are ‘a chaotic programme where neoliberal and anti-neoliberal, centralist and federalist, libertarian and authoritarian ideas coexist’. Wu Ming also accuse Grillo of having channelled popular discontent against austerity in a purely electoral and politically very ambivalent direction, suggesting that this is one of the reasons why there was no Occupy or Indignados movement in Italy.

But what, then, can account for Grillo’s astounding success? You could rightly blame the centre-left Democratic Party for flirting with neoliberalism and austerity. In a paradoxical situation – one very representative of the Italian anomaly – during the electoral campaign the economic positions of left and right seemed to switch. Berlusconi’s right has taken to quoting neo-Keynesian economists in order to condemn Monti’s policies.

Many leftists were hoping that a good performance of the centre-left coalition would allow Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani to form a government without Monti’s neoliberal centre, and that a good performance by the more radical Left Ecology Freedom party (SEL) could bring the axis of any coalition onto an anti-austerity platform.

But everybody knew that this was highly unlikely and that probably, in the end, the centre-left would have championed neoliberalism by governing with Monti. Certainly Grillo profited from this perception.

Failure of the left

All that is true, but still too simplistic. If it was an anti-austerity vote, then why didn’t Left Ecology Freedom, which proposed an anti-austerity and green platform in many respects similar to Grillo’s, get more than 3 per cent? Because it was allied with the Democratic Party? But then why did Civil Revolution, a group of all the leftist forces that refused to enter the centre-left coalition, get only an irrelevant 2 per cent?

It is striking to see how Grillo won support by ‘stealing’ so many issues and battles that the alternative left has been fighting for decades. As Lorenzo Zamponi notes, there are three main themes that Grillo appropriated from the movements: global justice issues (opposition to war, GM food, big finance, multinational corporations), environmental issues (especially the battle for water to remain public and the ‘No TAV’ movement against a high speed railway in Piedmont), and participative issues, reacting against the top-down nature of the traditional parties (which in Grillo’s case is translated into an exaltation of internet democracy that hides his strict control over the movement).

Perhaps what we find most frustrating is that Grillo completely fails to acknowledge his debt to the alternative left. But I think this is the very explanation for his success. Italy is an extremely politically polarised country. Just as some people will never vote for the right, many people will never ever vote for the left, no matter how bad the right is.

All parties on the Italian left are descendants of the Communist Party diaspora, and to some extent they are still paying for the party’s early support for the USSR and its later ambiguities on the issue. Many people just can’t stand the idea of seeing ‘the communists’ in power, and Berlusconi is well known for having exploited this feeling to the utmost – he has sometimes framed Bersani as some sort of ‘austerity communist’. But even Left Ecology Freedom’s leader Nichi Vendola, an expression of a more libertarian left, is seen as part of the old communist bureaucracy, and indeed he used to be a cadre of the Communist Party.

The attempts from Vendola and his allies to renovate the old organisational forms and the standard conception of political representation by working with social movements, although seriously pursued, did not manage to go far enough. This is partly due to the internal limits and the heritage of the party structure, partly to the impossibility of winning the rest of the centre-left to this strategy, and partly to the lack of consensus within the movements themselves on the issue of collaborating with parties.

The final failure of this strategy came about in 2008, when the centre-left government collapsed. And this is exactly when Grillo’s political project started to take shape. By proposing a new organisation with a new organisational form and rejecting the identity of ‘leftist’, Grillo was the only force that could appear as truly different from the discredited establishment. He drew votes from both sides.

Where will Grillo go?

Sergio Zulian, a long standing activist in Italy’s North East Social Centres network, comments: ‘This electoral result is certainly a child of the economic crisis that finally destroyed the credibility of the political class, which was already highly damaged by the corruption scandals typical of this country. Even the radical left wasn’t able to separate itself from the old representational mechanisms that are seen as part of the establishment. Grillo had a very effective communicative strategy that allowed him to re-frame many battles led by the movements. The same cannot be said for the parties of the left.’

Among other things, with his own anti-austerity and green platform, he managed to build the working class and post-materialist middle class coalition that Vendola’s project had been based on. Many trade union members voted for M5S, as well as those workers who had formerly switched from the Communist Party to the far right Northern League.

Now the centre-left does not have his own majority in the upper house and Monti’s seats are not enough to build one. Bersani and Vendola have rejected the idea a ‘grand coalition’ with Berlusconi, which would make them lose even more support. They are trying to negotiate with M5S.

It’s too early to tell what will happen. Maybe Grillo could work with the left and actually do some of the leftist things that are in his own programme: renegotiate the debt, create incentives for a green economy, regulate finance, guarantee basic income, and so on. Or maybe he will cling to the most demagogic parts of his platform – for instance, after the elections he immediately restated that he wants to abolish all public funding for the parties, which would finally throw electoral politics exclusively into the hands of millionaires like Berlusconi and Grillo himself.

Sergio Zulian adds: ‘This crisis is changing Europe – we need to make an effort to understand this change and bring it on a progressive direction. We’ll soon find out which direction the M5S itself will actually take.’

Italian elections: choosing our ground

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:00:05 +0000

The occupied social centres came from a drive to bring people together to achieve aims that are social as well as political. So you will always find a bar and a kitchen in which people can eat together, along with all kinds of cultural activities, including gyms, workshops, music studios, radio stations and performance spaces. The political aspect lies in participation in the assembly-based self-management of the occupied space.
In 1989, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a right-wing offensive started in Italy both electorally and with fierce police repression. The fascists were reorganising on the streets and entering key positions in state institutions at the same time. That summer, Leoncavallo made the news with its resistance against an attempt to close it down. In 1991, Andrea Rossini, a comrade from Radio Onda D’Urto was stabbed by the fascists in front of the social centre and nearly died. In 1993, the candidate of the far-right Lega Nord became the mayor of Milan, and in 1994 Berlusconi became prime minister.
In this context, a significant part of the extra-parliamentary left chose to abandon the idea that the social movements should be entirely separate from political institutions. We could not allow the right to conquer the public institutions without any opposition. So we decided in 1998, with the ‘Milan Charter’, to launch a political offensive. The charter was a statement aimed at building a bridge between social movements and left parties, especially the Greens and Rifondazione Comunista (see guide), which had become increasingly oriented towards those movements. In that period there was also a recomposition of the relationship between social centres and a new militant grassroots trade unionism.
Our dialogue with Rifondazione became focused on making the political institutions responsive to social movement pressure. Rifondazione supported centre left candidates who did not represent the movements at all but this was compensated by the fact that we had our own direct representative inside the party, Daniele Farina. He had to relay back and forth between our assembly practices and the party organisation. The personal virtue of single comrades such as Daniele within the party compensated for the limited ability of the party to come to terms with participative democracy.
The shortcomings and advantages of the new strategy reached a peak with the great global justice movement that began in the late 1990s. The social forums that it stimulated drew energy from international connections, for instance with the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico. Mobilisations in the early 21st century united the best of the anti-mafia movement, the social centres, feminists, immigrants, environmentalists, the resistance from within the institutions, sections of unions and schools.
It was a great novelty; however, it came up against the contradictions of the institutional left. In Genoa at the 2001 G8 summit, the day after the police killing of a demonstrator and serious beatings of many more, a huge demonstration took place that was opposed by the Democratic Left (now the Democratic Party). The subaltern governmentalism of the centre left eventually subordinated the struggles, and after Genoa the different strands of the extra-parliamentary movements that had united there separated again.
Relationships that broke nationally, however, survived in many local contexts. In Milan, Leoncavallo continued its collaboration with Rifondazione and later with the Left Ecology Freedom Party, SEL (see guide), and this culminated with the radical left lawyer, Giuliano Pisapia, becoming mayor. Pisapia is close to SEL but has no membership card. SEL is a fragile and small party but it is also a movement, in the sense that it provides a platform for non-members and gives them access to state institutions. Leoncavallo is not affiliated to SEL or any other party. We will not fly party flags inside Leoncavallo.
In Milan we have managed to influence a part of the Democratic Party, which is in coalition with SEL, and to gain its support for the self-managed social spaces and the occupations to meet living needs; for the exclusion from the city administration of the fascists the former council leadership had put into position; and for some social and environmental measures, such as the reduction of council house rents and limiting the use of cars in the city. But many parts of the social movements did not support SEL in the council elections. This meant that SEL’s presence in the administration is not strong enough to allow for more radical changes that would otherwise have been possible.
Support from social movements is even more necessary in the coming political elections. Today the right is falling apart, and yet the situation is chaotic. Disaffection towards liberal democracy has given the upper hand to an anti-politics wave that was exploited by Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (see guide). This is dangerous because it appropriates some leftist themes, such as environmentalism and opposition to the power of finance, but hijacks them towards right wing positions. For example, it tends to be anti-immigrant and issues of class are totally forsaken.
I am also critical of the so-called ‘orange left’ that opposes all parties. In the absence of the great and powerful movements of the 1970s, what do they want to substitute the parties with? The only result might be to help the right by fragmenting the left.
For this reason, I believe that the only way to defeat the right and neoliberalism is to support the Democratic Party-SEL coalition led by Perluigi Bersani. By concentrating our support on SEL, we can reduce the influence of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. Our central programme includes: universal minimum income to compensate for the austerity measures; investment in public education; industrial policies to convert the country to sustainable development; legalisation of cannabis and consequent emptying of the prisons for related crimes; civil unions for all, including homosexuals. For us, choosing Bersani’s Democratic Party today means to choose the ground for tomorrow’s struggle.
Elena Iannuzzi was talking to Lorenzo Fe

Who’s who in Italy’s elections

Lorenzo Fe guides us through the maze of political parties competing and combining in the elections
The left wing coalition
Led by Perluigi Bersani
Expected total: 36-42 per cent
Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD)
Expected result: 31-34 per cent
The Democratic Party, led by Pier Luigi Bersani, was born in 2007 out of the fusion between two long-time rivals: Democratici di Sinistra – coming from the Italian Communist Party, the major left party in the ‘first republic’ (1948-1994) – and the Margherita, a formation originating from Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the main ruling party during the whole of the first republic.
Left Ecology Freedom (Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, SEL)
Expected result: 4-6 per cent
SEL was founded in 2008 when Nichi Vendola and others left the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista. Vendola, currently president of the Puglia region, is building on the idea of innovation of the communist tradition. SEL refuses orthodoxy and works closely with social movements. Some activists from the Green Party, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Democratic Party joined too.
The centre coalition
Led by Mario Monti
Expected total: 10-16 per cent
Centre Union (Unione di Centro, UDC)
Expected result: 4-6 per cent
The UDC comes from the right wing of Christian Democracy, which refused to coalesce with its old-time communist opponents and preferred to ally with Berlusconi in the 1994 elections. Its constituency is mainly formed by conservative Catholics.
Future and Liberty for Italy (Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia, FLI)
Expected result: 0.5-1.5 per cent
FLI leader Gianfranco Fini’s journey started with the Movimento Sociale Italiano, formed in 1946 by the remnants of the Fascist Party. In 1995 the party changed its name to the Alleanza Nazionale and decided to embrace a liberal conservatism closer to other European right-wing parties. In 2009 the party dissolved in order to unite with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the PDL. In 2010 Fini left the PDL due to his disagreements with Berlusconi and founded the FLI, which claims to be more moderate than the populist right.
Civic choice for Italy (Scelta civic per l’Italia)
Expected result: 6-9 per cent
An electoral list formed by outgoing prime minister Mario Monti with contributions by Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, president of the Ferrari car manufacturing company. The list will collect dissidents from PD and PDL along with ‘civil society’ and business figures in order to support Monti’s neoliberal, technocratic agenda.
The right wing coalition
Led by Silvio Berlusconi
Expected total: 27-33 per cent
People of Freedom (Popolo Della Libertà, PDL)
Expected result: 18-20 per cent
PDL came into being after the fusion of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale. Berlusconi founded Forza Italia in 1994 to stop the left from winning the elections after the old party system based on the alliance between Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party had collapsed under the weight of major corruption scandals.
Northern League (Lega Nord)
Expected result: 4-7 per cent
The Northern League is a territorial party, the expression of a Euro-sceptic and anti-immigration right seeking greater autonomy (and at times independence) for the wealthier north. Apart from a break in 1996, it has been a faithful ally of Berlusconi under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. Last summer, a wave of corruption scandals hit the party and especially the Bossi family, leading to a reduction in the party’s influence and a new leader Roberto Maroni.
Others
Five Stars Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle, M5S)
Expected result: 10-13 per cent
M5S builds on the frustration that most Italians feel towards the political class as a whole. The movement claims that left-right divisions are meaningless and has a mixed agenda comprising environmentalism, Euro-scepticism, anti-corruption, anti-finance, and some anti-immigration remarks. In many ways it has an innovative organisation using the internet, local ‘meet ups’ etc to spread the movement but the founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, exercises considerable power and the sense in which it is democratic is controversial.
Civil Revolution (Rivoluzione Civile)
Expected result: 2-4 per cent
Not a party but an electoral list put together by the anti-mafia judge Antonio Ingroia. It features candidates from the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista and the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani. It also has candidates from the Italia dei Valori, an anti‑corruption party that was quite influential but has lost much of its lustre, ironically, after a recent corruption scandal.
Some minor parties excluded, but included in coalition totals. Poll data comes from an average of the main surveys

Essay: Europe’s hard borders

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:00:20 +0000

In the aftermath of the cold war, the more utopian prophets of globalisation hailed the advent of a new ‘borderless’ world in which national borders would become irrelevant and obsolete. Since then governments across the world have dismantled barriers and tariffs against the free movement of capital and commodities, and entered into regional and transnational agreements that have relinquished traditional tenets of national sovereignty.
Yet the past two decades have also been seen an unprecedented political concern with borders as symbolic markers of national identity, and barriers against the movement of unwanted people. In various countries, from the United States and India to Israel and South Africa, governments have reinforced their borders with new physical barriers, technologies and personnel.
This dual process of softening/hardening borders has been particularly striking in the European Union. On the one hand European governments have achieved something that only a few decades ago would have seemed unimaginable – the reintegration of Eastern and Western Europe, the removal of internal border checks and the creation of a vast ‘space of freedom, security and justice’ in which some 500 million European citizens can live and work freely anywhere on the continent.
At the same time European governments have gone to extraordinary and unprecedented lengths to limit and monitor the entry of people from outside the continent. From Ceuta and Melilla in the south to the 1,800-mile frontier that marks Europe’s eastern frontier with Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova; from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic and the Aegean, European governments have reinforced their borders with police, soldiers, border guards, naval patrols, and an array of physical barriers and surveillance and detection technologies that amount to the most extensive border enforcement effort in history.
The new political prioritisation of borders has been shaped by various factors, from economic insecurity and anxieties about national identity to law enforcement and security concerns. But the overriding priority behind the new border regimes, from the Rio Grande and the Sinai to the Greek-Turkish border, is the prevention of ‘illegal immigration’ – a category that generally refers to undocumented migrants from the global south, whether defined as ‘economic migrants’ or refugees and asylum seekers.
Today Europe’s immigration controls are no longer limited to the continent’s territorial frontiers but extend both inside and outside the continent. They include a sprawling archipelago of detention centres scattered across and beyond the EU; draconian ‘post-entry’ policies which victimise and marginalise asylum seekers in order to transmit a deterrent message; ‘upstream’ immigration controls aimed at detecting and trapping unwanted migrants before they can even reach Europe; and neighbourhood partnerships that seek to involve an ever-widening array of countries in Europe’s ‘externalised’ border controls.
Devastating consequences
This system has had devastating consequences for the people it is designed to exclude. At least 15,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the EU’s maritime and land borders. Men, women and children have drowned in the Mediterranean and the Aegean, frozen to death in the mountains of Slovakia and Poland, or been blown up in minefields along the Greek-Turkish border.
Migrants have also fallen from trucks and trains, or killed themselves to escape detention or deportation or because they were reduced to stateless destitution. Such deaths have since become so routine that even the most spectacular tragedies increasingly attract little more than cursory media attention.
European governments frequently attribute the horrific migrant death toll to the ruthlessness and cynicism of traffickers and people smugglers – and not always without reason. But the death toll on the continent’s borders has become a kind of collateral damage in an undeclared ‘war’ that treats undocumented migrants as criminal and harmful intruders to be kept at bay through a quasi-military enforcement effort.
The moral condemnation of the people-smuggling industry ignores the fact that that migrants make use of such services in order to find a way through the gauntlet of obstacles that have been placed in their path. It also tends to overlook the demand for undocumented migrant labour in key sectors of the European economy – a demand that is often enhanced by the fact that illegal workers have few or no legal protections.
European governments do not want migrants dying on the continent’s borders. But their common determination to prevent or at least slow down the pace of migration has in practice created pockets of impunity, in which the worst things can happen to migrants but no one is ever responsible or accountable for them.
In 2005 at least 13 African migrants were shot or fell to their deaths when Spanish and Moroccan security forces attempted to prevent mass crossings of the border fences in Spain’s Moroccan exclaves at Ceuta and Melilla. To date neither the Moroccan nor Spanish security forces have accepted responsibility for these deaths.
In the Aegean and the Mediterranean, there have been a disturbing number of incidents in which coastguard and naval vessels from various countries are alleged to have rammed migrant boats or refused to rescue their passengers. Such allegations have tended to produce inconclusive investigations, insofar as they have been investigated at all. These incidents cannot be considered the norm. Thousands of migrants have indeed been rescued at sea by European coastguard officers and naval personnel. But the horrendous death toll means that the glass must always be considered half empty, and the proliferation of ‘left-to-die’ episodes is the most extreme manifestation of the repressive model of border enforcement, which generally prefers to ensure that migrant journeys are as hazardous, difficult and harsh as possible – the better to deter others from following their example.
Undermining Europe’s principles
These priorities have remorselessly ground away at the principles that supposedly define the European Union, in ways that are not always visible to the general public. The European Union places human rights at the heart of its political identity. Article 2 of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty states that: ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.’
This commitment to human rights is further reflected in various treaties and conventions, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, in addition to conventions and treaties to which the EU is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Charter.
No European government has explicitly abrogated these agreements, even though some have called for some of them to be revisited. Yet these commitments are routinely violated in practice by the continent’s border enforcement procedures.
The Geneva Convention explicitly mandates its signatories to observe the principle of ‘non-refoulement’, whereby refugees and asylum seekers are not sent back to a country where they may face persecution or harm. But this principle has been regularly evaded or ignored by numerous European governments. In 2009, Italy signed its notorious ‘pushback’ or ‘towback’ agreement with Gaddafi’s Libya, whereby migrants intercepted on the high seas were handed over to the Libyan navy without any asylum screening procedures and sent back to a country with some of the worst immigration detention centres in the world.
Both ‘pushed back’ migrant detainees and migrants entering Libya from the Sahara were subjected to the routine violence, overcrowding, and sexual exploitation that characterised Libya’s detention regime – some of which received funding from the EU itself. Both Italy and the EU were aware of conditions inside these centres, but Gaddafi’s Libya, like Tunisia, was nevertheless allowed to play the role of migrant dumping ground – a role that has continued since his overthrow.
Other countries have also been drawn into the EU’s migration controls in an attempt to deny access to asylum in practice without explicitly refusing it. In Greece, the police and army have conducted secret deportations of migrants across the Greek-Turkish land border, and Turkey’s weak traditions of refugee protection have not prevented the EU from attempting to involve the Turkish government in its ‘externalised’ border controls.
In Slovakia and Ukraine, migrants crossing the border from Ukraine to seek asylum have been handed over to Ukrainian border guards without any assessment of their claims and placed in detention for months or a year in a country where almost no one gets refugee protection.
At the Moroccan-Algerian border, I visited forest camps where migrants, including young children, were living in homemade bivouacs (improvised shelters) at the mercy of the Moroccan police and army, who regularly shunt them across the border, and where female migrants are routinely raped or sexually exploited by bandits, law enforcement officials and other migrants themselves.
Within Europe itself, a number of ‘border countries’ have acted as dumping grounds and migrant traps as a result of the Dublin Convention’s ‘geographical’ clause, which limits asylum applications to a single country. In Greece tens of thousands of migrants have become trapped in a country that accepted few refugees even before the economic crisis erupted. In Malta migrants have sometimes been detained for five years from the moment of their arrival in detention centres that were condemned by all external observers.
Punitive array
Formal detention is only one instrument in an array of punitive measures aimed at isolating migrants from the societies in which they find themselves. Thousands of rejected asylum seekers across the continent are not allowed to work and receive no benefits because they won’t sign an agreement agreeing to return to the countries they came from.
In the Spanish exclave of Melilla in Morocco, some migrants have spent more than five years in the ‘migrant reception centre’ or living in camps on the outskirts of the city, waiting for their asylum applications to be processed. Even when migrants have been registered officially as asylum seekers and theoretically entitled to continue their journeys to the Spanish mainland, they have been turned back on the ferry and forced to remain in a city that effectively acts as an offshore detention centre.
In the Greek ports of Patras and Igoumenitsa, migrants have been harassed by police in an increasingly vicious campaign of persecution in an attempt to make them leave. In Calais, the demolition of the Sangatte ‘jungle’ in 2009 was followed by a relentless war of attrition, in which police have attempted to prevent migrants from using the city as a conduit to the UK.
In the spring of 2010, I personally witnessed police taking away blankets from more than 50 homeless migrants in Calais, in temperatures that were only just above zero, under the supervision of the local authorities. Since then police have raided migrant squats and camps, some of which have been demolished by the municipal authorities.
All these developments have formed part of a punitive response to what the European border agency Frontex once described as a potential ‘human surge’ of immigration that might overwhelm the continent.
In some countries, such as Berlusconi’s Italy, extreme right wing politicians have described undocumented migration as an ‘invasion’ – a fantasy that is sometimes reframed more specifically as an Islamic invasion that threatens to undermine European culture and civilisation. In other countries, even left-of-centre governments have presented ‘immigration management’ as an instrument of ‘social cohesion’ and an essential prophylactic to keep more extreme political forces at bay.
The result is a border enforcement model that is simultaneously ruthless, devious, incoherent, hypocritical and lacking in any moral credibility, and which has proven largely futile and counterproductive. If militarised border controls have sometimes succeeded in reducing the flow of migrants in some countries, these ‘victories’ have generally paved the way for new migratory routes elsewhere.
Europe’s need for migrants
Numerous economists have argued that a ‘greying’ Europe needs migrants to pay the taxes that provide the continent’s pensions and public services and to fill the demand for labour in key economic sectors. In 2011, a strategy paper presented to the European Commission noted that ‘European countries are facing labour market shortages and vacancies that cannot be filled by the domestic workforce in specific sectors’ and that ‘long-term population ageing in Europe is expected to halve the ratio between persons of working age (20-64) and persons aged 65 and above in the next 50 years.’
The paper called for less stringent visa requirements and the development of ‘migration and mobility dialogues’ with neighbouring migrant-producing countries that would attempt to transform migration into a mutually-beneficial process. These recommendations were accompanied by the same emphasis on restrictions, barriers, readmission agreements, and outsourced border controls that have dominated EU policy debates for so many years, and which called into question the paper’s stated aspiration to ‘protect the human rights of all migrants throughout their migration process’.
These contradictory objectives are even more glaring in mainstream political discourse. Too many politicians and policymakers recognise Europe’s need for migrants yet refuse to acknowledge this publicly and prefer instead to celebrate crowd-pleasing deportation statistics as proof of their ‘toughness’ on immigration, and commit themselves to drastic immigrant-reduction targets that cannot be met without replicating the ‘closed’ security-obsessed borders of the 1930s.
In Europe’s age of debt-driven ‘austerity’, it has become even more convenient for governments to prioritise national privilege and depict migrants as parasitical intruders – a tendency reflected in meaningless populist promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’, in unrealisable immigration reduction targets and in the Spanish government’s recent law denying free healthcare to undocumented migrants.
Today the economic crisis has become a further justification for an intensification of border enforcement, at a time when the numbers of migrants coming to Europe are falling across the continent because of the crisis. Not only have migrants in various countries begun to return home because there is no work available for them but European countries that have only recently undergone the transformation from ‘immigrant-producing’ to ‘immigrant-receiving’ countries have once again begun to produce a new generation of migrants.
These developments suggest an inherent rationality to migration that rarely features in media debates about immigration and policy documents pertaining to Europe’s ‘hardened’ borders. Instead of recognising such rationality and developing policies that can harness migration for the benefit of Europe and migrants themselves, too many governments have accepted the exclusionary model without any regard for its human or political consequences.
Contradictory principles and practice
The European Union was not only intended to be a trading bloc and an economic union. The project of European unity was a response to the most catastrophic period in European and world history. Its architects aspired to create a common European space that would reflect the continent’s best political traditions, rather than its worst. These aspirations are at odds with the punitive border enforcement policies that have been put in place over the last two decades – and the attitudes and assumptions that have shaped these policies.
A genuinely inclusive Europe that prioritises human rights and aspires to be a ‘Europe of asylum’ cannot coexist indefinitely with exclusionary policies based on detention centres; with target-driven deportations; with ‘externalised’ border controls that transform ‘offshore’ countries into migrant dumping grounds and prevent potential refugees from even reaching Europe; with border surveillance technologies, fences and barriers; with ‘post-entry’ policies that reduce men and women to homeless pariahs in the heart of some of the richest cities on earth.
Sooner or later the contradictions between principle and practice will become impossible to ignore or smooth over. If European governments are to avoid a dynamic of repression that risks replicating some of the darkest pages in the continent’s history, it is incumbent upon Europeans to develop a more humane and rational approach to immigration, which reflects the continent’s best political and moral traditions, rather than its worst, which places human rights at the heart of migration and does not treat people in search of work or a place of safety as criminals, invaders and threats to its cultural identity.
Thousands of people across the continent have already made this choice. They include NGOs, militant anti-border control activists, church and civil society organisations and individuals from a variety of different backgrounds who have intervened in Europe’s immigration wars to stop the deportations of migrants they have known as friends or colleagues, provided humanitarian assistance to destitute asylum seekers, or engaged in popular mobilisations against detention centres and deportation flights.
In their examples we can glimpse the possibility of another kind of Europe to the ‘fortress’ model that is currently under construction, one that is based on solidarity, inclusivity and common humanity, rather than fear, xenophobia and the demonisation of the alien Other.
The great challenge is how to find governments that not only pay lip service to these principles but are prepared to develop policies that reflect them in practice, and replace the continent’s hardened borders with a more generous and realistic approach to migration than the one that has dominated the past two decades.
Matthew Carr is the author of Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a gated continent. He blogs at www.infernalmachine.co.uk. Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Organising to survive in Greece

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:00:36 +0000

Greeks queue to buy cheap sacks of potatoes sold directly by farmers at cost price in the northern town of Thessaloniki. Farmers in northern Greece have joined forces with local residents to provide cheap produce for the people. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis
The first problem is that in Greece now we have 25 per cent unemployment, with youth unemployment reaching 58 per cent and unemployment in areas that used to be highly industrialised sometimes reaching 70-80 per cent. Many industries either close because we have very low consumption or, as in the case of the big multinationals like Coca-Cola, they are leaving.
Around 170,000 small companies have closed in the past three years. It is almost impossible to set up a new company today in Greece because you can’t get the finance. The banks are taking 80 per cent of the money that Greece is getting from the EU and IMF. But they are not lending a euro to the people.
Unemployment benefit only lasts for one year, and then you get nothing to survive on – only help from friends and family, from social networks and working for very little in the black economy. The problem up to now hasn’t been as severe as it could have been because of very strong family and friendship networks – if someone had difficulty in paying bills, for example, others would support them. But it isn’t possible to sustain this kind of support indefinitely.
A related problem is homelessness. In the past, homeless people were mainly those who had problems with drug use or illness. Now many are homeless because they lost their jobs. There are least 20,000 homeless in Greece now – some estimates are much higher. And state-provided shelter only covers around 250 people.
At the same time, there are 300,000 houses for sale in Athens because people need the money to live on. About 40 per cent of mortgages are in arrears. There are few repossessions at the moment because the mortgage companies would not know what to do with the houses. But they are talking about it.
Salaries have fallen substantially – by up to 70 per cent in some cases. When the state cannot pay its debt, it reduces public sector salaries, as well as pensions. My sister has been working in education for 25 years. Her monthly salary has dropped from €1,400 to €1,000 (£800). People with bigger salaries have seen an even bigger drop. So talented people, especially the young, are going abroad to find better paid work.
Food direct
At the same time, contrary to the normal assumptions about prices falling during a recession, they are actually going up. The reason is that many products are imported and with trade in the hands of big companies, these companies can keep prices high. This is why, with Solidarity for All, we’re trying to create a network to provide food direct from producers without using the normal market. In this way we have been able to lower prices by up to 50 per cent compared to what they are in the supermarket. This is a big movement in Greece now. We have not managed yet to organise for all products, but there are now networks for the direct exchange of some vegetables, potatoes, oil, flour and lemons, for example.
There are many families who are undernourished. Children are fainting in schools because they haven’t eaten anything for a day or two. We have therefore tried to push the government to provide some food in schools – something that hasn’t happened since the 1950s.
There is a big problem with the health system. Most people have to pay health insurance. But they have not been able to keep up payments, so they can’t go to the hospital, to a doctor, or buy medicine. Insurance is very expensive, €350 per month – so it is very difficult to afford when salaries have been cut from, say, €2,000 to €1,000. More than one third of the population can’t use health services because of this. So we have tried to set up small health centres with volunteer doctors, and gather from pharmacies some medicine for people who have no insurance. We’ve also tried to collaborate with some hospitals where there are sympathetic managers and send them the more serious cases.
There is a particular problem with the most expensive medicines, such as those for cancer. Even the hospitals don’t have these medicines because of lack of funds, so the patient ends up just being given cortisone. Every day in our network we try to inform people who have these diseases where they can find the right medicine – one day it’s this hospital, three days later another one.
Another problem is the taxes. The government has reformed the tax system but it has benefited the rich. Before the change those with up to €10,000 income wouldn’t pay taxes. And beyond €10,000 the taxes were between 10 per cent and 40 per cent (and for companies from 25 per cent to 40 per cent). Now individuals have to start to pay taxes from the first euro, with tax rates for individuals between 20 and 35 per cent, while corporate taxes are now 25 per cent maximum. The idea is that this gives the companies an incentive to invest. But at the moment most companies show no intention to do so.
There has been a big increase in suicides. Before the crisis, the suicide level was very low but in the past year suicide ranked equal first with car accidents as a cause of death. This particularly affects middle class men who have lost everything. One newspaper reported that every day we have 500 attempted suicides, around 50 of which are successful.
Solidarity networks
The solidarity networks are working in six spheres: food supply and health services (see posters, right), education, cultural activity, legal advice and social economy.
We are people of the left and radical left, and connected with Syriza – though it’s not only people from Syriza who are involved. Syriza also decided that 20 per cent of its MPs’ salaries would be given to solidarity actions. We have decided that this will be used to help people to start small collective businesses, or to buy essentials for social kitchens, but we don’t use it for direct payments to people or for paying rent.
Solidarity for All is a growing movement – last year there were maybe only 100 initiatives and now it has grown to 2,000. There is a lot of activity, spreading fast. So far it has been people taking action by themselves but we are trying to coordinate it. We are trying to make a database of all the small groups doing solidarity actions so they can meet each other and exchange experiences. The aim is to make a movement out of this, and try to find solutions to the problems encountered by solidarity networks.
Many of these problems arise from state intervention. For example, there is a very important solidarity centre in the town of Volos in Thessalia, in the middle of Greece, where products and services are exchanged without money. They have a social currency called a ‘tem’. They have created an exchange system, so that, for example, one kilo of potatoes is one tem and one hour of babysitting is one tem. So if you want someone to babysit you could give them a kilo of potatoes in exchange. As this grew, the state asked them to pay taxes on the services and products they were exchanging. Up to now the state has not succeeded in enforcing this but we don’t know what will happen in the future.
Another example of state hostility is towards the social kitchens. The state told us we didn’t have the necessary sanitary conditions or permission to run these kitchens. In response, all social kitchens got together and answered with a huge communal meal where many people cooked all together and challenged them to arrest us all!
Our work on education is important because in Greece you have to pay for subjects such as languages, music and so on. People increasingly can’t afford this, so we have volunteer teams giving lessons in foreign languages and music in many neighbourhoods in Athens and other cities.
Then there are teams of people who provide legal information when people have problems with the banks and so on. Also we have groups who put on music or theatrical performances, where people can watch by donating food, which then goes to feed others in need of it. And finally we have networks working on different aspects of the social economy – for example to support people taking land that is not being used and cultivating it, or people occupying a free space and running a social marketplace in it, with very low prices.
People are expecting an even bigger crisis and we have to be prepared. The most important thing is to provide medicine and food. Greece is very competent in agriculture, so we could easily become self sufficient in food.
Reducing fear
It is also important to ensure people aren’t isolated and fearful. The only weapon of the government is fear. My mother is an old woman and is afraid of losing her pension. She knows that the money Greece receives from the EU is not, as the media pretend, for salaries and pensions but is for supporting the banks. No one really believes the government’s policies are right, but many people are afraid to protest.
We are trying to reduce people’s fear, so that they can exert their right to protest. But our aim is also to counteract the increasing support for the Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece, which is now approaching 12 per cent support in the polls. These people offer their own kind of ‘social solidarity’, but only for white, Greek Orthodox people and mainly as a media trick. They go to a square, call the media and distribute food, and if, for example, a woman who is not originally Greek tries to take some food they chase her away in front of the media. They campaign for nursery schools to give priority to ‘Greek’ children and not to take the children even of legal migrants. And the most severe problem is that they attack migrants every day without any punishment from the state. Worryingly, they are starting to have an influence in high schools, where they have formed gangs.
Their vote comes largely from the middle class or poorer – though not the poorest – people, including many from rural areas. Their voters believe that Golden Dawn is an anti-system party because its MPs vote against the austerity measures in parliament. We are trying to inform people that in fact they are the violent hand of the system.
More positively, Syriza is coming first in many polls now, with about 32–33 per cent support, with the governing New Democracy party on 27–28 per cent and the old social democratic party PASOK collapsing. In a recent poll asking ‘Who do you think will form the next government in Greece?’, 58 per cent answered Syriza and only 28 per cent New Democracy.
We have received support from the left all over Europe, but it’s not yet organised in an effective way. The strikes across the EU on 14 November gave strength to people in Greece. But we also need to create a network of help and solidarity. Maybe people could come and volunteer in Greece – doctors, for instance, or a solidarity brigade that could come and work on the land. Or maybe organisations could donate food and medicine. The solidarity brigades could be organised in an open and symbolic way, so that the solidarity with Greece is very visible.
People willing to offer solidarity should contact +30 210 380 1921 or email solidarity.for.all@gmail.com
Tonia Katerini was talking to Red Pepper at Firenze 10+10, a convergence of networks and campaigns working against austerity and debt, for natural and social commons, for social and labour rights, for democracy, global justice and peace, for gender liberation and for migrant rights. Meeting in Florence exactly ten years after the first European Social Forum met there, it agreed a common day of action around the EU spring summit on 23 March 2013, with a combination of Brussels-based and decentralised actions.

Dawn of a new danger

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:00:59 +0000

Members of the neo‑Nazi Golden Dawn march through the streets in their blackshirts. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis. Below, Hitler on the cover of Golden Dawn magazine
Golden Dawn is not exactly subtle in its Nazi allegiances. This is a group that in 1989, four years after it was founded, decided to put Hitler on the cover of its magazine (pictured right). Even as late as 2007 the publication led on a big picture of Rudolf Hess.
In 2005 the magazine ran an article headlined ‘May 1945-May 2005: We have nothing to celebrate’. It read, ‘[The real] winner is the young fighter of the Hitlerjugend, who fell fighting in destroyed Berlin. The soldier of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, against the forces of nature and the forces of the enemy.’
Yet somehow Golden Dawn continues to deny that it is a neo‑Nazi organisation. ‘Let everyone know that they should not speak of neo-Nazism,’ says Ilias Kasidiaris, the Golden Dawn MP best known for punching left-wing MPs on a TV chat show. ‘For us, this is hubris and criminal defamation. We are Greek nationalists.’ This is a man who, in an article written for Hitler’s birthday just last year, wrote that the Nazi leader was ‘a great social reformer and an organiser of a model state’.
While the veil might seem transparent, and the international media hasn’t been slow to build up the threat from Golden Dawn, 425,000 people in Greece still voted for this neo-Nazi party. How did that happen?
To answer this question, we need to look back at where Golden Dawn came from, the base of its support and how it has built a following during Greece’s crisis. Only then can we look beyond the horror story to see who is really threatening democracy in Greece – and how we can stop them.
The long shadow of the colonels
Golden Dawn was founded in 1985 – but its roots stretch back much further, to the fascist dictatorship of General Metaxas that ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, and more directly to the colonels’ junta of 1967 to 1974.
The personal political history of Golden Dawn’s founder and leader Nikos Michaloliakos shows the links. At the age of 16 he joined the ‘4th of August Party’ – named after the 4 August 1936 coup that brought General Metaxas to power. Then in 1984 he became the head of the youth organisation of fascist party EPEN, a group openly nostalgic for the colonels’ regime. Michaloliakos was put into the position on the order of the chief of the deposed colonels himself, Georgios Papadopoulos.
Since 1980, Michaloliakos had been publishing a magazine called Golden Dawn. When EPEN failed to make the electoral breakthrough that had been predicted in 1985, he decided to split and turn Golden Dawn into a new party.
He was helped by the fact that large parts of the state were left unchanged despite the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. The extreme right remained strong in the police and the security forces in particular.
Today Golden Dawn’s ties with the police and the secret state are becoming more and more obvious, as anti-fascists and migrants are constantly harassed and physically attacked but the neo-Nazis remain uninvestigated and unpunished.
This September, for instance, supposed ‘indignant residents’ backed by Golden Dawn completely destroyed two shops belonging to migrants and a Tanzanian community centre. The police pressured the migrants not to identify those who had been involved in the attack. When one insisted on doing so, he was arrested – while his attacker was set free. Ioanna Kurtovik, a lawyer who went there to support the migrants and was attacked, reports that Golden Dawn members and police officers could be seen chatting all over the police station.
More recently, arrested anti-fascists reported police bluntly telling them: ‘We will send your names and photos to Golden Dawn and they will come after you.’
The battle of the nurseries
Over the last few years there have been two factors that have helped Golden Dawn’s rise. The first was Italy and Spain’s crackdowns on migrants, in particular Italy signing a treaty with Libya’s then-dictator Gaddafi to close the ‘Libyan corridor’. This has meant that nine out of ten ‘irregular’ migrants trying to make their way to Europe now come through Greece.
Then, in 2009, Greece became the epicentre of the global economic crisis, and the Eurozone debt crisis in particular. Greece’s two traditional governing parties, New Democracy and the social democrats of Pasok, both turned to scapegoating migrants to try to divert anger away from the austerity measures that the EU, finance and employers demanded.
New Democracy leader and current prime minister Antonis Samaras claimed that migrants were ‘taking the places of Greeks’ in council-run nurseries. He was exploiting the fact that publicly funded nursery places are limited by income to the very poorest. Migrants are often the poorest of the poor, meaning they get places that used to go to low-paid workers. Much like the issue of housing in Britain, this has become explosive.
Once Samaras had opened the door, Golden Dawn ran through it and went much further. The party pledged to go into the nurseries and violently throw out migrant children.
With stunts like this the neo-Nazis try to pose as an ‘anti‑capitalist’ force that is on the side of the middle and working classes against ‘corrupt’, ‘traitor’ politicians. Their answer to austerity is an awful form of ‘direct action’ that claims to win more resources for struggling Greeks by taking away migrants. For example, Golden Dawn often barges into businesses and threatens employers, telling them they must fire their migrant workforce and hire Greeks instead.
But in truth this does not threaten the bosses’ system – in fact it helps it. The businesses are more than happy to hire Greeks at the same wage they were paying the migrants, not least because doing so undermines collective labour agreements along the way – which the trade union movement is struggling to defend. And Golden Dawn, for its part, doesn’t limit its attacks to migrants – it has also attacked left wing activists, as well as journalists, gay people and all the other long-established targets of fascists.
A question of democracy
So who is voting for Golden Dawn? Are there really 425,000 Nazis in Greece?
According to pollster Christophoros Vernardakis, Golden Dawn’s primary audience is the traditional lower middle class: small business owners, shopkeepers, lower middle class unemployed people, and of course the police.
As well as making political capital out of immigration, Golden Dawn has also been able to tap into the general ‘anti-political’ mood. Nikos Michaloliakos frequently declares at rallies that ‘democracy hasn’t worked’. In today’s Greece, with the austerity-pushing troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF undermining democracy at every turn, and those who claim to speak in the name of democracy daily demonstrating their disdain for the people, that’s a message that appeals to many.
Meanwhile the media whitewashes the Nazis, reporting on the marriage of this Golden Dawn MP or the love affair of the other one. They are legitimising Golden Dawn’s anti-democratic views through day to day banality.
But none of this means that it is too late to stop Golden Dawn. This is a country, after all, that will have seen at least four days of general strikes this autumn alone. And the marches during these strikes, and the local committees organising people’s everyday struggles against austerity, are places where Golden Dawn never goes.
Indeed there is a constant struggle taking place over public space. In many places, people have mobilised to stop Golden Dawn’s marches and anti-migrant raids.
But the labour movement and the left in Greece is in a battle against time. Progressives need to hurry up in not just bringing down the government but agreeing an alternative programme to the anti-democracy of the troika: more public services, more rights, more power to working people. All over Europe and the world, we need to put an end to austerity and privatisation – before more racist gangs like Golden Dawn get in our way.