Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 91
December 22, 2018
On our efforts to unite progressives in Europe and internationally: A Buzzfeed News Long Read
For more than an hour, Varoufakis captivated the crowd by arguing that a grand crisis of capitalism was propelling the right to power and that it was time for the left to fight back.
His story began with the 2008 financial crisis that hit Europe. EU leaders “shifted the gigantic losses of the idiotic banks onto the shoulders of the taxpayers … This is what you do if you want to poison the politics and democracy of Europe.” The policies of the last decade were creating economic conditions like the ones that propelled Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini into power, he argued, and today they fueled the rise of “all those people that Steve Bannon is organizing and putting together in a Fascist International.” Varoufakis’s appearance got little more mention in the press than a column in the left-wing British magazine the New Statesman.
But Varoufakis is trying to change the script. The past decade has seen the rise of far-right and nationalist movements everywhere from the US to India to Brazil. In Europe, factions long shut out of the mainstream have thrived on Facebook and started winning elections by crusading against immigration and the power of Brussels, the EU’s de facto capital. But left-wing parties in much of Europe are on life support. While the US has exported Breitbart — which helped boost Brexit in the UK — and now Bannon himself, the kind of broad-based progressive revival that launched politicians like Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US has yet to really take hold across Europe.
Varoufakis, who is now 58 years old, wants to be the man to change that.
His November stop in Oxford was part of a tour that also included visits to Berlin and Rome to launch a new transcontinental political party to save the EU by enacting a “Green New Deal” to spread prosperity and tackle global warming. Last month he also went to Vermont, where he launched an initiative called Progressive International at an event with Bernie Sanders.
“The financiers are internationalists. … The fascists, the nationalists, the racists, like Trump, Bannon … they are internationalists. They bind together. The only people who are failing are progressives,” Varoufakis said during a press conference in Rome in October. “Today … we’re saying enough.”
Varoufakis’s worldview is almost a mirror image of Bannon’s, ironically, albeit grounded more in economic theory and less in obscure fascist philosophy.
Bannon traces the uprising of a “global reaction against centralized government” to the 2008 economic crisis. The way he tells it, working people the world over saw “elites” in global centers of power joined together into a kind of dictatorship that sold them out to protect international financiers. Leaders like Donald Trump, who promised to smash the world order, were Bannon’s answer, and, after helping steer Trump to power, he opened an organization last summer in Brussels to offer help to parties that want to weaken the EU ahead of elections across the bloc next May.
Varoufakis agrees that these movements were spawned by leaders more worried about bankers than normal people. But for him, these politicians are “monsters” offering “lazy answers” that blame immigrants or Jews or other countries for their problems. “Populism is simple,” he said at Oxford.
But the populists are gaining ground — fast — at the same time that Britain’s messy split from the EU is a constant reminder that European unity is not inevitable. Far-right parties lead the government in Italy and are the largest opposition faction in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. The government of the EU’s sixth-largest country, Poland, was threatened with sanctions for undermining the rule of law, and Hungary is inching closer to dictatorship by the day.
As the right unites, the left is dissolving.
Many of the continent’s major center-left parties, perhaps because they offer no clear alternative to the reigning political order, are on the edge of extinction. The Social Democratic parties governed both France and Italy until elections in 2017 and 2018, but recent polls found them getting support from less than 5% of voters. Germany’s Social Democratic Party is now polling in fourth place after five years in coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. It is now running neck and neck with Alternative for Germany, a far-right populist party that is aligned with Bannon.
There have been some insurgent left-wing movements that have sprung up in this environment, such as Spain’s Podemos or Britain’s reinvented Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. But the very questions that are forging a natural alliance among the far right — immigration, identity, and national sovereignty — split the left, in many cases driving a wedge right down the middle of existing parties. Some of the radical left’s most visible leaders also decry immigration to court the very same voters turning to the far right.
Varoufakis’s answer is not less power in Brussels, but more. International financial institutions span borders, and so must governments if there is any hope of bending them to the will of voters, he argues. He wants the EU to have far more control over Europe’s economy in exchange for more responsibility to take on bad debts when things go wrong. But he doesn’t want to leave control in the hands of today’s EU leadership, which is mostly unelected. He wants a new elected government in Brussels, transforming the EU into something more like a United States of Europe.
“A united Europe is something we must fight for,” he declared at Oxford.
So why can’t the European left agree? In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Varoufakis put much of the blame on ego and opportunism. That, he said, is why he is trying to build a new party from the ground up to compete in all of the EU.
Existing parties, Varoufakis said, “are far more interested in discussing who goes into bed with whom … and patching up differences on the basis of personality based alliances, not on the basis of a common program.”
But Varoufakis’s ambition sometimes seems to outpace doing the groundwork to build strong alliances.
He caught Sanders’ staff by surprise when he announced in an October press conference that, “on the 30th of November, Bernie Sanders and I are going to be launching the Progressive International in Vermont.” In fact, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ closest aide and former presidential campaign manager, told BuzzFeed News he thought Sanders first learned of the initiative while sitting onstage during the announcement. The group, which doesn’t have much in place beyond its website, is being organized in partnership with an institute run by Sanders’ wife and son-in-law. The senator keeps at arm’s length to avoid running afoul of Senate ethics rules.
Varoufakis routinely speaks of wanting to build a broad movement, saying during the Vermont event, “We need a plan internationally, not just some white faces, not just males — decrepit ones like myself … but Africans, Asians, we need a lot more women.”
The leadership of the organizations he’s built in Europe comes from across the continent — and beyond — though it is primarily white. These groups also have strict rules requiring gender parity in top posts. But some of Varoufakis’s ideological allies think his celebrity has led him to fall victim to exactly the kind of egotism he decries.
One senior politician of a major European leftist party, who spoke off the record to discuss conflicts within her movement, told BuzzFeed News that Varoufakis is “a typical male character — he likes to be the first and leading one.”
“In politics, this happens,” she said. “I have some experience dealing with these kinds of male problems.”
Varoufakis did not respond to the accusation of chauvinism when asked about these comments by BuzzFeed News, but replied with a statement saying, “The last thing I want is to run at all, let alone lead any list. In a happier, better world, I would be in Aegina writing my [books] without the chores of electoral politics or the nastiness that one encounters even amongst comrades. If I am running it is because a historical accident bequeathed me some political capital that I am now putting at the disposal of our party list.”
Varoufakis’s vision for global progressive politics is rooted in his short tenure as Greece’s finance minister in a government led by the Coalition of the Radical Left, known as Syriza.
He was, for a moment, a true global celebrity. Varoufakis was one of the most closely watched politicians in the world. Greece’s economic crisis threatened the global financial system, and the government he was a part of was elected to say no to the prevailing response — austerity — that was pushed on struggling countries by financial powerhouses like Germany. But the media also breathlessly wrote about how he wore a leather coat to meet the UK finance chief, Doc Martens to the White House, and how he doesn’t wear a tie no matter how formal the setting.
Even when he was finance minister and locked in bitter fights with German leaders over Greece’s debt, Germany’s right-leaning Die Welt newspaper published a story headlined “What Makes Varoufakis a Sex Icon?”
“The one thing that we do have — that no other political party, in fact, has — is a pan-European charismatic leader,” Lorenzo Marsili, chair of European Spring’s coordinating collective, told BuzzFeed News. “He incarnates at once the fight against the system and the desire to construct a European democracy. …. Nobody else has that. He is not replaceable anywhere in the European Union.”
When Varoufakis came into office in 2015, he inherited a series of loan obligations to foreign governments and institutions that previous Greek governments had signed to stabilize the economy, which was devastated by a banking crisis that erupted in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. He had been elected to renegotiate these bailouts, and he saw the EU’s leaders as thugs holding a gun to his country’s head.
Syriza’s victory caused a kind of global leftist euphoria. Finally, a radical government was elected to end the cycle of austerity and bank bailouts. But Varoufakis resigned in defeat after just five months in office. Despite popular support, the government had sidelined him and agreed to the bailout. Varoufakis then began a career as a kind of professional victim, a tragic hero to his fans and a self-aggrandizing egocentric to his critics. He titled his memoir of the financial crisis Adults in the Room: My Battle With the European and American Deep Establishment.
Varoufakis still has many supporters. He took his first step back to politics in 2016, creating an organization intended to link disparate left-wing parties called Democracy in Europe 2025, or DiEM25 for short. It won support from high-powered politicians and endorsement from famous iconoclasts, including WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange and Noam Chomsky. It now counts 78,000 members.
With the group, Varoufakis wanted to spark a groundswell of support to write a new constitution for the EU by 2025. But, Varoufakis told BuzzFeed News, he quickly despaired at the possibility of creating a broad alliance of existing parties.
“I was a lot more optimistic some time ago when we created DiEM with the naive idea that power of the ideas, the power of the program, is going to create this kind of alliance. That is fake — it’s not happening,” Varoufakis said. The left usually produces, time and again, what he calls “Frankenstein coalitions” that stitch together the fragments of dead parties, with leaders who share no common vision except to somehow get enough votes to win office.
So in the spring of 2018, DiEM25 decided to launch an “electoral wing.” In Greece, Varoufakis leads a party called it MéRA25, a play on DiEM25. (The names are all very “People’s Front of Judea,” a party official joked.) He is trying to get elected next May to the European Parliament. Some smaller existing parties signed on to his campaign in eight other countries, and they decided they would together form what they call “Europe’s first transnational party,” called European Spring. Now Varoufakis leads a ticket to get elected next May to the parliament of the European Union.
For some of his supporters, Varoufakis — who was educated in the UK and spent parts of his career teaching in Australia and Texas — is the only politician who truly understands the realities of their transnational lives.
Maria Christou, a 46-year-old supporter, told BuzzFeed News after a MèRA25 event with Varoufakis in Athens last month, “I’m exactly the kind of European Varoufakis is talking about.”
Christou was born in Cyprus and lived in the UK and France before moving to Athens around the time the global financial crisis began. Her son holds British citizenship, so they may lose the right to live in the same country after Brexit. She has paid into pension schemes in three countries, owns property in two, and doesn’t meet the requirements to cast a ballot anywhere.
“This is the result of the EU that we have now, which encourages the free movement of workers but never sought a cohesive life for its citizens,” she said. “They’re happy to take my money, but they don’t want to talk about my rights.”
The EU, for all its moves toward integration, has never functioned like one country, nor has it had a unified political party that runs across the whole bloc. The European Parliament is also less powerful than the EU’s unelected branches.
European Spring hopes to transform Europe it into a true beacon of progressive internationalism and revive the democratic spirit in the process. This vision seems especially audacious today, as the Brexit mess is proving that the EU is far from indivisible. Brussels now functions through alliances between political parties separately elected from 28 countries, and they’ll be coming from only 27 EU countries by the time of the European elections, barring yet another unforeseen Brexit disaster. The EU is split on fundamental questions ranging from immigration to marriage equality to policy toward Russia.
Europe’s volatility and the growing threat of the far right do create an opening for new players to galvanize the left. But Varoufakis is also competing in some cases with existing parties that hold 10% or more of their country’s vote. He’s not even the only left-wing economist vying for the role of savior of the left. France’s Thomas Piketty — author of the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book perhaps more widely praised than read — also recently rolled out a platform with some resemblance to Varoufakis’s.
His project has attracted some important support, most notably from Benoit Hamon, the former Socialist candidate for president of France. Sometimes called the “French Jeremy Corbyn,” Hamon has since started his own political party that now has the support of about 5% of French voters.
But building a coalition is hard. As Varoufakis was kicking off his candidacy for European Parliament, he got into a public spat with one of the biggest names he expected to join his coalition, the mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, who leads a coalition of progressive mayors in Italy that also includes the immigrant rights icon Domenico Lucano. A newspaper close to a small, anti-EU left-wing Italian party called Poter al Popolo — Power to the People — posted a video of Varoufakis with misleading subtitles that suggested de Magistris had created a “Frankenstein coalition.” De Magistris fired back with a statement that essentially called Varoufakis a control freak.
They have since cleared up the miscommunication and repaired the relationship, a spokesperson for de Magistris told BuzzFeed News but they’re delaying making a decision about formally joining European Spring.
Varoufakis at times seems to make a virtue out of his shortcomings as a politician, but they are ones that have long plagued leftist politics — long policy debates, a disdain for electioneering. Now they may be especially dangerous liabilities at a time when the far right is building electoral machines and getting access to cash. As Bannon is setting up what appears to be a well-financed operation in Brussels, promising basic campaign tools like polling to any like-minded party, Varoufakis is focused on policy above all else. The party spent two years developing its platform.
European Spring has a grand vision, but it has modest goals for the 2019 European elections. While Bannon and his allies are hoping to win one-third of the seats in the European Parliament — which would give them leverage to bring business in Brussels to a halt — Marsili of European Spring told BuzzFeed News that he’d be happy with taking 5–10% across all of Europe.
But even that’s still a heavy lift for a new party starting from scratch.
Varoufakis expressed no interest in raising money in an interview with BuzzFeed News, though he actually attended three fundraisers this month and is not afraid to rub shoulders with people with deep pockets. Though Hillary Clinton was widely criticized for her paid speeches to financial institutions, Varoufakis answered a question about fundraising by offhandedly mentioning that he had just appeared as the “main speaker” at the global meeting of Citibank in Paris and had gotten a standing ovation.
“Can you imagine that I didn’t find the courage to ask for money? Not one person. … I’m a complete failure,” he said. “We have people that are trying desperately, trying to convince me to [fundraise], but you know, I just can’t do it,” he said.
“I’m really not a good politician and I don’t want to be a good politician. I believe in the program,” said Varoufakis. “We’re offering coherence.”
David Adler, European Spring’s policy coordinator, conceded that Varoufakis is not necessarily the best grassroots organizer and that the organization around him was dedicated to the nuts and bolts. His role, Adler said, was similar to that of “Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, which is outlining an inspirational vision that can mobilize the people on the ground.”
And building the party is not the only goal, Adler said, but also to shift the debate more broadly by reaching members of other parties.
“Many of these left-wing parties are stuck at 3% or 5% because they’re stuck speaking to their own audience. We pivot towards speaking to a much, much broader audience,” he said.
Varoufakis is eager to go toe to toe with Bannon. Varoufakis titled his Oxford Union speech “The Euro and Steve Bannon’s Fascist International” and closed his written remarks with a story about Bannon backing out of a debate with Varoufakis once scheduled to be held in Ireland.
Bannon responded to this claim in a text message to BuzzFeed News: “The Greek guy?— nonsense— I’ve never backed out of a debate with anybody— ask david frum/Have never done anything in Ireland.” He answered no further questions for this story on the record.
Bannon, Varoufakis said as he wound down his speech that night, is “utilizing the divisions in Europe caused by the European Union’s terrible design” because “Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon care about one thing: They want a divided, reactionary Europe.”
Varoufakis formally launched his candidacy for the European Parliament at the end of November at a space the Nation described as a “hip ‘event loft’” in Berlin. Arriving at the event was “as if you were entering an improvised nightclub,” Die Welt newspaper wrote.
“We are the only genuinely transnational party, the only party that offers democrats and progressives in Germany an opportunity to join hands with progressive democrats across the rest of Europe,” Varoufakis said in English at a press conference surrounded by about 100 supporters. “In other words, to do that which our grandparents failed to do in the 1930s.”
Though he is, obviously, a Greek citizen, he is seeking to represent Germany in the European Parliament, a symbol of the union he wants to create. But Marsili acknowledged it is also great publicity.
“Whenever [Varoufakis] sneezes, the German media writes an article,” he said.
Varoufakis was especially proud of the party program, a 16-page document developed in consultation with members, covering everything from monetary policy to global warming to demilitarization. He came alive when describing his plan for the European Union to issue bonds to pay for a continental transition to a green economy.
But he sometimes seems caught up in his own cleverness. An awkward moment at his Berlin launch came when a reporter raised the most obvious objection to his candidacy — whether he met the legal requirements to run, including being a German resident and not standing as a candidate anywhere else.
Varoufakis’s reply was curt: “They’ve been met.” Silence lingered with the expectation he would try to explain his connection to Germany. But he clearly didn’t want to, even when nervous giggles popped up around the room. Finally, a thin smile crept across his lips and Varoufakis said, “I’m not going to give you my address.” The room erupted into applause. The reporter gave up.
Varoufakis privately delights in hacking the system. A BuzzFeed News reporter overheard him at an event in early October telling a supporter that he expected elections would be called for the Greek government at the same time as elections for the European Parliament, and he’d be competing in both.
“I’m going to be a prime minister candidate in Greece but run for European Parliament — wait for it, wait for it — in Germany,” he said. This was just before a press conference he’d called hastily in Rome to comment on the standoff Italy’s nationalist-led government was locked in with the EU over its budget deficit. He’d rented an apartment in Germany last month, he told the supporter.
Varoufakis at times seems surprised that convention should apply to him. He seemed irritated that anyone ever remarked on the fact that he dressed down for formal events, including not wearing ties to meet with the group EU finance ministers at the height of his stardom in government. It was widely seen as a calculated attempt to cultivate a nonconformist image, and became a symbol of his rebel spirit to his fans and of preening arrogance to his critics. Varoufakis says he was just being himself.
“I never wore a tie [so] I didn’t wear a tie,” he shot back when asked about it by BuzzFeed News in an interview before his speech at Oxford. “I was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and I never wear a tie there. Why should I wear a tie in the Eurogroup? Is the Eurogroup more important than Trinity College, Cambridge? If I [had started wearing] a tie, that would have been an attempt to create an image. ”
Varoufakis expressed frustration that it had been difficult to find partners. He was especially disappointed in Spain’s Podemos, which he said wouldn’t even come to the table to discuss policy differences. One of the leaders of Germany’s Left Party spoke at DiEM25’s kickoff in 2016, but an alliance there was impossible, Varoufakis said, because it is “a party that is so deeply divided between radical Europeanists like us and radical anti-Europeanists” that it winds up with the “lowest common denominator of a program.”
The Left Party is a microcosm of the divisions that shatter the left across the continent. Its co-chairs embrace solidarity with immigrants, but the party’s leader in the Bundestag has launched an anti-immigration movement to compete with the far right.
Katja Kipping, one of the Left Party’s co-chairs, who quit DiEM25 after Varoufakis created his own party, told BuzzFeed News she had actually been trying to persuade Varoufakis to accept a spot on her party’s ticket for the European elections. She argued that it’s far better for left-leaning parties to settle disagreements internally because “the left tradition of splitting up in order to have a very clear position is a very long — and usually a not very successful — tradition.”
But many observers believe another German party, the Greens, prove that clarity of message on immigration is critical for the success of the left.
The Greens roughly doubled their share of the vote in recent state elections in Germany with unapologetic support of immigration. The party has also climbed in the national polls and is on track to replace the Social Democratic Party — which has governed in coalition with Angela Merkel’s center-right party for the past five years — as Germany’s major left-leaning party.
A senior Green Party lawmaker, who asked not to be named in order to discuss election dynamics, rejected Varoufakis’s argument that the EU is to blame for austerity in an interview with BuzzFeed News, and said it was right that Greece was forced to honor its debt obligations. She said she wants the EU to do more to protect citizens’ rights, but believes the EU should not replace the national government’s responsibility to set economic policy.
“That’s why I’m not with Varoufakis,” she said. When she learned he was running in Germany, she said, “I was like, Jesus. Of all places where he has to run because he doesn’t get a different slot, it’s in Germany? I don’t know who will be excited for Varoufakis, to be truthful.”
Varoufakis clearly enjoys being a candidate, relishing speaking to large and small gatherings alike. He has a gift for inspiring audiences when talking about complicated ideas, which, he said, came from years trying to keep undergraduates awake during lectures on economics.
“You’re one of the few people who manages to unite both my [conservative] Thatcherite father and socialist uncle,” said one enthusiastic student during the Q&A following Varoufakis’s Oxford Union speech.
“It’s a sure sign that we live in a completely topsy-turvy world,” he said. “I mean, I enjoy it.”
When another student asked Varoufakis that night about whether he thought he would succeed in the election, he replied, “Probably not. But so what? … I know that I’m going to die, and I’m sure you will also die — I hope not for a very long time.”
“This is not a reason not to wake up in the morning optimistic.” ●
December 20, 2018
Καλωσορίζοντας την Σοφία Σακοράφα στο ΜέΡΑ25
Χτες, 19η Δεκεμβρίου 2018, καλωσορίσαμε στο ΜέΡΑ25 την ευρωβουλευτή, φίλη και συνοδοιπόρο Σοφία Σακοράφα – τόσο ως μέλος του κόμματος όσο και ως μέλος της Πολιτικής Γραμματείας.
Ακολουθεί το κείμενο της ομιλίας μου κατά την διάρκεια της Συνέντευξης Τύπου:
Το 2018 σημαδεύτηκε με την προσπάθεια του Μνημονιακού Τόξου να περάσει το Οργουελιανής έμπνευσης αφήγημα περί εξόδου της χώρας μας από τα Μνημόνια.
Ήταν μέρος της συνολικής προσπάθειας, σε πανευρωπαϊκό επίπεδο, να αποδείξουν ότι οι «ενήλικες» της Ευρώπης ξέρουν τι κάνουν – και πως η υπακοή σε αυτούς είναι μονόδρομος.
Μέρα με την μέρα, όμως, αποδεικνύεται πως δεν γνωρίζουν τι ποιούν. Μέρα με την μέρα, οι πολίτες στην Ελλάδα αλλά και σε όλη την Ευρώπη τους γυρνούν την πλάτη, πεπεισμένοι ότι η πορεία που ακολουθείται τους γονατίζει, ιδίως εδώ στο επίκεντρο της ευρωπαϊκής κρίσης – στην Ελλάδα της Χρεοδουλοπαροικίας και των νέων που φεύγουν.
Κυρίες και κύριοι,
Η μεγαλύτερη απειλή για την Ελλάδα είναι η αίσθηση των πολιτών ότι δεν υπάρχει εναλλακτική σε αυτή την πορεία που τους γονατίζει.
Η μεγαλύτερη απειλή για την Ευρώπη είναι ο συνδυασμός: (Α) Των αποτυχημένων πολιτικών λιτότητας, που πρώτα δοκιμάστηκαν εδώ ρημάζοντας την Ελλάδα, και (Β) Των ξενοφοβικών ακροδεξιών τεράτων που αυτές οι πολιτικές λιτότητας γέννησαν σε όλη την Ευρώπη, όχι μόνο υπό την μορφή νέων φασιστικών κομμάτων αλλά και υπό την μορφή της ακροδεξιάς στροφής κεντροδεξιών κομμάτων όπως η ΝΔ.
Το 2019, εκλογική χρονιά, η ίδια ολιγαρχία θα δώσει μάχη για να παγιωθεί, να μονιμοποιηθεί, το 4ο Μνημόνιο στην Ελλάδα. Σε πανευρωπαϊκό επίπεδο, θα δώσει μάχη για να αποτραπούν οι μεταρρυθμίσεις που είναι απαραίτητες στην ευρωζώνη παγιώνοντας έτσι τις αποτυχημένες πολιτικές λιτότητας που ενισχύουν την αντιευρωπαϊκή ρατσιστική δεξιά.
Το ΜέΡΑ25 είναι το μοναδικό κόμμα που, έχοντας εξ αρχής προβλέψει αυτές τις εξελίξεις, δίνει την ίδια βαρύτητα στις δύο εκλογικές αναμετρήσεις:
Στις Εθνικές εκλογές, όπου θα παλέψουμε για τον τερματισμό της Χρεοδουλοπαροικίας που γεννά την Ερημοποίηση της Ελλάδας.
Και στις ευρωεκλογές, για την ΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗ ΑΝΟΙΞΗ που απαιτείται έτσι ώστε η Ευρώπη να πάψει να αποδομείται πνίγοντας τους έλληνες στην αναξιοπρέπεια.
Το 2019 το ΜέΡΑ25 θα δώσει το παρόν τόσο στις εθνικές όσο και στις ευρωεκλογές. Είμαστε το μοναδικό κόμμα στην Ελλάδα που έχει καταθέσει λεπτομερές εκλογικό πρόγραμμα για το τι πρέπει να γίνει στην χώρας μας. Κι είμαστε το μοναδικό κόμμα που έχει καταθέσει λεπτομερές πανευρωπαϊκό πρόγραμμα – την ΝΕΑ ΣΥΜΦΩΝΙΑ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΥΡΩΠΗ – με το οποίο το ΜέΡΑ25 και τα αδελφά του κόμματα θα κατέβουν υπό την ομπρέλα της ΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗΣ ΑΝΟΙΞΗΣ.
Ήδη τα κλιμάκια του ΜέΡΑ25 και η Πολιτική Γραμματεία οργώνουν την χώρα στήνοντας τις οργανώσεις μας, ενισχύοντάς της μέσα από συμμετοχικές διαδικασίες εκπόνησης πολιτικών και στελέχωσης των συνδυασμών. Προχτές είμασταν στην Πάτρα, την περασμένη εβδομάδα στην Λάρισα – το ΜέΡΑ25 θα βρεθεί σε κάθε γωνιά της Ελλάδας. Όπως γνωρίζετε, ως Γραμματέας του Κόμματος θα ηγηθώ των ψηφοδελτίων μας για τις εθνικές εκλογές ενώ, παράλληλα, θα ηγηθώ του ευρωψηφοδελτίου του αδελφού μας κόμματος στην Γερμανία – μια κίνηση μεγάλης συμβολικής αξίας που σηματοδοτεί ότι δεν υπάρχει σύγκρουση μεταξύ Βορρά-Νότου, γερμανικού-ελληνικού λαού αλλά σύγκρουση μεταξύ προοδευτικών ευρωπαϊστών και αυταρχικών, αντιδημοκρατικών, ολιγαρχικών δυνάμεων.
Όσο για το ευρωψηφοδέλτιο του ΜέΡΑ25 στην Ελλάδα, θα είναι ισχυρό, θα αποτελεί αναπόσπαστο μέρος της ενιαίας πανευρωπαϊκά λίστας της ΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗΣ ΑΝΟΙΞΗΣ, θα υποστηρίζει το συνεκτικό πανευρωπαϊκό της πρόγραμμα και, βεβαίως, θα επιλεχθεί δημοκρατικά – μέσα από τις πάγιες εσωτερικές εκλογές του ΜέΡΑ25.
Μαζί με τα μέλη της Πολιτικής Γραμματείας από αύριο το πρωί, κάθε μέρα, κάθε ώρα, έως τις ευρωεκλογές και τις εθνικές εκλογές θα οργώσουμε την χώρα δίνοντας την προοπτική που λείπει και η οποία αναδύεται μέσα από το πρόγραμμά μας, τόσο το εθνικό όσο και το ευρωπαϊκό.
Και τώρα, με χαρά και τιμή, θα δώσω τον λόγο στο πιο πρόσφατα εκλεγμένο μέλος της ΠΓ του ΜέΡΑ25, την ευρωβουλευτή και εδώ και χρόνια συνοδοιπόρο Σοφία Σακοράφα που εντάσσεται στο κόμμα μας υπηρετώντας σταθερά τις αξίες της και με σκοπό να οργώσουμε όλοι μαζί την Ελλάδα στον διπλό προεκλογικό αγώνα των εθνικών εκλογών και των ευρωεκλογών.
December 14, 2018
Launch of Generation-s & European Spring in Paris, 6 DEC 2018
Onwards with DiEM25-Generation-s-EUROPEAN SPRING and our New Deal for Europe
DiEM25’s European New Deal plan can succeed where Macron and Piketty failed – The Guardian
Macron was the European establishment’s last hope. As a presidential candidate, he explicitly recognised that “if we don’t move forward, we are deciding the dismantling of the eurozone”, the penultimate step before dismantling of the EU itself. Never shy of offering details, Macron defined a minimalist reform agenda for saving the European project: a common bank deposit insurance scheme (to end the chronic doom loop between insolvent banks and states); a well-funded common treasury (to fund pan-European investment and unemployment benefits); and a hybrid parliament (comprising national and European members of parliament to lend democratic legitimacy to all of the above).
Since his election, the French president has attempted a two-phase strategy: “Germanise” France’s labour market and national budget (essentially making it easier for employers to fire workers while ushering in additional austerity) so that, in the second phase, he might convince Angela Merkel to persuade the German political class to sign up to his minimalist eurozone reform agenda. It was a spectacular miscalculation – perhaps greater than Theresa May’s error in accepting the EU’s two-phase approach to Brexit negotiations.
When Berlin gets what it wants in the first phase of any negotiation, German chancellors then prove either unwilling or incapable of conceding anything of substance in the second phase. Thus, just like May ending up with nothing tangible in the second phase (the political declaration) by which to compensate her constituents for everything she gave up in the first phase (the withdrawal agreement), so Macron saw his eurozone reform agenda evaporate once he had attempted to Germanise France’s labour and national budget. The subsequent fall from grace, at the hands of the offspring of his austerity drive – the gilets jaunes movement – was inevitable.
The great advantage of our Green New Deal is we are taking a leaf out of Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s
Historians will mark Macron’s failure as a turning point in the EU, perhaps one that is more significant than Brexit: it puts an end to the French ambition for a fiscal union with Germany. We can already see the decline of this French reformist ambition in the shape of the latest manifesto for saving Europe by the economist Thomas Piketty and his supporters – published this week. Professor Piketty has been active in producing eurozone reform agendas for a number of years – an earlier manifesto was produced in 2014. It is, therefore, interesting to observe the effect of recent European developments on his proposals.
In 2014, Piketty put forward three main proposals: a common eurozone budget funded by harmonised corporate taxes to be transferred to poorer countries in the form of investment, research and social spending; the pooling of public debt, which would mean the likes of Germany and Holland helping Italy, Greece and others in a similar situation to bring down their debt; and a hybrid parliamentary chamber. In short, something similar to Macron’s now shunned European agenda.
Four years later, the latest Piketty manifesto retains a hybrid parliamentary chamber, but forfeits any Europeanist ambition – all proposals for debt pooling, risk sharing and fiscal transfers have been dropped. Instead, it suggests that national governments agree to raise €800bn (or 4% of eurozone GDP) through a harmonised corporate tax rate of 37%, an increased income tax rate for the top 1%, a new wealth tax for those with more than €1m in assets, and a C02 emissions tax of €30 per tonne. This money would then be spent within each nation-state that collected it – with next to no transfers across countries. But, if national money is to be raised and spent domestically, what is the point of another supranational parliamentary chamber?
Europe is weighed down by overgrown, quasi-insolvent banks, fiscally stressed states, irate German savers crushed by negative interest rates, and whole populations immersed in permanent depression: these are all symptoms of a decade-long financial crisis that has produced a mountain of savings sitting alongside a mountain of debts. The intention of taxing the rich and the polluters to fund innovation, migrants and the green transition is admirable. But it is insufficient to tackle Europe’s particular crisis.
What Europe needs is a Green New Deal – this is what Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 – which I co-founded – and our European Spring alliance will be taking to voters in the European parliament elections next summer.
Here’s how it would work: the European Investment Bank (EIB) issues bonds of that value with the European Central Bank standing by, ready to purchase as many of them as necessary in the secondary markets. The EIB bonds will undoubtedly sell like hot cakes in a market desperate for a safe asset. Thus, the excess liquidity that keeps interest rates negative, crushing German pension funds, is soaked up and the Green New Deal is fully funded.
Once hope in a Europe of shared, green prosperity is restored, it will be possible to have the necessary debate on new pan-European taxes on C02, the rich, big tech and so on – as well as settling the democratic constitution Europe deserves.
Perhaps our Green New Deal may even create the climate for a second UK referendum, so that the people of Britain can choose to rejoin a better, fairer, greener, democratic EU.
Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement) and former Greece finance minister
Our progressive internationalism – The Nation
Flanked by a dozen members of DiEM25, the pan-European movement launched in 2016 to “democratize” the continent’s institutions, Varoufakis announced that he would run for a seat representing Germany in the European Parliament. He would make his bid as a Greek, a European, and, you might even say, a Berliner—all to drive home a larger point about the necessity of thinking beyond borders. “No European people can be prosperous and free when other European countries are condemned to the permanent depression that eternal austerity creates,” he said.
Persistent unemployment, cuts to welfare, and other suffocating economic policies across the continent help explain why Varoufakis chose Germany—a country he’s best known for antagonizing, precisely over its leaders’ support for austerity, in the fraught negotiations over Greece’s debt in 2015. These circumstances are also the motivating force behind the Progressive International, an initiative that Varoufakis launched five days later in Burlington, Vermont, with DiEM25 and the Sanders Institute.
Building broad-based coalitions takes time, and for now, the Progressive International is just a website with some inspiring language and a video. Its membership is also very Eurocentric. But Varoufakis hopes it will blossom into a global movement that helps leftists create coherent platforms, policies, and parties to defeat the “nationalist international” masterminded by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
The logic is simple. Financiers have long had global networks; now, right-wing authoritarians do too, with coordinated social-media strategies and deep pools of dark money funding campaigns and disrupting elections around the globe. It’s time for the left to go on the offensive and reclaim its tradition of internationalism: in Varoufakis’s words, to “mobilize workers, women, and the disenfranchised around the world” to prevent outright fascism from taking hold. This means local action, but it also means dreaming big.
It’s a fuzzy plan, of course, and one that Varoufakis’s critics deem implausible. Aren’t ideas like “democratizing” the European Union and making global finance more “progressive” oxymorons? How will a ragtag group of leftists dream up a new monetary system and an ecological New Deal for the whole world when Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil call the shots?Then again, pockets of the left—and even popular officials like potential 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders—are starting to rally behind an internationalism that seeks to displace the right’s authoritarian nationalism with a more egalitarian vision of global politics. “In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement…that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power,” Sanders wrote in The Guardian in September.
Varoufakis hopes the Progressive International will be able to help supporters move beyond kaffeeklatsch and “kick-start the process of giving [the global left] substance.” To that end, he’s been on the road nonstop since Berlin trying to bring his vision into the world: making appearances with Sanders and other prominent left leaders, like Fernando Haddad, who lost the race for Brazil’s presidency to Jair Bolsonaro in October; speaking at universities and community centers; recording podcasts and writing op-eds.
Along the way, Varoufakis has found that not everyone is taken with his commitment to freedom of movement and his conviction that the European Union should remain. For practical reasons and sometimes philosophical ones, parties like Labour in the United Kingdom, Podemos in Spain, and Die Linke in Germany operate as if social democracy in their own country is more important than a socialism that crosses borders. Varoufakis’s outlook is more expansive; that’s what makes his radical leftist internationalism so challenging, and yet so necessary.
Four days after his speech in Berlin, Varoufakis flew to Vermont, disembarked in Burlington’s tiny international airport, and made his way to a cocktail reception at an aquarium on Lake Champlain. The evening was hosted by the nonprofit Sanders Institute, which is run by Jane O’Meara Sanders (Bernie’s spouse) and her son David Driscoll. The Vermont senator, who was also present, has no formal role in the institute or in the Progressive International; nevertheless, he was the main attraction for the crowd of community organizers, political staffers, progressive politicians, and reporters in attendance. “I’ve never seen so many sensible shoes in my life,” remarked a guest from Los Angeles, scanning the room.
Varoufakis, who turned up wearing Doc Martens and with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder, immediately began making the rounds, exchanging handshakes and bear hugs with friends and colleagues. When the lines of his face settle into a mischievous smirk, you get the sense that Varoufakis is operating on two levels: in the present day, which is full of distractions, cumbersome details, and bothersome personalities; and in the Hegelian zeitgeist, the forward march of history, where his worldview comes into clear, urgent focus in opposition to the dominant reactionary forces. “There’s a clear dilemma,” Varoufakis told me the next morning. “Either we move down that road of toxic politics with the renationalization of authoritarian power, or we move towards an internationalism.”
The challenge, of course, is to connect the two planes and turn everyday activism into something more potent than the sum of its parts. That’s hard for an internationalist left to do when elections themselves are nationally bounded and when right-wing governments hold so much political power.
While traditional activists might start small—organizing a community, a union, or some other manageably sized group—Varoufakis has tried to bridge the gap between theory and practice through clever hacks. He registered as a candidate in Germany thanks to a rarely-used regulation allowing any European with proof of residence within the country to run; to establish it, Varoufakis simply rented an apartment from a German friend. Billionaires shift their tax residence all the time; why shouldn’t leftists?
Back when Varoufakis was a finance minister and thinking of contingency plans to keep Greece running should it be forced out of the euro, he considered recruitinga childhood friend to hack into the country’s digital tax infrastructure in order to assign each account credits so that people could continue spending. Then, in February, DiEM25 was part of an effort to convince the European Parliament to hand over the seats that Britain had forfeited through Brexit to transnational parties like theirs. That failed, but interventions like these can push the limits of where we think politics can happen.
For the launch of the Progressive International, Varoufakis pulled no flashy tricks; he just sat on a panel with Bernie Sanders, economist Jeffrey Sachs, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, and Canadian MP Niki Ashton. A short promotional video created by the self-described “anti-capitalist propaganda” firm Means of Production laid out the new movement’s agenda. The video struck an ominous note and featured centrist figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spliced between stills of Trump, Bannon, Bolsonaro, and Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte—clearly implicating the liberal establishment in the current crisis. “Where globalization promised prosperity, it’s delivered financial crisis and endless war instead,” a woman’s voice, speaking with a British accent, warned over throbbing electronic dance music. “The time has come to form our own common front in the fight for peace and prosperity.”
Varoufakis appears in the video for only a couple of seconds, but he might as well have written it. “Globalization was all about the freedom of capital and the unfreedom of people,” he told me. “Internationalism should be all about freedom of humans…and restraining the financial genie. Money is a public good that is never privately produced, [so] it has to be publicly controlled.”
Without him saying as much, you get the sense that Varoufakis wants us all to live in the transnational world he’s in. It’s a world where any Greek citizen can not only move to Germany to live and work, but also participate in its political life. It’s a world where international finance is something easy (or at least possible) to understand and to battle; a world where ordinary people end up with a real say in Europe’s—and the world’s—most powerful institutions.
In fact, Varoufakis is currently at work on his fifth mass-market book—“my Utopia,” he called it, referring to the 16th-century political satire by Thomas More. The Shaken Superflux—the book’s working title—seeks to answer, from the vantage point of 2035, questions like: “How could the world be structured differently? How could society function differently?”
The book’s premise is that the 2008 financial crash was so cataclysmic that it split the space-time continuum. This bifurcation created two trajectories: the current course of events, and another in which the left didn’t squander the crisis and instead seized the world’s trading desks to bring down financialized capital. “I’m using science-fiction tools to get glimpses into how this would look,” Varoufakis said. The book’s subtitle: “Dispatches From an Alternative Present.”
Virtually everyone at the Vermont conference agreed that the Progressive International’s basic thrust is laudable. But as Varoufakis has begun to pitch his grand vision—which he insists must be paired with policies and planned actions—more prosaic concerns about elections, alliances, and, well, politics have come into play.
Take his electoral campaigns in Europe. In Germany as in Greece, Varoufakis’s platform consists of an expansive “New Deal” to end austerity across the continent. In both countries, he is running as a member of DiEM25; European Spring, the transnational partnership that DiEM25 has created with like-minded parties, now counts some 100 candidates sharing a platform across the EU.
They’re not in it to win, exactly. After all, Varoufakis is a game theorist; he knows the chances of victory are slim. It’s still early days, but parties under the European Spring umbrella—Benoît Hamon’s Génération.s in France, Alternativet in Denmark, and Razem in Poland, to name just a few—are polling around 3 percent of the vote or less. Even if they somehow prevail, said Michael Broening, a political analyst at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a think tank affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the European Spring project is severely limited.
“Varoufakis’s Diem25 is proof that in Europe, personal celebrity status does not automatically translate into political influence,” Broening wrote in an e-mail. “Essentially what we are looking at is another radical-left fringe movement that aims to unite the left but could ultimately further divide it. Its adamant pro-European stance is unlikely to act as a rallying call.”
Indeed: Varoufakis’s run from Germany is a repudiation of Euroskepticism; a middle finger to his fascist, centrist, and leftist critics; and an epic troll, all rolled into one (though he prefers to call it “symbolic”).
“We wanted to show that business cannot continue [in] the old-fashioned way, which is to set up a national party [and] issue a manifesto that promises all sorts of things within your own country, independently of what’s happening next door and in Europe at large,” Varoufakis explained, takig care to speak of his party as a collective, in the plural. “Our line is: Nothing good will happen in Europe unless it starts in Germany. If you want to change the Roman Empire, you begin in Rome. You do not begin in Athens, you do not begin in Londinium; you begin in Rome.”
This aspect of Varoufakis’s politics is far from mainstream. Nationalism is the default ideology for the extreme right, but the nation is also the framework within which most center and left parties shape tax policy, government services, and everything in between (after all, that’s where they hold power.) Now, debates over immigration are pushing parties on the left to choose sides. DiEM25’s priority is to end “forced” migration—whether the people are migrating as a matter of safety or economic necessity—while preserving freedom of movement as a matter of principle. But others are prepared to take Hillary Clinton’s advice and make concessions on the number of migrants they’re willing to admit in their countries for the sake of winning elections. Die Linke, one Germany’s biggest left parties, is split on this very question; France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon has railed against the downward pressure that immigration exerts on wages, and his party has recently refused to sign an open letter welcoming migrants.
Whether the European Union is worth salvaging is also a divisive question among progressives. UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with whom Varoufakis has discussed the Progressive International, has hardly been a fierce advocate of Britain’s remaining in the EU, and he’s said that he will not attempt to reverse Brexit if elected prime minister. Corbyn would’ve been welcome in Vermont, but he opted to attend his friend Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s inauguration as the next president of Mexico instead. (“We must never forget the human dimensions—an important part of leftist politics!” Varoufakis rationalized, noting that Corbyn’s wife is Mexican).
Given these kinds of disagreements, what Varoufakis wants is to push an alternative narrative to “left populism,” which advocates a fortress-like conception of social democracy. He characterizes any kind of populism as an outright capitulation to the far right. “And that’s why we’re not with them,” he said, explaining why DiEM25 had opted to form its own faction instead of joining the existing leftist coalitions in Europe.
“I feel bad that they have not come to discuss a common program so that we can run together,” Varoufakis continued. “I do not feel bad that we’re taking away votes from them, because they will lose. They will keep becoming irrelevant as long as they stick to lowest-common-denominator programs.”
Winnie Wong, the co-founder of People for Bernie who now advises Die Linke and Podemos, sees this tactic as alienating and impractical. “Yanis wanted other parties to adopt his platform,” she said. “But [Podemos leader] Pablo Iglesias didn’t want to be part of it. He didn’t think it would help him win more seats.”
Wong and other Bernie-adjacent organizers travel frequently to Europe to participate in workshops about getting out the vote and canvassing, and she told me that she’s noticed a resurgence of internationalist thought—and praxis—in the past two years. Still, she added, “we don’t believe in parachuting in as Americans”—implying that Varoufakis is doing something similar, making unwelcome interventions into national elections. “We think the best way is not to interfere with what they’re doing.”
Varoufakis, Wong contends, has not done the boring, everyday legwork at the local level to build popular support. Since his political trajectory took him straight from an economics department to Brussels (and, just as quickly, back again), she sees his lack of buy-in from Europe’s established parties as a major shortcoming.
“Yanis is a very talented troll,” Wong said, noting that his skills might be better suited to running the European Central Bank, not fighting for votes in two national political races. (Varoufakis might agree, but there’s the rub: The top job at the ECB isn’t a democratically elected position.) “He has a great platform that no one disagrees with—and if this is a narrative intervention, that’s great. But he’s in the tower. He’s creating strategies in the tower.”
“Of course we need progressive internationalism,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, which has reading groups and sister publications in several countries. “But it’s not clear to me how [the Progressive International] relates to the existing—and, at times, quite effective—networks of international cooperation on the left.
“We have a party of the European left; we have think tanks and institutes; parties share experiences and strategies,” Sunkara continued. Varoufakis’s new effort “will make a media splash, but I’m just not sure what the value is of having something else.”
Bernie Sanders, for his part, is noticeably cautious when discussing Varoufakis’s initiative in institutional terms. “We’re talking about it,” he said during a break at the Vermont conference. Still, he added, “the demagogues and authoritarians are coming together, and it’s important that we do, too.”
A Sanders staffer explained that it was important to separate the Sanders Institute from the senator’s legislative work, and that while Sanders is supportive of all the ideas that Varoufakis is pushing, the Progressive International remains the former Greek finance minister’s project, not his. It’s also hard not to wonder how an alliance with the Progressive International would look to the Washington establishment if Sanders were someday president, given that Varoufakis has spoken at various times of “nationalizing and internationalizing” profits from social-media platforms, rebuilding the world’s monetary system, banning trading on the stock market—period—and other decidedly radical initiatives.
Still, while Sanders might not be buying in as a US senator, it doesn’t change the fact that the language of the Progressive International and his own rhetoric in recent months align almost perfectly. There’s the same focus on wealth inequality, oligarchy, and power; it’s just that one of them is much more inclined to quote Karl Marx.
On the final public appearance of his US tour, Varoufakis spoke on a panel at Mayday, a community center in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. His wife, Danae, had accompanied him, and they both seemed at ease in the run-down building, making small talk and drinking cheap wine out of plastic cups in the “green room”—a shabby corner of an office on the second floor. “You travel thousands of miles and you still end up in Exarchaia,” joked David Adler, an American who works closely with Varoufakis on the Progressive International, referring to an anarchist neighborhood in Athens.
Soon, they were joined by state Senator-elect Julia Salazar, a democratic socialist, and New York City public-advocate candidate Nomiki Konst, a former journalist who’d visited the couple at their vacation home on a Greek island last summer.
The evening prior, Varoufakis had appeared at the New School with Haddad, the leader of the Workers Party, the largest left party in Brazil. Earlier in the day, he’d met with a group of progressives in Manhattan to start fleshing out what, exactly, the Progressive International would try to achieve. Just days before that, he’d been schmoozing with Sanders and the actors John Cusack and Danny Glover. In contrast, the panel with Salazar and Konst was small potatoes, but Varoufakis seemed every bit as enthusiastic there as he was in Vermont, or at the New School, or in any other arena. Whether that’s a function of his vanity or of his genuine conviction that he can make a change in people’s thinking by sheer force of will, it still counts for a lot. Varoufakis is showing up. And there’s a word for that: solidarity.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a senior editor at The Nation and the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen(Columbia Global Reports, 2015).
“Why we need a Progressive International”. With Christiane Amanpour on CNN Int
December 10, 2018
Η Προοδευτική Διεθνής είναι εδώ. Εντάξου!
Ένα παγκόσμιο δίκτυο ακροδεξιών μορφωμάτων εξαπλώνεται διεθνώς, υπονομεύοντας τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα, καταπιέζοντας τις αντίθετες απόψεις, προωθώντας τη μισαλλοδοξία. Η ανθρωπότητα έχει εισέλθει σε βαθιά υπαρξιακή κρίση που όμοια της έχει να βιώσει από τη δεκαετία του ‘30.
Για να ηττηθεί αυτή η ακροδεξιά απειλή πρέπει να έχουμε ως στόχο κάτι πολύ διαφορετικό από την επιστροφή στο αποτυχημένο μοντέλο των τελευταίων δεκαετιών. Η δίχως όρια παγκοσμιοποίηση υποσχόταν ειρήνη και ευημερία. Αυτό που όμως έφερε ήταν μια παγκόσμια οικονομική κρίση, πολέμους και περιβαλλοντική καταστροφή.
Είναι επιτακτική ανάγκη οι προοδευτικοί της Γης να σχηματίσουμε ένα παγκόσμιο κίνημα με γερές ρίζες σε όλες τις κοινωνίες – ένα κίνημα που θα κινητοποιήσει την εργατική τάξη, τα φεμινιστικά κινήματα, τους πολίτες που βιώνουν την ανασφάλεια στη βάση εός κοινού οράματος για δημοκρατία, ευημερία, βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη και αλληλεγγύη.
Το κίνημά μας, η Προοδευτική Διεθνής, θα φτάσει σε κάθε γωνιά του κόσμου επιδιώκοντας να κάνει πράξη το κοινό μας όραμα.
Η Προοδευτική Διεθνής θα σταθεί στο πλευρό όλων όσοι αγωνίζονται κατά των ανισοτήτων, της εκμετάλλευσης, των διακρίσεων και της καταστροφής του περιβάλλοντος.
Η Προοδευτική Διεθνής θα εργαστεί για να ανακτήσουμε τις κοινότητές μας, τις πόλεις μας, τις χώρες μας και τον πλανήτη μας, καταθέτοντας μια ανθρωποκεντρική Διεθνή Πράσινη Νέα Συμφωνία (International New Deal) την οποία θα καταρτίσουμε από κοινού.
Είναι ώρα για τους προοδευτικούς όλου του κόσμου να ενωθούμε.
Σήμερα, εκπροσωπώντας το DiEM25 και το Sanders Institute, απευθύνουμε Κάλεσμα σε Δράση: να δημιουργήσουμε το απαραίτητο παγκόσμιο δίκτυο πολιτών και οργανισμών και να αγωνιστούμε όλοι μαζί για αξιοπρέπεια, ειρήνη, ευημερία και ένα καλύτερο μέλλον για τον πλανήτη μας.
Έλα μαζί μας. Εντάξου στην Προοδευτική Διεθνή.
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