Tagged with Oskar Lafontaine

Time to break up the Euro

The broken Euro symbolThe European policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel is coming increasingly under pressure. Not only European Commission President Manuel Barroso, but also Enrico Letta, recently asked by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to form the new governnnent, have criticized her austerity policies, which have been dominant in Europe and are leading to disaster. Europe’s leaders have long been at a loss. The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level which is increasingly undermining democratic structures.

The Germans have not yet realized that the southern Europeans, including France, will in the face of the current economic misery be forced to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later. In particular, German wage dumping, which has been an infringement of the spirit of the treaties from the outset of the currency union, is putting them under pressure. Merkel will wake up from her self-righteous slumber when the countries which are suffering from German wage dumping get together to force a policy switch against the crisis at the cost of German exports. Continue reading →

Europe needs a citizens’ revolution, declare Lafontaine and Mélenchon

The following declaration was yesterday issued by Oskar Lafontaine, who has previously been German finance minister, chair of the SPD and co-chair of Die Linke (Left Party), and Jean Luc Mélenchon, the Presidential Candidate for France’s Front du Gauche:

We note with dismay the use made of the European Union as a tool of widespread austerity. It leads nowhere except to a disaster from which no country can escape. These policies discredit the European ideal in leading our people into the impasse of the destruction of the welfare state, economic recession and ecological indifference. Continue reading →

Learning from Europe: the future of the British Left

The most important outcome of the Bradford West by-election is undoubtedly the rejection of the 3 main political parties who secured the support of only 40% of the electors. This increasing disaffection with conventional politics, with the Labour-Tory share of the votes down from 97% in the 1951 election to just 65% in 2010, was accentuated in Bradford West by the very high proportion of Asians in the electorate (38%), the still raw wounds in the Muslim population about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the very significant revolt among the younger Asian generation against being told how to vote by their elders (bradreeism). Continue reading →