Demokratie in Europa

Unter Meteorologen braucht es keine Meinungsvielfalt – so lange die etablierten Methoden fundierte Prognosen liefern. In den Wirtschaftswissenschaften, wo die Vorhersagen “allenfalls per Unfall” richtig lägen, sei das anders, meint der Ökonom und DiEM25-Initiator Yanis Varoufakis. Wenn die herrschende Lehrmeinung die Realität nicht mehr treffend beschreiben kann, brauche es alternative Blickwinkel. 

“We have to talk to people in a way that combines addressing these [economic] anxieties with the issues of the environment. Unless we manage to do that, we will fail.”

Kate Aronoff  Summer 2019
Yanis Varoufakis celebrating the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 2018 (Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr)

To read DiEM25’s Green New Deal and join the many, including 18 parties from 13 countries, that have ‘taken the pledge’, click here.

“We showed Europeans how a common agenda can be put together collaboratively by many political actors coalescing from all over Europe. How a common list of candidates, in support of this common agenda, can emerge. How we can campaign across Europe, together, under the banner of this agenda. In the months and weeks leading to 26th May, I have had the distinct privilege of campaigning with all of you in Paris, in Brussels, across Italy and the UK, in Denmark, in Portugal and, of course, in Greece and in Germany.

On Monday 25th March, the EUROPEAN SPRING was launched at the Bozar Theatre in front of friends, supporters and hopeful citizens of Europe. For the first time in Europe’s history, a common list of candidates is presented across Europe promoting a single agenda – the NEW DEAL for EUROPE that we worked on together for more than two years. Europe has not had much to celebrate recently. Now we do!

The official story is one of creating a national champion, a German bank large enough to compete with American investment banks. The truth is far less heroic and a lot more sordid than that. Here is why Demokratie in Europa is campaigning against this merger.

In the last week of May European citizens will have their last chance to vote in a European Parliament election that makes a difference. It will be a paneuropean election where we can, perhaps for the last time, oppose both faces of authoritarianism across Europe: (A) The inane authoritarianism of the business-as-usual establishment, and (B) The authoritarianism of the xenophobic Nationalist International that is reinforced by the establishment’s policy of socialism for the bankers and austerity for the many.