Category: new authoritarianism

Article republished from Morning Star

PROTESTS over cuts and the cost of living continue to rock Italy and France. Millions were on the streets across Europe on Saturday.

Over the weekend mass demonstrations spread to Germany, where the “welfare not warfare” cause has taken centre stage. Placards at the thousands-strong rally at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate read “Merz Must Go,” “No to Cuts and War Budgets,” “Invest in People Not War.”

As in France the monopoly media focus on occasional outbursts of violence rather than the issues at stake. But this is a movement demanding a complete change of political direction across the continent.

German protesters are not the first to link cuts to social spending to ballooning military budgets. But the political choice being made is especially stark in Europe’s biggest economy.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz is a millionaire whose previous role at US asset-management giant Blackrock ties him to the most parasitical and unproductive expression of modern capitalism.

His government has imposed savage cuts on healthcare — raising the co-payer element for drugs and hospital stays that applies in Germany and cutting insurance exemptions for non-working spouses. It has taken an axe to pensions, which Merz openly says will no longer maintain pensioners’ living standards over time.

It has cut unemployment benefit even as deindustrialisation accelerates, courtesy of the move from piped Russian gas imports to costlier and ecologically more damaging liquefied natural gas shipments from the US.

All this has accompanied staggering increases in military spending — Germany even amended its constitution to exempt the armed forces from its famed balanced-book requirements — and the introduction of compulsory fitness-for-military-service checks at 18, which millions of young people rightly see as a stepping stone to conscription.

As the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt puts it, young people see investment in the young (across education, parental leave rights and child benefits) slashed; they see decent jobs disappearing as factories close; and “the administrators of this misery offer only one alternative to these hopeless young people: to die on the G36 rifle for German imperialism.”

These are the same dilemmas mobilising the young in France and Italy. In France, the movement is now readying for mass strike action on November 5 as unions and left forces call out the refusal of the Emmanuel Macron regime to change course.

The drive to war is real, Europe-wide, and exceptionally dangerous. All proposals for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war are dismissed as surrender by European governments and their direct involvement in the conflict is ever deeper.

We cannot tolerate the normalisation of the prospect of war “on the scale our grandparents and great-grandparents endured,” as promoted by Nato secretary-general and Trump boot-licker Mark Rutte. Such a war would kill millions and would be, contrary to the propaganda we are exposed to presenting Russia as an imminent threat, a war of choice by Western powers.

Besides its terrible risks, the war drive is, as the young people of Europe increasingly recognise, being used to justify the permanent degradation of public services and social security.

We need an alternative to austerity and war: a programme for state-led investment in reindustrialisation and the technologies and infrastructure projects needed to cope with climate change.

This is as true of Britain as of Europe — which is why, following a do-nothing Budget, the left needs to build a campaign for a new economic direction big enough to force ministers’ hand before next year’s Spending Review.

And as we see on the streets of Paris, Madrid, Rome and Berlin, it is as true of Europe as it is of Britain — exposing claims by Rachel Reeves and other EU-nostalgics who claim Brexit is the source of our economic problems as a total distraction from the fight for economic transformation we need.

Article republished from Morning Star