Europe

New Popular Front gains support from French health activists

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Original article by Peoples Health Dispatch republished from peoples dispatch under a CC licence.

French health activists stage a protest.

Social movements and trade unions in France are rallying behind the New Popular Front, which promises a genuine alternative to the far-right and liberal health policies

Trade unions and activists warn that a National Rally victory would spell disaster for public healthcare in France. If the far-right wins the upcoming election, as polls currently predict, changes would come at the expense of sexual and reproductive health services and migrant health, among other things.

Marine Le Pen’s party recently dominated the European Parliament elections, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call for a snap election, hoping to mobilize voters against the far-right. According to analysts, Macron gambled that the people of France would go to great lengths to keep the National Rally out of power, perhaps even reaffirming his mandate.

However, Macron’s policies, including privatization and commodification of health services, have fueled the far-right’s growth. His administration has caused closures of local hospitals, creating health deserts, and continues to push for more privatization, causing patient suffering. Despite the failures of this approach, liberals continue to pursue the same strategy in the current campaign, advocating for a more profit-driven logic in healthcare. The Trade Union of Health Centers’ Physicians (USMCS) stated: “We are experiencing the consequences of this policy on a daily basis. Patients suffer. We want no more of it.”

The far-right is expected to continue liberalizing the sector while introducing intolerance and xenophobia by prioritizing French citizens and marginalizing other residents. “If implemented, the [far-right policies] will pose a major risk to public health, not only for these ‘excluded’ individuals but also for the population as a whole,” USMCS warned.

“Abandoning the values of solidarity and universalism that underpin our healthcare system, a right-wing program will worsen social and territorial inequalities. We reject any program that proposes a healthcare policy based on exclusion and discrimination.”

Trade unions and organizations, united under the Tour de France pour la Santé, are backing the New Popular Front (NFP), a left-wing coalition opposing Macron’s policies as much as the far-right. The NFP plans to retract the controversial pension reform, curb living costs, and rebuild the healthcare system by recruiting healthcare workers, increasing incomes, and regulating the private sector. For example, the program states that new private clinics will only be allowed if they provide guarantees that patients will not face any out-of-pocket costs.

Read more: Left and progressives form New Popular Front to counter far-right in French elections

The USMCS emphasized that the NFP’s program is the only one to offer real prospects for healthcare reform. To support this, the Tour de France pour la Santé announced a series of actions during the election campaign, starting with an assembly in Lille on June 27, where activists will discuss the importance of resisting the far-right. Speakers will include Françoise Nay from the People’s Health Movement (PHM) France and Ramon Vila from the trade union SUD Santé Sociaux.

“Confronted with the threat of the extreme right, now more than ever, we urge citizens, trade unions, associations, mutual insurance societies, and progressive parties to unite in defending the right to health for all,” the platform said in its press release.

Ahead of the first round of the election on June 30, the National Rally leads with approximately 35% in polls, followed by the NFP at more than 29%, and Macron’s party at 19.5%. Bridging the gap between the far-right and the progressives might be possible with strong social movement support.

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, click here. 

Original article by Peoples Health Dispatch republished from peoples dispatch under a CC licence.

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Deadly heat waves in Mecca and Greece underscore climate crisis

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https://www.axios.com/2024/06/17/heat-waves-greece-mecca-saudi-arabia-climate-crisis

As the U.S. faces another potentially record heat wave this week, the Middle East and Europe’s Mediterranean have endured extreme temperatures that have proven deadly.

The big picture: Multiple heat-related deaths have been reported in Greece during the country’s earliest heat wave on record and Jordan’s official news agency said Sunday “14 Jordanian pilgrims died and 17 others were missing” in the searing heat while on the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Tourists outside the Acropolis during high temperatures in Athens, Greece, on June 12, when authorities announced the closure of the ancient site for five hours due to soaring temperatures that also shut schools. Photo: Hilary Swift/Bloomberg via Getty Images
  • The heat waves sweeping these regions this month have been made “at least five times more likely” because of human-caused climate change, per new Climate Central analysis.

Context: Climate Central’s analysis is based on the group’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), which compares observed or forecast temperatures with simulations of the same weather conditions minus excess atmospheric greenhouse gases, per Alex Fitzpatrick.

  • The idea is to compare real-world conditions with what might have been the case had human-caused climate change been absent.
  • Saudi Arabia had a CSI of 5, meaning that human-caused climate change made a given daily average temperature five times more likely as of Monday morning. Greece, which has endured two weeks of extreme heat, had a CSI of 5 last week and 2 on Monday. Parts of Turkey had a CSI of 5.

Between the lines: Greece has been among the worst-affected European countries for extreme weather caused by the climate crisis in recent months, enduring an intense heat wave, severe wildfires and heavy rains flooding the country’s streets last year.

  • A joint report by UN and European Union agencies found in April that Europe’s temperatures are rising about twice as fast the global average due to human-caused climate change — making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.

…

Continues at https://www.axios.com/2024/06/17/heat-waves-greece-mecca-saudi-arabia-climate-crisis

Continue ReadingDeadly heat waves in Mecca and Greece underscore climate crisis

Morning Star: Fight the far right to commemorate the D-Day heroes

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Republished from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-fight-far-right-commemorate-d-day-heroes

Royal Marine commandos moving off the Normandy Beaches during the advance inland from “Sword” beach, June 6, 1944

WITH the Tories and Labour exchanging blame over Channel crossings, we mark 80 years since a Channel crossing of a different kind.

On June 6 1944 British, US and allied troops crossed the Channel to open a second front against the Nazis in Europe, something the Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the war against fascism for the previous three years, had long urged.

Veterans are arriving in Normandy for commemorations of this heroic chapter in Europe’s liberation. Modern hostilities overshadow celebration of the anti-Nazi alliance of the 1940s, with the US and Britain criticising France for inviting Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine, though they themselves have never been excluded from World War II memorials while laying waste to countries from Vietnam in the cold war to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya more recently.

These diplomatic divisions raise a question we should be asking our own politicians. Have you any right to claim the inheritance of anti-fascist victory if you are dismantling its achievements?

The world war against fascism was the crucible of international institutions as we know them today. The United Nations was established in a joint declaration by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and China on January 1 1942: it formalised the alliance against the Axis powers Germany, Italy and Japan, and a condition of membership was to declare war against Nazi Germany and its allies.

The foundation of the UN and new treaties like the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (on the conduct of war) and 1951 (on the treatment of refugees) expressed hope that a more civilised world order would stop any future descent into Nazi barbarism.

These agreements are not perfect, and powerful countries have often ignored them. But their existence is a legacy of the sacrifice made by those who gave their lives to smash fascism on D-Day, or at the battles of Stalingrad or Berlin, or among the heroic resistance movements that sprang up across Nazi-occupied Europe.

Politicians talk now as if the rules are outdated: the refugee conventions were drawn up by people who couldn’t conceive of the scale of “irregular” migration today. It isn’t true: World War II and its aftermath saw huge population displacement, the uprooting of millions of people. The Refugee Convention of 1951 set out universal obligations to refugees because of these horrific experiences.

Those obligations are ones governments across Europe, including ours, are trying to erase. The end of EU search-and-rescue operations, the active persecution of civil rescue crews by states like Italy, have fatally undermined the binding responsibility to aid anyone in distress at sea. The odious Nigel Farage clearly approves, having insulted brave volunteer lifeboat crews by calling the Royal National Lifeboat Institution a “migrant taxi service” for presuming to save people from drowning.

Farage has never yet been elected, but his ability to call the tune at Westminster is as great as ever if the first leaders’ debate is anything to go by: with Labour’s Keir Starmer calling Rishi Sunak, the PM of the Rwanda deportations scheme and the Bibby Stockholm prison barge, “the most liberal prime minister we have ever had on immigration.”

This is gutter politics, and a betrayal of what the D-Day heroes fought for. But so, at home, is the systematic destruction of the NHS and welfare state built after defeating fascism, fruits of a victorious people’s war and a recognition that fascism had emerged from a Europe wracked by poverty and unemployment.

It is no coincidence that today, with living standards falling, public services failing and the brazen theft of our wealth by an ever smaller corporate elite, the far-right politics of grievance and hate are on the march across the continent.

The real commemoration of D-Day must be to mobilise against them. For peace and socialism, against fascism and war.

Republished from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-fight-far-right-commemorate-d-day-heroes

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DeSmog Launches Investigation Into Food and Farming Misinformation Ahead of EU Elections

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Original article by Clare Carlile republished from DeSmog.

Credit: Alberto Perinot/X

The far right is set to piggyback on agricultural discontent to capture votes in June.

A large blue billboard stands outside a park in the town of Conegliano in northern Italy. On the left, a man pops a vast cricket into his mouth. On the right, are the words, “Let’s Change Europe before it changes us” – and the dates of the upcoming elections.  

The poster – an advert for the country’s radical right party Lega per Salvini Premier – refers to a conspiracy theory that has swept across Italy in the last 18 months. Elites in Brussels are planning to replace meat with bugs and are using environmental regulations to do so, or so the theory goes.

As millions of voters across the EU prepare to head to the polls from 6-9 June, conspiracy theories and misinformation on food and farming could pull voters towards the far right and parties opposing climate-friendly laws.

In the face of this onslaught of misinformation, DeSmog is launching a new series that investigates misleading claims and their impact on climate policy in the farming sector. 

Over the next two months DeSmog will monitor the spread of misinformation across the continent, working in seven different languages. We will look to identify false claims and uncover who is spreading these narratives online.

Agriculture accounts for 11 percent of carbon emissions in the EU, and has contributed to plummeting bird and bee numbers. But tackling the sector’s harms has become one of the most divisive issues on the continent, with tractors blocking highways across Europe during demonstrations this year. 

The protests – attended by thousands of farmers in several countries – reflected a wide range of concerns, from unfair food prices to calls for protection from increasingly extreme weather. Yet this complexity was barely represented in the media where demonstrations were cast as opposition to environmental measures. 

Far-right groups also weaponised the protests. In January, Jordan Bardella, lead EU candidate for France’s National Rally (formerly National Front), accused the country’s President Emmanuel Macron of pursuing “the death of agriculture” while Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right party Vox, wrote to Macron demanding an end to “aggressions” against Spanish producers, who he described as “victims” of EU policy.

In the eyes of its critics, green reforms agreed in the last EU term would destroy farming. Plans to cut chemical use and make farmers protect natural habitats would lead to monumental job losses, they claim. The same arguments are used by agricultural corporations that stand to lose out if green reforms are enacted.

The most extreme opponents, including radical right think tanks and hardline farming groups, see green reforms as part of a plan by Brussels bureaucrats to control the industry and “grab land”. 

These claims, however, contradict the facts: last year, more than 6,000 scientists said that such nature-friendly measures were “the cornerstone of food security and human health”. 

The policies that are currently being attacked aim to tackle climate breakdown – the biggest threat to producers across the EU, who are already feeling the effects of global heating. A “staggering portion” of the continent has been exposed to high drought risk in recent years, according to the European Drought Observatory, leading to widespread crop losses.

Right-wing and far-right groups stand to make massive gains from stoking these tensions. A recent study by the EU’s Committee of the Regions showed that discontented rural areas could be a major source of votes.  

This series will shine a light on those candidates that are weaponising false claims for electoral gain.

Original article by Clare Carlile republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingDeSmog Launches Investigation Into Food and Farming Misinformation Ahead of EU Elections

UK environmentalists commend EU’s decision to criminalise ‘ecocide’

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/03/uk-environmentalists-commend-eus-decision-to-criminalise-ecocide/

“That’s how it’s done.”

On February 27, EU lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to make the most serious cases of environmental damage a crime. The vote in the European Parliament saw 499 votes in favour a, just 100 against, and 23 abstentions.

Under the updated environmental crime directive, those responsible for the deliberate destruction of the ecosystem, including illegal logging and habitat loss, will face tougher penalties, including prison sentences.

The vote means that the European Union is the first international body to criminalise eco crimes. EU member states now have two years to bring the updated directive into national law.

The move was hailed by environmentalists across Europe. The EU is “adopting one of the most ambitious legislations in the world,” said Marie Toussaint, a French lawyer and MEP for the Greens/European Free Alliance Group.

“The new directive opens a new page in the history of Europe, protecting against those who harm ecosystems and, through them, human health. It means putting an end to environmental impunity in Europe, which is crucial and urgent,” she added.

…

https://leftfootforward.org/2024/03/uk-environmentalists-commend-eus-decision-to-criminalise-ecocide/

Continue ReadingUK environmentalists commend EU’s decision to criminalise ‘ecocide’