In approximately 2 weeks, the European elections will take place. For people and workers, the European Union (EU) is at the heart of a deep crisis and their divorce from it is largely complete. On May 16 in Montauban at a meeting of CGT activists in Tarn et Garonne, Jean-Pierre Page spoke about the European Union, the far right and fascism, the new international balance of power.

The political, economic, social and cultural credibility of European institutions has indeed declined considerably. Increasingly numerous cleavages and divisions have appeared between member countries and affect all areas, social, security, refugees, economic, monetary, etc. Corruption through the role of thousands of lobbies affects both the Brussels Commission and its president and the Parliament itself. To exist, the EU seeks to compensate for its undemocratic functioning by resorting to authoritarianism, it attacks fundamental freedoms. As we see in Ukraine, in the Middle East or with regard to China, its servility towards the United States illustrates how much this existential crisis is linked to the very nature of what the EU is. As in its beginnings, European institutions are continuing an evolution consisting of maintaining a close relationship with the most retrograde political forces of the neo-fascist extreme right. The EU is shaking on its foundations, it is isolated and we cannot bet on its future. In fact, this one has no perspective, the worst is yet to come.

Furthermore, this undeniable evolution of Europe is not indifferent to the beginning of a significant change in the balance of power in the world. It is even a revealer.

More than 30 years after the destruction of the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the unipolar power established by the United States with the support of their European vassals is today openly contested. The dominant system is cracking and we must take the proper measure. Imperialism must face a growing disavowal and a questioning of the peoples, of the workers, including those of its own camp, in particular the youth. Furthermore, many developing States are seeking to free themselves from this hegemonic desire that we seek to impose, whatever the cost. This stifling tutelage that the West exercises by all means, including wars and even the threat of a Third World War. This is significant in Ukraine with this war against Russia which is fraught with nuclear threats and for which Americans and Europeans demand that we fight to the last Ukrainian for the greatest benefit of the military-industrial complex and at the price of a social regression with an unprecedented human cost since the Second World War.

In fact, the decline of the dominant Western system continues to widen in the face of people's resistance. The role of the latter is decisive in this change. This is what we see in Palestine and through the extraordinary movement of global solidarity from which the resistance of the Palestinian nation benefits. This is also the case through a new generation of emancipatory struggles in the face of colonialism, which we can see in West Africa, in several countries of Latin America and Asia and more recently in New Caledonia, and this after Mayotte where French neocolonial and racist arrogances became unbearable. The July 2023 meeting of the Baku Initiative Group (Azerbaijan) with the Non-Aligned Movement and 14 independence political movements from the last French colonies including Polynesia, who are fighting for true decolonisation and self-determination is an important one drawing.

Anti-hegemonic alliances

This is also the case for anti-hegemonic alliances which are being formed and which are shaking up geopolitics. This is what we can verify with the rise in power of several emerging countries with the pivotal role played within them by China within the framework of this political, economic, financial and soon monetary alliance of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia , India, China, South Africa). In January 2024, it was strengthened by the accession of five new members including Iran and Saudi Arabia, other states are candidates such as Venezuela and Algeria. We can also note on a monetary and commercial level this movement towards de-dollarisation, the spectacular vitality of the gold market, and the massive abandonment by China of the EU treasury bonds that it held as well as the creation of new international institutions parallel to those of Bretton Woods. This development illustrates the choice of an ever-increasing number of countries in favor of a new international economic order. Many people now intend to assert their independence in order to exercise their sovereign decisions over their resources as well as their political choices and the content of their economic and social development.

It is therefore appropriate to ask the question of the causes and the deeper meaning of these unprecedented changes. They are accelerating and will determine the future of international relations in the very next period. These are fundamentally characterised by increasingly acute international contradictions. On the one hand, the Western camp is stubborn and stubborn: “if we let our guard down, the liberal world will disappear,” warns Francis Fukuyama. On the other hand, the vast world that we wrongly call the Global South is rebelling, it has no shortage of support! In this worsening global conflict, the international division of labor that had prevailed has become untenable. This is the case between the dominant and the dominated, between development needs and globalised financialisation, between inequalities and the accumulation of wealth and privileges in the hands of a few parasites, between nations which carry a project of social justice and win/win cooperation and those for whom the search for maximum profit requires destroying social and economic conquests. The main cause of this crisis is not so much the form it takes, even if we cannot neglect it, it lies in the substance and what it demonstrates regarding the harmfulness of an anachronistic system which does not is nothing other than a capitalism that has become totally outdated and incoherent with regard to the demands of humanity.

Consequently, the immediate perspective that dominates is that of a period of great turbulence with an uncertain outcome. This violent disorder will grow! Hyper inflation, over-indebtedness, unprecedented inequalities, social tensions of all kinds, the future and status of refugees, threatening conflicts and high-intensity wars will contribute to chronic political instability. This will disrupt the order of things everywhere and particularly in countries like the United States where the fragmentation of society is already extreme, which the next presidential elections will illustrate. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Fundamental freedoms under threat

Faced with this trend, the questioning of fundamental freedoms, which everyone can see, continues everywhere. In fact, it continues to worsen in worrying ways. It is one of the characteristics of this state violence to which Emmanuel Macron and his government resort systematically. It brutally falls on workers as soon as they express their demands, on young people and even on parliamentarians. Since the yellow vest movement, the police but also the justice system and the judiciary have demonstrated a zeal worthy of any regime in which democratic freedoms have been prohibited.

This is why we can say today that this neo-fascism has no need for armed gangs to destroy political and trade union organisations, or to put an end to workers' conquests. Quite simply because successive governments have taken care of it. Thus the parties are atomised, the unions are reduced, the representative institutions are now integrated into the European Union which prohibits them from any critical reflection or independent action: this is how we regulate the functioning of national parliaments. This is also the case by directing media stories through a caricatured model of single thought, repeated over and over and uniformly, as much as by the control and finicky repression of social networks and the systematic practice of amalgamation. The objective is to muzzle any space for freedom of expression, as required by the directive of European Commissioner Thierry Breton or as illustrated by the Guillaume Meurice affair, this comedian suspended from Radio France for daring to criticize the war criminal Netanyahu.

To seek to remobilise opinion electorally and socially, most political and union forces are raising the threat of the neo-fascist far right. We talk about it in itself without any relation to the real causes of its influence. We do not stigmatise it, on the contrary we demonise it, including by making it more public and ensuring its media promotion.

In France, we are witnessing the establishment of a form of sacred union by politicians, trade unionists and set experts. It aims to be consensual and never intends to evoke the real reasons behind the legitimate resentments of a large number of workers and citizens, as well as the need for a real political alternative. So, rather than questioning the substance, we prefer to divert and talk about something else. To do this, we are putting up a smokescreen over the economic, social and political disaster, the threats to peace, and to individual and collective freedoms that the government's policy as well as that of the European Union represent. In fact, the objective is to save the capitalist system in deep crisis by granting it a new remission so that it can continue its evil, and if necessary by resorting to the worst reactionary ideas.

What are the seeds of the extreme right?

In fact, to stifle resistance, the ruling elite in France, as in most European countries, needs right-wing extremists and neofascists. This is why it is the bourgeoisie which deliberately creates this obscurantist and retrograde political climate in which the seeds of the extreme right and fascism can develop. Especially since in fact their program is identical.

Moreover, together, they put it into practice and collaborate closely. Nowhere is this more evident than in the brutal repression of social movements and the rejection of all social policies, through the exploitation of insecurity, through the persecution of refugees or demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. This can be verified in the votes in the National Assembly as well as in the European Parliament. Thus the violence of government measures against immigration even made Marine Le Pen declare that the government had found its inspiration in the program of the National Rally. She saw this as an ideological victory. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is also preparing to renew this approach through an authoritarian system on the elimination of social allowances to families in the name of safety at school.

Under these conditions, responsibility for the rise of the far right lies entirely with the political and economic forces which currently determine policy in France as is the case at the European level. Therefore the idea that the rise of the far right can be stopped by voting for these left-wing, green, social democratic or liberal and conservative parties is a dangerous illusion. The reality is quite different. The fight against the far right is not a question of electoral arithmetic, but of the dynamics of class struggles. This is what history teaches us! The first fights against Hitler's occupation of France and Vichy collaboration took place through worker demonstrations demanding soap and bread. Let's not forget it. The best way to fight against the extreme right conveyed by the partnership of Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen and the employers is to fight for demands and a real break with capitalism and its deadly ideology. But strangely, there, the union confederations are absent.

Ultimately, the policies of Emmanuel Macron, like those of Brussels or the far-right forces, are choices put at the service of globalised financial capital whose function is to continue the plundering of work and natural resources in all its forms by Europe as in developing countries and the rest of the world. So it is with the function of debt which is the means by which Western economies use and abuse to further enrich this leech that the global financial system has become. It is for this and nothing else that we intend to create the conditions necessary for the establishment of a police state directed against the entire working class. In fact, the responsibility for the rise of the far right in elections in France and in Europe lies in the policies implemented by the main European leaders in their respective countries, regardless of their political affiliation and complicity. from which they benefit. It is dismaying to note that no union questions those who, through the content of their decisions, are at the origin of the influence of the extreme right.

Ursula Von der Leyen complicit with the far right

This is so true that in Europe, Ursula Von der Leyen has long worked in close collaboration with the neofascist Giorgia Meloni, the president of the Italian Council of Ministers, who is also the president of the CRE (Parliamentary Group of Conservatives and European reformers to which most of the forces of the political extreme right adhere). Thus, Von der Leyen applied the recent tightening of European asylum legislation by drawing inspiration from the decisions of Giorgia Meloni. Von der Leyen even intends to go further by taking over the system that the British Prime Minister has just put in place for the deportation of refugees without distinction of nationality to Rwanda.

In reality, the current main representatives of the Brussels Commission and the European Parliament are preparing to cooperate closely with far-right parties. There is no longer any mystery in this configuration that these parties will be called upon to play an important role after the elections, both in the European Parliament and in the European Commission. The famous firewall against the extreme right, or sanitary cordon, which has always been a fiction, will then fall definitively. Meanwhile, the media will continue to entertain the gallery with the supposed electoral performances of one or the other or the prospect of a Mr. Le Pen/E debate. Macron. These political games are only made to distract people's attention. They contribute to making those who are presented as adversaries more accountable but who in fact are the acolytes and associates of the same system of dupes.

Ursula Von der Leyen, the very one who alongside the German Chancellor received a long standing ovation and unconditional support from all the delegates of the 15th Congress of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) in Berlin, is the only candidate of the conservatives of the European People's Party (EPP). She is preparing to be re-elected as head of the Commission with the votes of right-wing extremists. It goes without saying that the latter will demand a price in the form of political concessions and important positions within the EU. What will then say those who speak of the fascist threat but who in fact are the useful idiots of a system which, in history and since, has shown that it is capable of resorting to the most extremist policies including war for maintain the exercise of totalitarian power.

From this perspective and to satisfy their thirst for profits, plunder of raw materials and markets, the EU and its Member States are once again ready to commit the worst crimes by pushing further their commitments to war in Europe. As in the United States where the defence budget will approach $1,000 billion this year, the military-industrial complex occupies a central place at the heart of the European and North American economies.

NATO and EU interventionism

NATO interventionism is encouraged everywhere. We are preparing for high-intensity wars. Thus, with 172 billion euros, Brussels will have invested more money than the United States to fuel the war in Ukraine against Russia. Furthermore, the European Union unconditionally supports Israel and the tragic genocide in Gaza that Netanyahu is implementing as a final solution to the Palestinian problem. With the United States, the EU is participating in the military encirclement of China and the strengthening of military alliances in Southeast Asia. It is in this context that Macron, after having obtained the support of the French Parliament for new military credits for the Nazi regime in kyiv, wishes to involve French military forces in the Ukrainian conflict. It also intends to share and pool the French nuclear defence system with the European Union in defiance of all principles of sovereignty. The same is true of France’s seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Europe, and therefore France, is passing on the costs of war and militarism to the working class and young people. This point is important because, in addition to its function which is to subject the world of work to new constraints in the name of a so-called European solidarity in the name of which we should prepare for war, Brussels intends to stir up conflict throughout the world. alongside Washington. This is the case in Ukraine, but it is also the case in many countries on the borders of Russia in Georgia, Moldova, Armenia but also in Cyprus, Serbia and the Balkans, it is still the case in the Near Middle East where the economic challenges for the control of energy sources or land and maritime corridors are obvious.

The expansion of NATO's prerogatives, the increase in military credits, the illegal use of economic and financial sanctions, the countless measures of coercion as we see against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua constitute another facet of this authoritarian arsenal. For its part, the UN system is exploited, presented as obsolete, multilateralism and the United Nations Charter itself are called into question. By all means and at any cost, the Western camp seeks to destabilise through chaos by engaging in interference, by directly carrying out regime changes, wherever its power is contested. He does this if necessary by resorting to the most extremist forces, as with the ultra-liberal recipe of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys”. We have seen them before and we see them again in Argentina where they inspire the policies of the neofascist Javier Milei who, fortunately, comes up against strong popular opposition.

The world is changing quickly

For the Western camp, the problem, one could say, is that the world is changing quickly, even very quickly. In fact we are at a turning point which involves other choices, those in favour of development, social justice, cooperation, peace. In fact everything that opposes the destructive and predatory logic of the capitalist West. The decline we are witnessing is therefore the reflection of a challenge to a system of aggression and pillage which has operated until now in an international balance of power which apparently seemed immutable but which today sees its totalitarian power openly contested.

In fact, the interests of the majority of people cannot be compatible with the greed and imperialist aspirations of the ruling class. This is the main contradiction. This requires the labor movement, the progressive forces and trade unionism in particular, to become aware of it in order to contribute independently to ensuring that the people, the workers, take responsibility for themselves, commit themselves in order to reappropriate another way of conceiving their union and political commitment. It is for the world of work to support all actions aimed at breaking the power of banks and multinational companies, financial institutions and weakening by all means the powers of the imperialist system, starting with ours. To do this, we must have the ambition to develop an internationalist solidarity of our time with all the social and political forces which not only challenge the domination of capital but intend to break with it.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/les-liaisons-dangereuses-d-ursula-von-der-leyen.html

TRANSLATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR.

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