Hello everyone.
This is a message on behalf of DiEM25, the pan-European movement that came together in Berlin when it was still possible to dream of reversing the degeneration of the European Union into an austerity union that drags the peoples of Europe down into a quagmire of naked exploitation of People and Nature, rampant inequality, technological regression, xenophobia and war.
Back then, as DiEM25 was coming together toward the end of 2015, we said that Europe had at most a decade to get its act together. That’s why we added ‘25’ to our name: either Europe would democratise by 2025 or it would disintegrate. It didn’t democratise. So, it is now disintegrating.
As we bid farewell to 2024 and prepare ourselves for 2025 – which we had imagined as Europe’s deadline – we now reflect on how Europe’s ruling class has abused, diminished, exploited and depressed our continent.
Fifteen years of austerity for the many and free money for the few have led to northern Europe’s deindustrialisation and southern Europe’s desertification. Europe, as a result, missed a whole technological revolution and is now in irreversible decline – technologically, financially, politically, morally.
Is it any wonder why, within Brussels, Europe’s future is shaped less and less in the EU building and more and more in NATO’s headquarters? Is it any wonder that Europe plays precisely no role in ending the cruel Ukraine war, that open, festering wound? Is it any wonder that Europe is either supporting or just putting up with Israel’s war crimes and genocidal drive in Gaza as if it were an act of God?
In this postmodern version of Europe’s 1930s, the radical centre has become sensationally unpopular. Brussels is seen as the capital city where decency and democracy come to die; the capital city where unchecked, undemocratic power goes hand in hand with criminal irresponsibility.
Every policy announcement by the EU leadership is just another dance with failure. You can see it on their faces. Even they do not believe what they are saying. With Europe’s industry in the process of liquidation, the Green Deal gone, Mario Draghi’s Report already in the dustbin, the only thing they are waxing lyrical about is spending zillions that they do not have on weapons, iron domes, drones and AI-equipped killing machines.
Unencumbered by the chains of their pretend-euro-humanism, they have now embraced their own failure. They own the essential futility of their existence. They collect their salaries and look forward to the directorships they will be offered once they retire. Ultimately, they no longer care that they are frauds – and that Europeans can see that.
In this postmodern version of Europe’s 1930s, as in the original 1930s, only the xenophobes and the (thinly disguised) fascists flourish. As in the original 1930s, the clueless centrists are paving the ground for them. The EU’s leaders last resort is to try to win over the strident xenophobic right while shoring up the crumbling centre. Alas, as in the original 1930s, the strident xenophobic right will devour them.
Luck will not help Europe now. No wind is favourable to a continent that lacks direction.
To make our own luck, Europeans need a transnational movement that links local movements together into a pan-European force that halts this slide into a new version of the 1930s. This movement is already here. It is DiEM25.
In 2025, DiEM25 will roll out our renewed agenda for a Europe that promotes peace around the world, comes down hard on human rights abuses everywhere, introduces a basic income for Europeans, ends humanity’s dependence on a fossil fuel industry determined to wreck what is left of our planet and, last but not least, projects a vision of the economic democracy without which no progressive agenda can flourish.
Join us to make 2025 a hopeful year.
Carpe DiEM25!
Yanis
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