As the EU drifts into opacity and war-making, citizens must reclaim the right to know what is done in their name, and to speak freely without fear

Transparency lies at the very core of what DiEM25 represents: democracy. In an age when much of the world’s political class bends to the whims of the military-industrial complex – trading our rights and freedoms for profit from the suffering of the most vulnerable – there has never been a more urgent need for us, the people, to take a stand.

Transparency is vanishing, as the billionaire class undermines international and municipal laws through backroom deals, evades democratic oversight, and suppresses community representation. Cloaked in the excuse of “commercial confidentiality”, this trend robs us of genuine democratic governance. A true democracy requires public oversight of powerful entities – by the people, for the people.

There is also an increasing presence of those who are privileged and courageous enough to take a stand through public protests, in social media and on the streets. It is through supporting and joining this presence that we, the people, can reclaim the rights to personal privacy for ourselves and the rights to transparency in the government and corporate sectors.

The right to privacy belongs to individual people, not to Big Tech giants, state officers, or law enforcement agencies. The responsibility to be transparent belongs to the companies, the governments, and the police. It is we, the people, who are owed the full oversight of our institutions, and we, the people, cannot sit by as they hijack the narrative to insist on surveillance of all others but privacy for themselves.

No one truly knows what is discussed behind the closed doors of those who are supposed to serve the public. From out of left field one day we are told, “Now we’re sending EU troops to Ukraine“, then the next from our of the right, we hear that France is preparing hospitals for “war time readiness”. The EU claims to embody democracy, yet destroys what little hope we have left with its deepening opacity and refusal to meet the most basic standards of public accountability.

Once, the news media offered hope for democratic communication and diverse public ownership. Today, it has been reduced to a mouthpiece for billionaires. The petrochemical and military-industrial complex – owners of nearly all our infrastructure – dictate the stories we hear through baseless editorials designed to justify their interests. The result is propaganda: lies painted over the crumbling foundations of our would-be democracies.

EU officials act with near-total impunity, barely answering even to their own “shadow rulers”, as they echo one another’s tired rhetoric about the inevitability of war – though it is doubtful that Vladimir Putin has ever directly threatened war with the EU. Ursula von der Leyen has announced that “we are in a war over who controls the world in the future,” alluding ominously to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, Trump continues his aggression against Venezuela – attacking their boats under the guise of a “war on drugs” – a transparent attempt to weaken Maduro and seize access to oil, without consulting a single citizen on the matter.

The inalienable human right to personal privacy is an essential element of any genuine democracy. Yet the world’s most powerful governments are quietly abolishing this right in secret meetings even now. In discussions surrounding the proposed ChatControl legislation, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard admitted (according to one translation) that “[The EU’s officers] need to break with the completely erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate via encrypted messaging services.”

Though a minority of states are holding the line and trying to block this landmark regression and rescission of fundamental human rights, it is likely that the near future holds in store for all of us the battle of our lives, just to be able to speak to each other in private without Big Brother, unaccountably and autocratically construing all we do as a crime, by his own caprice.

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