UK election result has revealed the real challenge for Europe’s future.

In the last months, the media have been worrying about an eventual Grexit. This catastrophic scenario for the whole Eurozone has been considered so far as No 1 threat.

The recently recorded convergence between Greece and its partners and their expected agreement within the next weeks, I hope, reveals that the Grexit was a false alarm. To the contrary, David Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum on EU membership, converted Brexit from a distant prospect into a real and non-negligible possibility.

Conservatives, willing to stop the rise of UKIP nationalists, adopted part of their agenda and entrapped one of the most powerful European countries into a false dilemma. The EU appears as a problem British people has to deal with. Moreover, we should not forget that, in France, Marine Le Pen, with her ultra-nationalist agenda, has promised a referendum if she wins the 2017 presidential election.

In the next two years, Europe will face a harsh reality, which reflects the adoption of wrong policies, based on extreme austerity, and a lack of a vision for the future of EU as a political union.

The developments in the UK and France prove that the problem of the EU crisis is not of technical nature. It is deeply political. The EU has ceased to appear as a factor of economic growth and upward social mobility. It has become synonymous of punitive policies of the wealthy North towards the poorer South, which leaded to recession and unsustainable debts. This favored the rise of anti-European and nationalist ideas, which have been so destructive for our Continent in the recent past.

If the EU fails to convince its peoples that it is determined to return to growth, job creation and social solidarity, it will face the danger of collapse, with incalculable consequences. A new European project for growth needs, first of all, clear political decisions to end unilateral austerity and give again hope to the European unification process.

http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-05/david-cameron-united-kingdom-european-union-calls/seite-3

Both the New Democracy and Pasok parties (partners in government) backed the arrangement, which includes lucrative terms offering remarkable privileges for investors in the shape of major energy companies like Germany’s RWE and the French EDL.

While the jumble sale of state property (industries, infrastructure, and utilities) has been a characteristic of the last five years, and chiefly apparent in Greece, the “everything must go” approach to public goods is regrettably not just a Greek phenomenon.

Privatisation is one of the preconditions of the mantra that has directed policy across the European periphery since the beginning of the Greek crisis.

Privatisation’s champions maintain that selling public assets is good for competition and hinders price-fixing, as well as benefiting state coffers and consumers. What we have seen instead are greater costs, added inefficiencies and redundancies.

Internationally, experience shows that, in contrast to this rosy image, privatisation often results in reduced access to services which then become more expensive and less efficient, with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s standing as the classic, gloomy monument to this economic lunacy.

Arrested for being on strike
But market fundamentalists and their allies are testing something even more dangerous in Greece. Genop-DEH, the main union to which most PPC staff is affiliated, has been fighting the government policy by calling a series of strikes.

Worryingly, in reaction to this, the government issued civil mobilisation orders to 19,000 PPC workers, meaning that they face arrest for being on strike. This move effectively abolishes the right to strike – a fundamental entitlement in any functioning democracy, not to mention something which is enshrined in the EU’s own charter of fundamental rights.

In the context of such shocking government tactics, the left in Greece is calling for a referendum on whether the PPC should be privatised.

This way, the Greek people can decide on the issue rather than leaving it up to a government that has shown itself to be both deeply unpopular and without democratic legitimacy already twice in elections – European and local – this year.

For us, access to energy is a human rights issue and so its supply should remain under public control and ownership. The people must have their say by referendum on such crucial decisions, which will impact on their lives and the lives of generations to come, and so it will remain our core priority for the near future.

We are also gathering support to counter moves to sell off other vital national assets, while pushing EU institutions to condemn the recent breaches of the charter of fundamental rights by the government in Greece.

Nightmare vision
Against this theft of public property, local initiatives have been springing up, and often halting the privatisation of utilities such as water services and hospitals.

From Thessaloniki to Berlin to Porto, the value of common goods is gaining traction as an essential idea in the popular response to the flogging of public assets on the cheap.

Five years of economic and social crisis under the austerity-fixated European leadership have prepared the groundwork for an exceptional transfer of resources from the shared democratic space to the realm of impenetrable multinationals.

The Greek left, alongside our allies all over Europe, is putting forward a vision of genuine democracy in Europe. This involves shutting down tax havens, fighting for a banking sector at the service of society, developing a proper training and investment plan to bring down youth unemployment, and democratisation of the EU institutions – especially the European Central Bank.

Vanquishing existing and imminent moves towards privatisation must form the nucleus of struggles to position the citizen in her rightful place at the centre of a much-needed democratic and social Europe.

This is the means by which we can present an alternative to the right’s nightmare vision for the future of our continent.

http://euobserver.com/opinion/124952