Right from the introductory debate on the new legislature of the European Parliament, on July 2nd, the Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left (GUE / NGL) called for a reinforced European solidarity through a New Deal organized in Project bonds, Tobin Tax, Carbon Tax and instruments of income redistribution through taxation and that lead to a new ecological path for the economy.
“Everything must change within the European Union – said Barbara Spinelli (a MEP elected in Italy with the Other Europe with Tsipras, part of the European United Left) – economic rules, institutions, the functioning of the EU that is not very democratic.” For the GUE-NGL group, the new European legislature has begun under the old flags: full compliance to economic rules that have resulted in the global economic crisis.
Structural reforms listed in governments’ agenda require job flexibility, market influences on public decisions, cuts in public spending and in welfare. The assumption that “there is no growth without austerity because austerity is a precondition for growth” is the target of criticism from the United European Left .
The real point, according to the Left side in the European Parliament, is not so much budgetary flexibility, but the method by which parameters are processed, the lack of an European investment plan and of adequate resources for the EU. The problem – radical Left’s leaders say – is that today an Europe based on solidarity does not exist and that instead there is only a nineteenth-century balance of power between more or less influential and wealthy national states.
In his press conference in Strasbourg, Eleonora Forenza (a MEP elected in southern Italy with the Tsipras list) has criticized austerity but she also encouraged the political forces of the Left that in Italy still rely on what was once known as the Center-Left to move now towards political stances clearly alternatives to economic neoliberal paradigm, which is no longer enclosed in a single alignment.
About immigration issues, Eleonora Forenza has highlighted “the need to think of a humanitarian corridor.” The European United Left considers the association of ideas between migration and destabilization misleading, since European countries have their own responsibilities about the conflicts that cause the flow of refugees.
“In 2001, in Genoa, social movements have struggled for another possible world, in 2002 we began to build the European social forum – summed Forenza – we are radical Europeanists, in favor of a union of peoples, our keywords are job and income.” Finally, the leftist group has claimed, since the new legislature’s beginning, the necessity of overcoming the economic competition’s ideology repeated by the media to so-called “generations Erasmus”, that seek coordinates to lay the groundwork for an Europe able to prove stable in its social foundations.
Right from the introductory debate on the new legislature of the European Parliament, on July 2nd, the Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left (GUE / NGL) called for a reinforced European solidarity through a New Deal organized in Project bonds, Tobin Tax, Carbon Tax and instruments of income redistribution through taxation and that lead to a new ecological path for the economy.
