After five years of austerity policies imposed by the Troika (European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank) the Greeks voted for a government trying to make an end to the hardships. In the past years Greek GDP has shrunk by 20 %, pensions have been reduced, VAT has increased, 25 to 30 % of people are jobless, health services have been dismantled, many people lost their homes and their businesses. Suicides are soaring. There is a real humanitarian crisis. All the institutions know that imposing austerity on a country in recession can only worsen the recession. It can never bring a solution.

The institutions know all this. Yet, they are fighting their ideological enemy, a progressive government with an alternative to neoliberalism, an enemy that puts people before profit, an enemy that may inspire other people in Europe to do the same. The neoliberal heroes feel threatened. The institutions are inflexible. Even if the ECB made 1,9 billion € of profit on Greek loans and the IMF even more, they continue to demand the impossible. They want Greek pensioners to suffer. And the Greek government continues to say no. It deserves our solidarity.

In hardly six months, nearly one hundred thousand people have tried to reach the shores of Europe, crossing the Mediterranean. They are now picked up by boats from different countries and are landed in Italy. From there, they try to reach other European countries, but are now brutally held back by the French police. Hungarians plan to build a huge wall along their border with Serbia. A modest proposal from the European Commission to accept 40.000 Syrians and Eritreans (the others are considered to be ‘economic migrants’) is rejected. What can those homeless people do? Can one expect Italy and Greece and Spain to bear all the costs of tens of thousands of refugees and migrants? Why can our governments not respect the minimal norms of human dignity?

What is this European Union where countries do not trust each other anymore? Where national governments anxiously look at their own budget, where people are sacrificed on the altar of fiscal balance and an illusionary and harmful economic growth?

People, pensioners, human lives do not count anymore. Pensioners have no human capital to develop, who should invest in them? Migrants and refugees are considered to be inferior beings, the idea of capital does not even make sense, however dynamic these people are. And solidarity, as a European senior civil servant told me, is a concept of the past…

I feel ashamed. Where is the moral superiority of Europe? How could it ever again speak to other countries on human rights or good governance? In the past, we could say it did not apply its high norms and values to the outside world, but today human rights are violated even inside Europe.

Today, two reports were published.

One concerns the illegal, illegitimate and/or odious nature of the Greek debt. Most of the billions of euros transferred by European taxpayers simply went to bail-out the banks. This money did not go to the Greek people.

The other report concerns the world wealth and the ‘modest’ (7,2 %!) growth of wealthy people’s assets. There is now a greater demand for social impact investments, the report notes. How not to become cynical when reading these lines?

We are witnessing the moral and political defeat of neoliberalism and of Europe. What is now happening can be lethal for our countries’ capacity to promote integration, cooperation and solidarity. Two hundred years after Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo, this is again a very sad day.

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