The European People Turn Slowly Against a World of War
Vijay Prashad
IN February 2024, two years into the war in Ukraine and five months into the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the European Union released data on the mood of the European public. In terms of Ukraine, large majorities continued to support the provision of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and to welcome Ukrainian refugees. But increasingly, there was growing scepticism about the enormous tranches of funds going toward the Ukrainian armed forces to prolong the war and about the increased military spending in their own countries due to pressure from the United States. In Germany, for example, 41 per cent of the polled public said that aid to Ukraine was ‘excessive’ and 80 per cent of the public said that they doubted the European Union’s ability to compensate for any reduction of US aid to Ukraine (a reduction that has already occurred and is all but guaranteed to go further downwards). In France, 39 per cent of the public said that they would like military assistance to be reduced. All the arrows move downward for military aid and for increasing military spending within the European states. Meanwhile, across Europe, more than half the public believes that arms trade with Israel must be banned (65 per cent in Italy, 62 per cent in Belgium, 51 per cent in France, 49 per cent in Germany), while most Europeans believe that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians (49 per cent in Italy, 43 per cent in Belgium, 33 per cent in Germany). By all polls it has become clear that increasingly the European public wants an end to the war in Ukraine and wants an end to the genocide against the Palestinians.
However, the vast bulk of the European political establishment is entirely gripped by an anti-Russian fever, unable to sanction any peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, and by a blindness toward the facts of genocide coming out of Palestine. The German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, for instance, told the Bundestag that Israel is justified in targeting and killing civilians in Gaza. ‘Self-defence means not only attacking terrorists but destroying them’, she said. ‘When Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools…civilian places lose their protected status because terrorist abuse them’. In fact, there is no basis in international law for the revocation of protected status if there are civilians present, not even a claim that they are being used as ‘human shields’. In the context of Ukraine, Germany is now setting up a military base in Lithuania, where it will station 4,800 troops and 200 civilians as well as – potentially – dangerous missiles that can strike Russian cities in minutes. Both Baerbock’s illegal comments and the creation of a German base in the Baltic countries accelerates the genocide in Gaza – giving the Israelis licence to kill civilians – and the war in Ukraine – by continuing to threaten Russia with direct attack by a NATO country.
There is a stark divergence in the attitude of the European people and their elected leadership. It makes a distant observer question the merits of a liberal democracy when the voters believe one thing and then the elected act in another direction. The starkest example is from Italy. In October 2022, Giorgio Meloni of the Fratelli d’Italia, with her partners in Lega and Forza Italia, formed the government. Before the election, Meloni and her party were against the sanctions on Moscow and the blank cheque western support for Ukraine. But, once in the prime minister’s chair, Meloni had to buckle to the NATO project. It helps the NATO project that there are three major US military bases in Italy, whose space for an independent foreign policy is minimal. The same is the situation for Germany, where there are over forty US military bases from the well-known Ramstein Air Base to the lesser-known Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart (the home of the US Africa Command). The presence of the United States armed forces across western Europe and its overwhelming control over the NATO project has certainly prevented any of the major European countries (France, Germany, Italy) from articulating a foreign policy that is even one millimetre divergent from that of Washington (there are some exceptions, such as when the US went into an illegal war against Iraq in 2003, but these are exceptions and not the rule).
NEW LEFT FORCES
By and large, the far right of a special type in Europe – such as Meloni and the Alliance for Germany (AfD) – speak out of two sides of their mouth, sometimes against these maddening wars, but mostly in favour of them. A glance through the votes in the German Bundestag, for example, makes it clear that there is almost no political project that is willing to stand up for peace and indeed to represent the increasing will of the German people. The same sort of conundrum is set in motion when one looks at the votes on the increased spending across Europe, with the habit of funding war overriding any sense of being representative of the voters. The far right of a special type is deceitful because of its two-faced politics: sounding as if it wants to be the representative of the voters, but at the same time being the representative of the arms industry and of Washington, DC. They are, in general, not able to be as populist as they claim.
New trends are apparent in Europe. The first indication of the new direction came in the French parliamentary elections in June-July, when the New Popular Front (NFP) – which comprises, among others, La France Insoumise, the Communist Party, and the Socialist Party – prevailed with 180 seats in the National Assembly. Typical of the failure of democracy in Europe, President Emmanuel Macron neglected to ask the NFP to form a government but turned to the dull establishment Gaullist centrist Michel Barnier to take the post. By neglecting the largest party in the Assembly, which has a clear position for peace in Ukraine and against the genocide by the Israelis, Macron signalled that the French establishment was simply not prepared to confront Washington or to listen to its own public. The fact that NFP won the largest bloc in the National Assembly is an indicator of a new trend across Europe which cannot be vanquished in the ballot box, but has to be set aside through the available constitutional rules that are in fact anti-democratic.
On September 1, in the two federal provinces of Saxony and Thuringia held elections that delivered a shocking result for the ruling ‘traffic light’ coalition of the Social Democrats (Red), Free Democratic Party (Yellow), and the Green Party (Green). None of them came close to being able to form a government, with the Greens and the Free Democrats struggling to get near the 5 per cent threshold for entering the parliament, a sign of their slipping popularity across the country. Meanwhile, the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD) won a third of the vote, while a new left party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which had broken from Die Linke (the Left) won about 15 per cent of the vote in both provinces. The BSW’s rise has been entirely linked to its forceful position against the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine, calling for a mandate ‘for peace, for diplomacy’ and not for war and for a mandate against the placement of US missiles on German soil. BSW broke with Die Linke, which has now moved into electoral obscurity, because their parent party refused to take a clear position regarding NATO and the war in Ukraine (a book by BSW’s international head, Sevim Dagdelan’s NATO has been published by LeftWord Books in Delhi). Critics of the BSW accuse it of being anti-immigrant; the party argues that while it supports the entry of asylum seekers into Germany, it is against the wars and IMF policies that force people to flee their countries – a position that is not anti-immigrant, but indeed pro-people. All the evidence suggests that BSW will grow in the year ahead before the next federal parliamentary elections.
On October 13, millions of Belgians (and some non-Belgians who have lived in the country for at least five years) voted in the 581 municipalities for their municipal councils. The bourgeois parties, which are united behind the NATO agenda, faced a serious challenge from the Belgian Workers Party (the PVDA-PTB), which made progress in the three parts of the country – Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia. The PVDA-PTB doubled their representation from the 2018 elections (the party now has 258 local representatives). What is important about the PTB-PVDA is that it wins across the country, not just in the French speaking or Dutch speaking areas. In Antwerp, the largest city in Flanders, the party won 20 per cent of the vote, and in some cities (Aalst, Ostend, Châtelet, and others) it won representation for the first time. The abolition of compulsory voting meant that 40 per cent of the electorate did not turn out, most of them from amongst the working-class and youth, both core constituencies of the PTB-PVDA. These gains – despite a smear campaign – are significant. The party is led by Peter Mertens, whose book Mutiny was published earlier this year from LeftWord Books. Recently, Mertens reflected on the churning in Europe: “Right now, we are in a phase of chaos, and chaos always kicks up a lot of dust. But the Left should not be afraid of that dust. If you look at all the disasters imposed on the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America – not only during colonialism, but also in the neoliberal period – it’s clear that the current order is already very violent. This process is just beginning and is currently in the most difficult phase. It could go in a far-right direction, but our job is to ensure that it doesn’t. I realize there are people in Europe who feel like they have stable lives and are afraid of the chaos, but that chaos is caused by capitalism. We have to show people a way forward, through the chaos, to a new kind of stability – a socialist stability.”
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