Declaration of OKDE-Spartakos for the European Elections on May 2019
Declaration of OKDE-Spartakos for the European Elections on May 2019
After more than four years that SYRIZA, along with its social-democrat, right-wing and far right allies are in power, the workers' movement is still in a state of frustration and disarray. Hopes that a “left” government or a government of “social salvation” would effortlessly lead us out of austerity were bitterly disproved, as expected. The massive NO of the working class and the poor and oppressed strata in the referendum of 2015 was cancelled in the most provocative way, once more showing that a vote is not enough to save us. On the other hand, through years of struggles and strikes, working people have accumulated significant political experience, which will prove valuable in a new round of struggles. There are signs of a certain recovery of the movement, as frustration and disappointment will be subsiding.
SYRIZA has rapidly and absolutely adopted a policy in favour of the interests of the rich, industrialists, ship-owners, multinational and local big business. They imposed the third Memorandum and the endless austerity of the post-Memorandum budgetary surveillance. They privatised ports, trains and airports, handing the public wealth over to entrepreneurs. They destroyed the workers' rights and generalised precarious labour, with the bosses getting more and more out of control. In 2019 only, we have counted tens of workers dying upon work, while at the same time the legal framework on the so-called working accidents is getting stricter. They have imprisoned refugees in miserable concentration camps. They permanently allied with the “centre-left”, i.e. with the cadres of PASOK who have been responsible for the dirty administration of the past decades. They became best friends with big business and they took them to the Republic of Macedonia to share the loot. They successfully claimed the role of the legitimate representative of the bloodstained NATO in the Balkans and the East Mediterranean.
Just before the elections, following the good old way, SYRIZA proclaimed some elementary benefits and measures of rationalisation that they themselves postponed for so many years: a slight increase in the minimum wage, facilitation measures for the indebted, a deferment of further cuts in pensions and a partial reintroduction of the 13th pension, some salary returns to specific categories of employees, that will probably be extinguished, if the tax-free salary level decreases again. Let there be no doubt, though, that even these benefits, which are ridiculous in relation with the needs of the workers and the unemployed, could never be gained without all those years of struggle and if SYRIZA was not afraid of the rage they will face in the elections. We owe the government no favour. SYRIZA is not the lesser evil.
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