Greens want to end poverty, reduce unemployment, strengthen European solidarity and put sustainability at the core of a new economic dynamic!
The European Green Party is holding its Spring Council in Madrid this week. We are showing our solidarity with the Spanish people who are suffering. We met in Athens in similar circumstances last November.
More than 19m people were unemployed in the Eurozone in March 2013. In Spain and Greece the jobless rate has jumped to 27%. and both countries now have youth unemployment rates close to 60%. Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus are not far behind in this catalogue of social misery.
The crises have been engendered by grave economic and financial mis-management, by a philosophy of deregulation and by unjust choices made by national as well as European decision makers. The failure of the European Union, in conjunction with the IMF and the European Central Bank, to produce a sustainable solution to this crisis lies in their blinkered approach. Their backwards-looking one-size solution assumes that national finances should be managed like household budgets. National and international economies do not respond well to such treatment and the austerity programmes being applied by the “troika” are creating a self-destructive downwards spiral where tax revenues are shrinking at the same time as household budgets. The idea of shrinking your way into growth is intellectually dishonest, it is not working and is socially destructive.
Many citizens, movements, civic groups, academic experts, trade unionists and even almost all the members of the G20 are calling for a revision of the path which the EU has been taking, but the political will to change course is still lacking.
We European Greens argue for a radically different approach - a green alternative that is based on justice and responsibility, and on solidarity and sustainability. We demand policy, which is visionary, democratically managed, and responds to the interests of Europe's citizens, rather than punishing them. In doing so we build on the Green New Deal policy, which we have been advocating since the 2009 European election. Crisis management must therefore take into account not only bureaucratic and financial criteria but also its social impact and long term economic consequences.
We need to design a system, which relieves some of the suffocating public debt to provide a breathing space for economic recovery. There must be new European policies to allow industries in the debt-ridden states to have a fair access to finance instead of the current blockage on lending imposed by the banks.
We strongly advocate a European banking union with common effective oversight, a banking resolution mechanism and in the medium term also a common savings guarantee scheme. We insist that new efforts must be made to come up with a sovereign bankruptcy mechanism instead of relying on the dogma of the fiscal compact to rein in public expenditure regardless of the consequences.
We need to re-double the efforts to fight against tax evasion and tax havens.
In short, instead of the current destructive policy of austerity, we propose a future strategy which is innovative, sustainable and puts the people, not the markets first.
