DSA Statement on the European Elections

Democratic Socialist of America News From DDS May 14,
2012

http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/Statement_on_French_Elections.pdf

One week after Socialist Francois Hollande won the
election in France, this Sunday the Social Democrats
won almost 40% of the vote in the most populous state
in Germany. It is too soon to say what these results
(and the more complicated ones in Greece) will mean for
Europe, but DSA welcomes these signs of a potential
turning of the tide against the austerity politics of
the 1%.

DSA National Political Committee Statement

DSA Salutes French socialist Francois Hollande's
presidential victory and the broader European left's
resistance to the Politics of Austerity

May 10, 2012

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) welcomes the
recent European-wide popular rejection of the austerity
politics of the 1%.  In particular, DSA salutes the
victory of socialist Francois Hollande in the French
presidential election. Hollande ran on a platform that
rejected the austerity policies of massive budget cuts
pushed by the lords of finance. Such policies only
serve to prolong both the Great Recession and the pain
it visits upon working people and the poor.  Hollande's
program calls for a financial transactions tax and
higher marginal tax rates on the rich to increase
investment in education, including the hiring of 60,000
new teachers.  His platform also calls for a major
raise in the minimum wage and for lowering, from age 62
to 60, the age at which manual laborers can retire and
receive full public pensions.. To achieve such
policies, the broad left must now win a majority in the
June French parliamentary elections and stand firm on
its pre-election pledges.  The fight against the global
capitalist politics of austerity must be truly
international; thus the United States left must
pressure the Obama administration to work with Hollande
to restart the European economy and to propose similar
programs in the United States that would highlight the
complete failure of austerity policies.

DSA recognizes that European (and American) bankers and
bond vigilantes will resist such modest efforts to
promote both equity and economic growth in France and
elsewhere.  The Economist magazine termed the moderate
socialist president "rather dangerous" because he
"genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer
society." (!) And the fate of Hollande's program will
not be decided solely in France. The broad left must
not only regain control of the French parliament in
June elections;  a revived German left needs to
overturn the bi-partisan German elite consensus
favoring the politics of austerity. Electoral victories
by the broad left in upcoming German state elections
could move the German political dynamic leftwards.   A
truly equitable response to the European economic
crisis depends upon Germany pushing the European
Central Bank (ECB) to drop its obsession with a phantom
inflationary threat and adopt policies that would
restore long-term economic growth. If the ECB used its
borrowing power to exchange existing sovereign debt for
ECB-guaranteed Eurobonds, then the fiscal crisis in
Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Ireland could be
eased, thus allowing for the adoption of full
employment growth policies. The undemocratic terms of
the European monetary union must be renegotiated; as
is, the European Union treaty agreements prioritize
fighting inflation over promoting full employment and
social justice in each member country.  Thus, the
people of Europe are being crucified on a cross of the
Euro.

Any Keynesian economist can explain the irrationality
of this politics of austerity -- a government cannot
cut its way out of a deep recession,  either in the US
or Europe.  But the battle of ideas is won in the
streets, not in the halls of think-tanks. Resistance to
the politics of austerity has spread from the youthful
indignados of Spain to the general European electorate.
In the same week as the French presidential elections,
the center-right government of the Netherlands
collapsed in the face of widespread protest; the
British Labor Party won a major victory in local
elections; and mass protests threatened the collapse of
right-wing governments in the Czech Republic and
Romania.  On the very day of the French elections, the
Greek electorate rejected both major, pro-austerity
parties, the conservative New Democrats and the
patronage-driven, neo-liberal "socialist" PASOK. This
led not only to the emergence of "The True Left Party"
(Syriza), which significantly outpolled PASOK, but also
to massive gains for far-right, anti-immigrant parties.

DSA recognizes that right-wing populism represents an
alternative, noxious form of popular response to
capitalist crisis. We see the politics of Le Pen in
France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and the
Golden Dawn in Greece replicated in conservative
efforts here at home to blame the plight of downwardly
mobile native workers on immigrants, rather  than on
the corporate elites who outsourced workers' jobs.  In
the United States, the Occupy movement may organize
mass protest at both the Republican and Democratic
convention, which is all to the good, but only a
popular left speaking to the needs of working people of
all races can forestall the rise of right-wing
populism.

In the U.S., as in Europe, DSA believes that only a
combination of street heat and grassroots progressive
electoral activity can displace the bi-partisan
corporate consensus on economic policy. The bi-
partisan, neo-liberal obsession with balancing-the-
budget at a time of rampant unemployment threatens to
turn the Great Recession into a true Great Depression.
And as in the Great Depression, only mass protest from
below can force the political class to adopt policies
that restore full employment and a modicum of social
equality.  It is in this spirit, and in solidarity with
a revived global left, that DSA recommits itself to
building popular protest movements against austerity
while simultaneously working in the 2012 elections on
behalf of grassroots progressive candidates who reject
the politics of austerity that make working people pay
for the blunders of corporate America.

___________________________________________

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