Their drive to stop SYRIZA
Greece will hold a general election on January 25 that the Coalition of the Radical Left, or SYRIZA, is favored to win. With its program of rejecting austerity and reversing the neoliberal program that plunged Greece into an economic depression and social crisis, SYRIZA has been leading in opinion polls for more than a year. After January 25, it may have the opportunity to form the first government in Europe that decisively challenges the austerity agenda. But even before a new election was set, Europe's rulers and their mainstream media mouthpieces were trying to scare Greek voters away from supporting SYRIZA.
In this statement issued January 1, the calls for solidarity across borders with the Greek left and working class in this showdown with the European ruling class that has inflicted misery in the name of austerity in Greece and beyond.
EVEN BEFORE the dissolution of the Greek parliament and the ensuing call for new elections, international and European powers had launched a campaign of lies and threats aimed at frightening the Greek electorate away from voting for SYRIZA in the upcoming general election to take place on January 25.
Seconded by the mainstream European media, the continent's "leaders"--including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble--are preparing yet another brutal intervention in Greece, a country they have already turned into a social ruin through the inhuman and barbarous austerity policies they dictated.
The CADTM does not have the least doubt about the real intentions of those who have used Greece as a testing ground for the most extreme neoliberal policies and the Greek people as guinea pigs for social, political and economic shock therapy.
We must be ready for an escalation of their campaign. They cannot allow SYRIZA to gain victory and be emulated throughout Europe. They will stop at nothing because they are well aware that the result of the Greek elections will be decisive in the social war they are waging against the vast majority of the European population.
It is because the stakes are so high that we can expect the "leaders" of Europe and of Greece to refuse to accept the result of the poll that, for the first time in Greek history, should bring victory to the Greek left. They will certainly try to stifle the left-wing government that should be the democratic result of the election, because its eventual success will be interpreted as tremendous encouragement to the workers and peoples of Europe to resist.
The CADTM, which has always stood alongside the Greek people in their struggle against austerity and the grave infringements on their social and democratic rights, again calls on European and worldwide social movements and radical parties to unflinchingly support the resistance and struggle of the Greek people. The illegitimate, illegal and odious debt that the Greek people have been burdened with is not their debt. The CADTM calls for the creation of an international popular commission to audit Greece's debt in order to identify the illegitimate, illegal and/or odious parts that should not be repaid. This would set a precedent and nourish a debate on debt repudiation in all the peripheral European countries.
To support the Greek people and the Greek left in their struggle to liberate the country from the grip of creditors and from the dictatorship of the markets is now the duty, not only of grassroots activists, but of every European citizen that rejects a Europe of austerity that produces misery, racism and barbarism.
CADTM Europe, January 1, 2015
First published at the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt website.
