 Guten Abend Berlin! Guten Abend Deutschland! Guten Abend Europa! Guten Abend to all of you who are watching the live screen, that's live streaming, hoping that something good is beginning here tonight. Guten Abend, even to those few people who are watching the live stream, fearing that something good is happening here tonight. Yes, Europe will be democratized or it will disintegrate. This is not a scare tactic, it's a fact. The European Union's disintegration is happening. New divisions, new walls are springing up along the borders of our nations, inside our societies, in people's minds and hearts. And yes, it is scary. But in our video, as you saw, we chose to depict this reality with soothing images, almost bland images, images that look a bit like a commercial. At the moment when we want that if democratization does not proceed, the European Union will disintegrate. We didn't show you images of electrified fences, discord and misanthropy, but we showed you a beautiful opening yellow flower. Fear is not our weapon, in sharp contrast to Europe's establishment, that rules through fear. Our weapon is reason mixed with liberal doses of hope and endless determination. And our radical message is very simple and is directed, not necessarily to those of us who are in the folks' unit tonight, but it's directed to those who are probably not watching the live stream, they are exhausted after a long day's work, they are depressed, they are watching some reality show on television trying to drown their anxieties and forget about their trials and tribulations, those who doubt that their rulers know what they are doing but they don't know where to turn to and they don't believe in politics. It is them, the majority suffering in quiet desperation that we must reach out to with a perfectly simple radical message. Democracy was bleached out of the European Union's decision making process. The demos has long ago been taken out of democracy and this is why the European Union is disintegrating tonight, today, now. If we do nothing, the European Union's reconstruction will lead to a version of the 1930s. This is why we need the search of democracy to prevent this. We have a historic duty to do so. We have a duty to the future to be able to say in 20 years time we were here and we acted when we were asked by children and grandchildren what did you do to stop the post-modern version of the 1930s. Now this is why we refuse to retreat into our nation states. This is why we, who are the European Union's greatest, harshest critics, we say that they return to fortress Germany, to fortress France, to fortress Britain, to fortresses everywhere in Europe. It's going to make life everywhere in Europe nastier, more brutish, and I fear, shorter. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, without democracy, life in every public institution withers away becomes a caricature of itself and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor. That was Rosa Luxemburg. It's what happened in the Soviet Union, as Rosa feared. It is what is happening to the European Union today. Earlier today a journalist asked me in the conference, Janis, you failed in Greece, you are a minority in Europe. How can you hope to change anything? I replied, throughout last year, it is quite true that in the Eurogroup I was in a minority of one. Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is the truth. And you better speak truth to power, especially when power is behaving like a stupid virus killing the organism in which it lives. Our societies, our Europe, our planet. But let me share a feeling with you. Tonight, I don't feel I'm in a minority. Not in the folks mood. Tonight in this magnificent temple of progressive politics and culture that is providing us so generously with a historic home for our first tentative step. Tonight we stand together, united. We come from all over Europe. We spend the whole day today in deliberations. People from the north, the south, the east, the west, the core, the periphery, the clave countries, Catholic countries, Protestant countries, and the north of those countries which is Catholic in its protestations called Greece. From across borders, from different party lines and with different views of the good society. We are united, however, by these differences. We have gone beyond the campaign for solidarity with Greece, with Ireland, with Portugal. We are here in solidarity with Europe. We are here in solidarity with the peoples of Europe. With a majority of Europeans whose instinct, even if they are not here tonight, even if they don't care about our kind of politics, nevertheless whose instinct is telling them that there is something rotten in the European Union. That a great deceit is threatening their lives, their future, their communities, the very idea of Europe as a realm of shared prosperity. The great deceit, right in the heart of our disintegrating European Union, is very simple. We have a top-down political decision-making process which is being presented as apolitical, technical, procedural, neutral. Why? To deny Europeans democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions, environment and communities. How did we allow as Europeans who cherish democracy? How did we allow this to happen? The answer lies in the origins of the European Union. Friends, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union began life as a cartel of heavy industry. You know what it was called? The European Community of Coal and Steel. Later it co-opted auto industry, the farmers, large landowners, through the common agricultural policy and so on. It was a cartel determined to fix prices. And to redistribute the profits of that cartel through bureaucracy located in Brussels. And you know, like all cartels, whether it's the European Union, OPEC, all cartels have administrators who see genuine democracy as a threat to their authority. Patiently, methodically, a process of depoliticizing decision-making was put in place. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for acquiescing to this depoliticization of political decisions in Brussels. And anyone who dared oppose this process of depoliticization was labeled un-European and was treated like a jarring dissonance, like a nuisance. The price of this deceit was not merely the end of democracy, but also a vicious circle between authoritarianism and economic crisis, just like in the video. The more they asphyxiated democracy, the less legitimate their political authority became. The less legitimate their political authority became, the stronger the recession. The stronger the recession, the greater their need for more authoritarianism. A never-ending circle. Now, what is fanaticism? Allow me to define fanaticism. It consists of redoubling your efforts when you know you understand that your project has failed. That's what fanaticism is. Exactly what a European Union has been doing. It's establishment since 2008, our generation's 1929. Now, this is why Europe is the sick patient of the global economy. This is why we have not recovered as a European Union economy compared to the United States, China and others. This is the unseen process by which Europe's crisis is turning our peoples inwards against one another, amplifying pre-existing jingoism and xenophobia. The privatization of anxiety, the fear of the other, the nationalization of ambition, the renationalization of policy, the end of the narrative of shared prosperity, the portrayal of democracy as a luxury reserved for the creditors. This is the vicious cycle that is destroying Europe today. But enough about them. Let us now talk about us, shall we? Who are we? What is the end? Are we a left-wing movement? What exactly are we up to? I don't know about you, but I am proudly left-wing. But it is important to think that the end is aiming to be much more than that. Let me remind you, those of us, especially who are of an older generation, and remember the 70s and the 80s. Back then, liberal Democrats and people of the left, like me and some of you, would indulge in heated debate, heated argument, on whether capitalism is compatible or is not compatible with democracy, whether capitalism is a prerequisite for democracy or an enemy of democracy. These were the debates we used to have with liberal Democrats. But events in Europe have made this debate obsolete. The reason? The European Union's establishment, in order to build the single market and the eurozone, has explicitly rejected the basic principles of liberal democracy. Certainly of social democracy. Remember, this is quite well known, about a year ago I was told in the first Eurogroup that I attended as the elected finance minister of a member state of the European Union by a certain gentleman whose office is not far from here. I was told elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies that the previous governments of Greece were committed to. What a great gift to the Chinese Communist Party, who believes the same. Not about Greece, but about economic policy. Now I have a question for any genuine liberal Democrat of the center-left, the center-right, the right. Can you live with this idea that elections cannot be allowed to change anything? Is this consistent with your principles about democracy? I don't believe it is. So we intend to build a broader coalition that embraces even liberal Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, who understand that liberal democracy has now been jettisoned from the heart of Europe. Are we radical? You are damned right we are. But we are radical in a manner that liberal Democrats must also be in order to remain liberal Democrats. Friends, when you are right, you can never be too radical. And when you are wrong, you can never be too conservative. So this is what DM is about. A broad coalition of Democrats, radical Democrats, left-wing Democrats, social Democrats, green Democrats, liberal Democrats. The purpose of which is to put the demos back into democracy against the European Union establishment that sees people power as a threat to its authority, just like the video, the way the video began. Now at this point it is important to clarify this. Our harsh criticism of the Brussels and Frankfurt bureaucracy does not extend to the many, many good people working there in these institutions. In a sense, what we are calling for, the democratization of the European Union, is a prerequisite for their own emancipation. Working for the people, not against the people, working for the people with their informed consent would be a wonderful change for the European Union staff currently unable to do so, constrained as they are, within an authoritarian pseudo-technocratic straitjacket. Now what do we mean when we speak of democratizing the European Union? How will this help arrest its disintegration? Our immediate priority is full transparency in decision-making. A few rays of light are capable of piercing the darkness inside the rooms in Brussels and in Frankfurt where important decisions are made for everyone. So we begin with a very simple demand. We demand the live-streaming of the European Council, of echo-fing of the Eurogroup meetings and we demand at the same time full disclosure of trade negotiation documents, publication of the Minister of the European Central Bank, like the American Central Bank or the British Central Bank do, nothing too radical, very soon after those boards meet. And we are going to start the campaign beginning tomorrow morning, as part of which we are going to ask the President of the European Union Council, the President of the Eurogroup and the President of the European Central Bank immediately to start throwing rays of light in their deliberations to be live-streaming their meetings and publishing minutes. And if they don't want to do this, they must answer to European citizens what are their reasons for not wishing those who pay their salaries and vote them in, supposedly, why shouldn't they know what arguments are being used and what decisions are being made. This is an action for tomorrow, for the day after, for this week. Something can be done immediately. In the medium term, our priority is to present as dim after very long and serious deliberation amongst all Europeans who want to join us in that deliberation. We want to present detailed policy proposals for Europeanising and therefore stabilising the crisis of debt, of banking, of extremely low investment. Germany today has the lowest level of investment in the last 45 years. This is a scandal for a rich country where interest rates are negative. So we are going to be presenting fully-fledged comprehensive proposals on how to stabilise the crisis of debt, low investment, banking, poverty, which is rising almost everywhere, fuelling nationalist movements and misanthropy, as well as migration. There is no contradiction in saying that we need to Europeanise the solution to this crisis of debt, banking, of low investment and so on, while at the same time suggesting that this Europeanisation and efficient addressing of this crisis and of these forces of deflation and stagnation, there is no contradiction in saying that this process of Europeanisation is consistent, not only consistent but enabling in the process of restoring national sovereignty, municipal sovereignty, sovereignty to parliaments, to city councils and to various communities. There is no contradiction there. It is a fallacy to think that Europeanising realms like those must come at a further loss of national sovereignty. The opposite is the case. The deeper those crisis, the less sovereignty the Bundestag has, the less sovereignty the Greek parliament has, the less sovereignty the city of Berlin, the city of Barcelona, the city of Lisbon has. Looking further ahead, our longer term goal, once Europe's various crises have been stabilised, is to convene a constitutional assembly where Europeans will deliberate on how to bring forth by 2025, that's the 25, next to the end, an authentic European democracy, featuring a sovereign parliament that respects national self-determination and sharing power with national parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils. And to do this, we have two or three years to establish a constitutional assembly where representatives elected from across the breadth and width and height of the European Union debate what constitution we want to run and rule over the affairs that are common throughout Europe. These are our goals, but how do we organise ourselves in order to achieve them? We consider the model of national parties which then form flimsy alliances at the level of Brussels, European parliament, to be an obsolete system. While the fight for democracy from below is necessary at the level of municipalities, rebel cities like Barcelona, La Coruña and so on, it is never very less, you feel insufficient if it is conducted without an international strategy throughout Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional and national levels. We are allergic to lack of transparency, to opacity. We have learnt the hard way that hierarchies breed authoritarianism even amongst comrades. We opt for a horizontal organisation based on self-organisation, extensive use of digital platforms, town hall meetings around particular themes leading to pan-European gatherings like this one for particular themes like for instance economic policy, sustainable green development, migration and so on and so forth. And in other words, aims to provide the infrastructure for a pan-European coalescence of green radical, social and liberal democrats. What its members will want to do with this infrastructure that we are trying to set up, how our deliberations will manifest themselves in terms of actions and electorally in our cities' region states at the level of Brussels. All this we shall be deciding collectively. It will be complicated, but that's life. Another journalist asked me today how did we intend to keep bad people out of DM? It's a good question. The answer is only through the gatekeeping function of our manifesto. Its clear statements of principle and aspirations is the magnet and the filter. We don't believe anything else is needed. We have four principles in our manifesto. Out there you can read it. First, no European people can be free as long as another's democracy is violated. Second, no European people can live in dignity as long as another is denied it and it is crushed by depression. No European people can hope for prosperity if others can't share in that hope. And fourthly, no European people can grow out basic goods for its weakest of citizens without human development, without ecological balance and without a determination to change society, not the planet's climate. These are our principles. As for the aspirations that drive us forward, we are inspired by a Europe of reason, liberty, tolerance and imagination, a Europe that is made possible by comprehensive transparency, real solidarity and authentic democracy. We aspire to a democratic Europe in which all political authority stems from Europe's sovereign peoples. A transparent Europe where all decision-making takes place under the citizens' scrutiny. Today we have transparent citizens and opaque governments. We must reverse this. We aspire to a united Europe whose citizens have as much in common and cross-nations as within them. A realistic Europe that sets itself the task of radical yet achievable democratic reform. A decentralized Europe that uses central power to maximize democracy in workplaces, towns, cities, regions and states. A pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, faith, nations, languages and cultures. And a egalitarian Europe that celebrates difference and ends discrimination based on gender, skin color, social class or sexual orientation. A culture of Europe that harnesses its peoples' cultural diversity and promotes not only its invaluable heritage but also the work of Europe's dissident artists, musicians, writers and poets. A social Europe that recognizes that liberty necessitates not only freedom from interference but also the basic goods that render one free from need and from exploitation. A productive Europe that directs investment into a shared green prosperity. A sustainable Europe that lives within the planet's means minimizing its environmental impact and living as much fossil fuel in the earth. An ecological Europe engaged in genuine worldwide green transition. A creative Europe that releases the innovative powers of its citizens' imagination. A technological Europe pressing new technologies in the service of solidarity. A historically-minded Europe that seeks a bright future without hiding from its past. An internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends in themselves. A peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its east and in the Mediterranean acting as a bulwark against the silence of militarism and expansionism. Never forget we don't forget that war does not determine who is right but who is left. An open Europe that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world with its defenses and borders as signs of weakness that spread in security in the name of security. A liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence all those wither allowing Europeans to be born into fewer stereotypical roles to enjoy even chances to develop their potential and to be free to choose life, work and society. Is DiEM utopian? Well, maybe. But let me tell you this it is far less utopian than the establishment's attempt to hang on to the currently disintegrating anti-democratic cartel-like European Union. And in any case our utopian movement is the only alternative to the terrible dystopia unfolding before our eyes as the anti-democratic European Union disintegrates. Friends the real danger is not that we shall aim too high and miss. The real danger is that we train our eyes on the floor and end up there. So tonight I will celebrate but from tomorrow morning let's shake Europe gently compassionately