 Welcome to the European Spring in the midst of this winter, this winter that has lasted long enough, at least since 2008. A personal note, journalists today, I met a lot of them, asked me, why in Germany? Why are you launching the European Spring in Germany? Why are you running, Mr. Varoufakis, in Germany, even though you are clearly not human? The answer is that if you want, let's say fictitiously that we have a time machine and we go a thousand or fifteen hundred years back, if we wanted to reform and transform the Roman Empire, we start in Rome, we don't start in Thessaloniki or Malaga. This Europe of ours is not going to be democratized, it is not going to be saved from the authoritarian establishment and from the nationalists that are being fed by the silliness of the authoritarian establishment. It's not going to be saved unless a progressive transnational movement takes root in Berlin, in Germany, in the heart of Europe. The reason why I'm standing for the European Parliament in this country, taking the same theme a little bit further, while at the very same time leading our Greek party, Mera25, and running in the Greek national elections for the Greek Parliament in Greece, is because we need to symbolize that the establishment toxic myth, that there is a clash between the Italians and the Germans or the Greeks and the Dutch or the French and the rest of Europe, this is a myth that is toxic and we must, we have a moral duty, a political duty, an intellectual duty, an activist duty to dissolve. The European Spring is the extension of the spirit of DiEM25 that began life at the Volksbühne Theater in February 2016 in this great city, before spreading its wings across Europe, creating the New Deal for Europe, the basis of the programme that answers the pressing question, what should be happening tomorrow morning under the existing rules, the existing institutions, so that we can stabilize Europe, create hope again, portray Europe in the hearts and minds of Europeans as a source of solutions, not as a source of austerity for the many and socialism for the bankers. What can we do tomorrow morning to change the spirit and the climate of this continent, so that we can have the conversation on how to democratize Europe immediately after that. The European Spring brought together comrades and movements and colleagues and friends and collaborators and co-conspirators and accessories from Poland, with Rasmus, from Denmark, where are you Rasmus, from Italy, with Dema, from Spain, with Actua, from Portugal, with Leveret, Greece with Mera and so on and so forth. We are coming together here to discuss our policies, to discuss something unique in Europe. One programme for the whole of the continent, where all of us are going to be running across Europe in May 2019, in this May, to bring about the European Spring. Thank you. We are all here to find out what this European Spring is about. So we are going to have four panels covering all the topics and I am sure you have our questions. There was half a press conference that we are going to build in this evening. I am going to get people in front of here, we are going to talk and then at the end of the 20 minutes we have space for two, three questions. So don't be shy to ask them. Again my name is Bianca Pretorius and I am part of Democratin Europa, I am a candidate for the European Parliament election as well, that you know who is this person who is leading us, that's me. So our first panel is about migration and xenophobia and I would like to ask Rui Taveres who just entered, Joana Bronovica, come here and David Adler as well and Valerita Sandu. This is from Portugal, so this is why everybody actually came in here to show you what this European Spring is about. It is a truly transnational movement which is the reason why we come from all over the places to tell you what we are doing here. So we are from Portugal, Joana is from Poland but also Germany, she is a co-founder of Razem which is the European Spring part of Poland but she is also part of the list in Germany. So Europe is one colourful bunch and yes that's why we are being on one list. Then we have Valerita Sandu, you are a DM25 France National Collective, so we have France and David Adler who is a French American Jewish writer and analyst. He has a bunch of passports, Greece, American and Australia, so we are absolutely international bunch. So the questions here are very simple, I want to talk about migration and xenophobia and I want to start with your personal experiences. What is broken and how are we going to fix it, that's the question. Is anybody really feeling that you want to start? I think David wants to start. Do you want to speak from personal experience? No, I want to see, yes, but I want to know what is broken. Sure, I will speak from two personal experiences, one is that of my family and one is that of myself living in Athens. The first is that of my family were French Jews who fought in the resistance and left after the war and were torn apart by people who were forced into hiding, people who were forced to Auschwitz and perish in Auschwitz and people who left the country following that. And that experience of being a nomadic family has of course deeply informed our sense of internationalism politically, but it's also deeply informed our sense of moral responsibilities when it comes to the question of migration and in putting equal value on people's lives. So that's where I come to this question. What's been fascinating to me is living in Athens, working closely with Metta and the rest of our spring partners, and seeing daily just how deep the failures of existing European migration policy really is. It's most profound I think in this amazing, of course we see these proliferation of death on the Mediterranean, but I think one of the most profound examples that I encounter in my life in Athens is this thin line that we draw between the deserving refugee, maybe he comes from Syria fleeing war designated as a true migrant, and the undeserving economic migrant who maybe has come from Pakistan, who has no chance of receiving asylum in Greece or in Europe more broadly because the reasons for his migration are too economic. They might threaten these European labor markets. And seeing just how quickly the existing frameworks crumble in the face of the human dimension of the migration question I think is deeply informed to all of our views of what European spring stands for. I also think that one of the reasons why we are fighting so hard in Germany, fighting so hard in France is because we see a very dangerous strain among our comrades, a very dangerous temptation to adopt similar rhetoric and similar critiques of the far right in terms of blaming migrants for lowering wages and threatening labor standards as well as threatening the cultural traditions of working class communities because the veil is such a provocation in the words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And I think it's crucial at this moment where that strain of left nationalism is so tempting that we reassert the importance of solidarity, which we recall is a fundamental right on this continent, and that we defend and extend the freedom of movement as a moral principle, as a strategic principle in order to expand the scope of our solidarity and our movement to build worker power. And I think that those are the principles and the foundations of the policies that we take forward going down the line. Great. Can I ask one other question of the policy because David is also coordinating the policy of the European spring with the movement of the Progressive Internationals. Can you shortly frame what is the bigger picture that we are trying to create here? So for us the migration question goes across the whole program. It's not just a question of how to safeguard the fundamental rights. So a part of that is of course extending political rights to migrants so they can participate fully as the citizens of the places where they live. A part of that is guaranteeing, you know, opening legal and open avenues to come to Europe and breaking down this fortress Europe for which we do not stand. But it goes much further than that because we understand that deep to diffuse the economic critique which somehow despite being undone by so many years of the same issue being brought before the second international, being brought before council after council to show that we can diffuse the economic critique of mass migration by building worker power in small and medium enterprises, by defending labor standards, by ensuring that we have rules in place for the harmonization of wages and social contributions between Germany and Poland, for example. And by building the kind of working class solidarity on a pan-European level that of course doesn't lead to xenophobia between the Polish and the Ukrainians or the Germans and the Polish or the French and the Germans. But it also extends to non-EU migrants who have been even more villainized by this process. So it's about building, you know, the framing is very much defending and extending freedom of movement where we recognize the great achievements dirty as its origins may have been of mobility across the Schengen zone and making sure that that's not a threat to existing labor regulations but that we extend that wonderful movement to break down borders beyond the continent and don't just make a single racialized space for Europeans and Europeans alone. Thank you. Johanna, I know that migration is like your topic that you've worked on for years. Can you describe what's broken and what we can we do in order to exactly get where they were just told to? Well, first of all, good evening, everyone. I just wanted to say that I'm replacing Agnieszka Dimonowicz-Bonk, who couldn't be here. I'm originally from Poland. I represent the Razan, Berlin. So I'm an immigrant myself. I've lived in Berlin for over four years. And Razan is a place where a lot of immigrants, Polish immigrants have found their place. So actually, 8% of our members live abroad. So this is also a big step for us as a party to be part of this transnational list and to have candidates in other countries, including in Germany. So I think the most important thing about Razan is that we are a party that represents interests of workers. And that also includes workers that work abroad. And I think it's very important to always remember and acknowledge the contribution that migrants have already made to Europe, including European Union migrants, doctors, nurses, construction workers, engineers, people that are literally building this continent every day. And I think also it's important, being Polish, to recognize the other European periphery. Because we often talk about southern European country, but we have the Eastern European periphery that is sometimes forgotten. And actually, a majority of migrants from European Union in Germany come from Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, and Croatia. And these countries have really suffered from neoliberal politics and being designated as little areas where cheap labor, where basically investors are given incentives to use us as cheap labor. But also we are used as cheap labor in Western European countries. And actually, European Union migrants fall through cracks that have been left there on purpose by lawmakers in Warsaw, in Berlin, and in Brussels. And they encounter a job market which is already riddled with problems that many workers know, which is fake self-employment, zero-hour contracts, precarization of work, these subcontracting chains where you don't actually know which company is responsible. So they encounter a lot of problems that other workers have. But of course, there are certain mechanisms that have been left there on purpose by lawmakers in Brussels. I'm speaking in particular about this posting of workers where companies are basically encouraged to recruit workers in Poland, the Romanian Bulgaria, to they don't pay them the same wages and they don't pay their social dues here in Germany. They pay the dues in Poland, which are of course much cheaper. What it means is that they are forcing this competition on local workers, which obviously leads to a lot of conflict in xenophobia. And this is not the workers fault. This is the fault of the lawmakers that have left it on purpose. And unfortunately, our current government in Poland and the previous government have not done anything to block it. In fact, they are encouraging this because this fits in this larger narrative of workers being just the interest that matters is the interest of the company, not the workers. So I'm very excited to see also Isabel here because we already in May had this initiative with colleagues from France that came to Warsaw to exactly to start bridging this divide that has been put between different types of workers and the European Union market. And now in the European Spring Program, there's a lot of initiatives that is exactly something that we were always advocating for. And we're very happy that this very strong point about treating all workers equally and fairer. So this, of course, also includes migrants from outside of the European Union. But the mechanisms are the same that we need to focus on. We need to make sure that the wages start being harmonized across the European Union so people don't have to leave. But not only wages because also social dues because we have huge disparities in social security systems that create a lot of unfair treatment. There's a lot of discrimination. There's a lot of exploitation of migrant work that goes completely unnoticed because migrants often don't speak the language or don't know how to deal with bureaucracy. So we need a stronger enforcement mechanism where we have a European labor agency that actually has teeth that can actually control companies. Because right now, the fines that companies get for breaking the law are a joke. So I think that's something that's very important for us as Raz and Berlin representing Polish and Eastern European migrants in this list. But also, we're just excited about the possibility of talking about generally problems in the labor market. Another set of problems that's coming up is the one related to technology and automation and how the benefits from automation will are being reaped by just few companies. And we have this idea of universal citizens dividend where it is not only the people that designed, algorithms designed, the products that control us, but also the users that should share in this profit. Great, yes, yes, yes, please give us a hand. So the European Spring is not only truly international and truly Pan-European. It actually comes with a bunch of solutions, which is helpful in that case. You've been a member of the parliament before, so you actually know from within inside what maybe is broken. Can you also, I love that you introduced yourself more, so please give a little bit more feeling, because most of you don't know what the European Spring is about, you maybe have a mad rui. So could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and also where did you experience, where these things won't work even in the future, and why you chose to be part of the European Spring, so how we can fix this specifically? Well, thank you very much. Very happy to be here and to see this room crowded with old friends and new faces. I'm also quite worried, because while I was arriving here, I just got news that Jean Willis, who is a congressman from Brazil, and actually the first openly gay congressman in Brazil, has decided to resign from Congress and to ask for asylum in order to survive. He's a close friend of Marielle Franco, who was assassinated last year in Rio de Janeiro. And he's maybe the first exile of the Bolsonaro era, only 25 days into the presidency of Bolsonaro. So allow me to break protocol here a little bit and to ask you to express solidarity with him, and I'm sure that tomorrow the Council of the European Spring will find a way to convey our solidarity to Jean Willis. And to all Brazilians and people in many countries who are feeling now the danger of far right of sending us in their countries and will need solidarity from us. Thank you. And this is actually one of the three ways in which I feel that we can have a role in the area of fighting against xenophobia and making concrete steps in solidarity with migrants everywhere. So firstly, it is about our individual actions and our actions as a movement towards people in need. We are going to face some dark times in many parts of the world. And before we change the world into what we want to see, before we change Europe into what we want to see, there are going to be very concrete, specific individuals that will need our help. So one of the ways in which we can organize inside the European Spring DM, Razum, Livre, Alternativet, and all the parties, but also amongst groups that are self-organized by us is to provide shelter, to provide help, to provide legal help, to help with people that will need jobs and safety in sanctuary cities. And this is one of the things that I think that we are going to be forced to talk more and more into the future. It is very concrete and it will be very needed. A second aspect, you were asking me about what can we do in an institutional setting. Well, in fact, we can do quite a lot if we have the necessary majorities to do it. I always remember that after 56, when the Soviet Army crushed the Hungarian uprising, you know how many months it took to give shelter to all the refugees from Hungary? Two months. It was then at that time, at the level of the Council of Europe, that there was not yet a European economic community or an EU. Every country set a quota. And they did it willingly because quotas are the traditional method that states and governments prefer because they know the numbers and they know how many people they resettle. Only now recently, they started to hate quotas, but at the time, only four states didn't want to have a quota. It was France, UK, Canada, and I don't remember the fourth. But you know why they didn't want to have quotas? Because they didn't want to have a ceiling in the number of refugees, of Hungarian refugees, that they would receive. They would receive as many Hungarians as needed. Well, many years afterwards, we see that a government of Hungary doesn't want to receive any refugees. And this leads me to my first point. Institutionally, we had a compromise between human rights and governments after World War II. Human rights were universal. Member states, governments, national governments committed to implement as far as possible those values that were in the universal declaration of human rights and the conventions on the protection of refugees. And it mostly worked. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. It stopped working not because it broke by itself, but it was broken from the outside by governments who wanted to break the traditional system of resettling refugees. And by the inside, by the governments that were doing mostly business as usual. So on the one hand, people like Orban. On the other hand, the European Council at the time, who, having the legal basis to resettle refugees, and having the money to resettle refugees, and the parliament legislated on this, decided that solidarity was optional. And this allowed for the system to be broken. On the other hand, I feel that we, on the progressive pro-immigration anti-xenophobia side, we kind of let it happen. Why? Because we found ourselves in a very defensive situation. On the one hand, either states and governments and the Union would apply the old traditional resettling schemes of the Geneva Conventions. Or else, we were left with no imagination. And that's where I think European spring can come in. We have very concrete steps under the European refugee fund, under the resettlement schemes and the relocation schemes to resettle, relocate refugees, and give a new life for the people who need a new life. And actually, the numbers are not that big. Before all this started, it was about 200,000 refugees per year in the world. And 100,000 were already being resettled outside the European Union. So the EU only had to do half the job to resettle the people that UNHCR said they were the priority, the most vulnerable of the refugees. So not even that is happening now. But we have to counter the far-right offensive and the business as usual apathy with new ideas of our own that somehow circumvent the traditional politics. One of those ideas that we have in our program is the creation of an international humanitarian passport. So if people say that refugees that have already risked their life by escaping their countries, by crossing the Mediterranean, that these people are turning themselves into fodder for human traffickers, and they are, according to the UNHCR, the refugees that are in the most urgent priority, women and children at the risk of sexual and physical violence, victims of torture, people who have diseases that cannot be treated in the refugee camps, all these people should get an international humanitarian passport that could work as a kind of an annex to the Geneva Conventions. And we should, in our countries and at the union level, make a political propaganda, a societal push for governments to sign into such a scheme, because that would mean that people, instead of risking their lives in the Mediterranean, they would just board a plane which is much cheaper than paying a human trafficker with an international humanitarian passport and be accepted in a plane and arrive at a country accepting this new kind of protection scheme, which, by the way, has already existed in the past. I am not talking about something that is utopian or in the future. Between the words, there was something called the Nansen passport, which worked exactly this way. Portugal got its most important philanthrop, Kalu St-Glubinkian and Armenian, precisely with the Nansen passport. We are not complaining because we have his museums and foundations. So I will say, stop making nonsense and start making Nansen passports for the future, international humanitarian passports. Now, you wanted me to say something personal and I will end with this. Being here, I cannot help remembering my first pan-european travel. Being from the westernmost tip of Europe, my brother found a way to marry a Czechoslovak young woman. So we had to come out of our village using an agricultural vehicle that was unknown in Eastern Europe, a forced transit, and we left Portugal by a very narrow, dark pothold road. In Spain, the roads were a little bit better. In France, much better. But we were using the national roads, not the highway. We didn't have the manifold highway. In Switzerland, wow, it was, you know, viaducts and tunnels everywhere, Bavaria, Austria. And then we entered Czechoslovakia, 86. We had just exceeded the European Union, but there was no Schengen at the time. We still had to show documents at the border. And the road in Czechoslovakia was just like the road in Portugal that we had left. So why didn't we stop in Bavaria or in Austria or in Switzerland and just decided to stay there? Because the borders had just opened. We had exceeded the European Union. And yet Portugal, that had hundreds of thousands of migrants in the 60s and the 70s, after 86, we stopped migrating. That's curious. Open borders and no migration. And why? Well, because the minimum wage was raising in Portugal, because labor standards were increasing, because the economy was growing, because there was public investment and some European funds as well. And we liked our home and our village. Afterwards, I left many times for many countries. But we did not need to emigrate as a family. To be sure, immigration is not a problem. Forced migration, forced involuntary migration, like Joan said, may be a problem. And sometimes really is a problem for the countries because of brain drain, because of losing the most qualified labor force. But actually, we are learning the wrong lessons from the good aspects of the European project and the good lesson is that open borders plus at least some redistribution actually decreases the numbers of migrants. The Portuguese migrated before the EU and not after. And this is also a global lesson. Migration is closely interlinked with us being able to redistribute globally and have a fairer, a more balanced globalization. And that's also part of our program. And that has to be a part of our debate also with our friends and comrades in the left, the progressive movement, and the Democrats. Those that David said that are starting to feel the temptation to seize the far right agenda. We have to tell them very clearly. We in the left and among Democrats and progressives, we have never believed that people should be subject to the lottery of life. Because you are born noble. You are noble because you are born Pablyan. You are Pablyan. We, our ancestors, revolted against this in the French and the American Revolution. We do not feel that people must be bound for their destiny, that their destiny must be bound to the lottery of life if they're born poor. They're poor if they're born rich. They're born rich. How can we accept, even on the left, that we are to say to people, if you are born in that side of the Mediterranean, tough luck, because I'm born in this side of the Mediterranean. So nice for me. We cannot allow that from the moral, philosophical, ideological standpoint of the left to start being a kind of a common discourse. And that's also why we need the European Spring, because that is becoming a very predominant discourse among some parts of the neo-nationalistic left. And that's also where we have to make a stand. Thank you. Thank you. So you see that the European Spring doesn't only have fundamentally interesting and really necessary ideas, but also the process how they were actually built. Was it 20 people in the room who thought, hey, this is our 10 ideas. Let's call it European Spring? No. So I want to introduce Valérie de Saint-Do, because you're the National Collective for the DiEM25 movement. So can you tell us about the actual process of this grassroots movement forming from all European countries, this agenda, and this program ideas. How was it looking from this grassroots in France? Especially about migrations, about the movement. About migrations, and probably the whole pressuring topic of fear and. OK. I would like to speak about a place which many of you, I think, may have seen on television, and which is Calais. Calais, maybe you've seen what used to be the jungle. And of course, what you've seen on television was the mud, the tents, the terrible conditions of living there. I went several times in Calais. I was working with an organization of artists and architects who were helping to build shelters a bit more solid than the tents there. And what I've seen, Calais, is of course the very hard conditions, the shame of Europe, the shame of letting people live in slums in Europe. But what I've also discovered in Calais is an extraordinary European solidarity. The jungle of Calais was the place where European solidarity was concrete. Every weekend, there were hundreds of volunteers from Denmark, from Germany, from Belgium, from England, many from England, from Ireland, were coming to help, to help to build, to distribute food, to organize. There's a youth hostel in Calais. And every weekend, this youth hostel was full of volunteers. And there's a story of European solidarity. But there is also a story of resilience. Because these refugees, and there are many nationalities in the jungle, they were up to 6,000 at some times. But there was also a self-organization along with the volunteers. And of course, the jungle was a terrible place to live. But it was also a village. People built schools, people built churches, people built even a theater, a library. There was a kind of resilience. I won't say that it was a real village. I won't know romanticism of misery. But there was a real solidarity and there was a real self-organization. And when the government decided to destroy the jungle, there was an official report who said that there was a dangerous tendency to self-organization. Self-organization was something dangerous, which is terrifying and terrible. And so the jungle was destroyed. And what's happening now? It's not because you destroy the jungle and because that refugees are not here around Calais. They are in Calais. They are in the north of France because they want to cross the channel. There are people, there are courageous mayors who have taken, who have built shelters, like in the Grand Saint-Denise-Carem. But the trouble is still there. And it's even worse because people are hiding, because it's harder and harder for volunteers to help them because volunteers are harassed by the French police. And you know the reputation of the French police. So it's harder and harder. And it didn't stop anything. Well, I'm a completer style to camp. But Calais could have been a real welcoming place. There was a project there. The cost of the project was 100 millions. To give you an idea, the cost of maintaining a police force in Calais when the jungle was here was 50,000 euros a day. I also come to the costs because I think that there is something we don't speak about when we speak about migrations of Xenophobia. Fortress Europe has a cost. And Xenophobia is a business. And it's a very profitable business. For instance, you know there's a dreadful barbed arrive with razor blades. We've seen everywhere the wire of razor blades. Well, it's quite a profitable industry. There's a firm in Spain. The main firm to produce this barbed arrive is in Spain. And it produces 10 kilometers of barbed arrive a day. And barbed arrive is only an example. There has been an estimation by the Transnational Institute. And what we call the border coping market was 15 billion in 2015 and is expected to be 29 billion per year in 2022. And of course, big companies are profiting from this situation. So there is also a work for us, I think, to ask for transparency about this Xenophobia business, to see how much we spend, how much also the taxpayers, the European taxpayers spend, only to build a useless fortress Europe. And what we spend could be also spent welcome in the spend of making a first force stress. Does anybody have something on their heart or tongue to say? Otherwise, I would like to have space for two questions about, yes. Would you like to come up? And I'm going to give you, yes, my microphone. Hi, Erez. I'm my name is Erez. I'm an activist with the refugees, Oplats that were turned off years in Iran and Oplats Hotspur, Oplats, you can Google it. We have newspaper, multi-language newspaper, and we invite the N25 and weather careful refugees to write in our newspaper in your own language, your own agenda. That's one. So she have the details. I would like to add another issue that is so much, very much important. It's the safe place. As a question, how do you think that you can help those that are in trade of deportation in any way? So one way was what you suggest, self-organized, et cetera. But what are other ways that you believe that we can push for being moderated in terms of safe place and those issues? First, I wanted to say thank you for the work you're doing, because one thing that we all have in common as migrants is that we are often objects of political speech. So people talk about migrants, about refugees, and voices of the actual refugees are rarely heard. And I think it's a unique situation where you have people in our lists that have a voice, but too often they don't. There are no media like yourselves. This is a fantastic initiative. But we need to push this farther. We need to actually subsidize diaspora groups and migrant groups. And this help for political integration cannot stop just at just becoming German, voting German elections. We need to let people talk about the problems that they have with German society, with German bureaucracy. And this should be part of our program to actually extend political rights of migrants. So I think that this is very important. And on the question of deportation, I'm terrified about what's going to happen. Because right now, we're just at the time that Germany, of course, accepted a lot of refugees. But right now, there's going to be a decision time where a lot of applications are going to be rejected. And I was living in Paris when Sarkozy just started deporting people en masse and actually, and I'm afraid that with what's happening with the German government right now, there's going to be not actually a political voice that's going to be defending these people. So I think that, I mean, we have to self organize, but on a much larger scale. What I can tell you worked in France very well is that in every school, in every district where there was a family with a kid in threat of deportations, parents mobilized for that kid. And it was amazing to watch because even right wing parents that voted for Sarkozy when it concerned a kid that their kid goes to school with were very eager to change their viewpoints. So I think it's a very difficult thing to block the deportations, but it's a little bit easier in the sense that we are talking about people that at least for the last two, three, four years have put roots there. And we need to really activate our social networks and just, we need, this should be really our top agenda in Germany in the next couple months and years because this is going to get worse. Yes. Okay, there's like many hands, but only one spot for one question. She's got the spot already. I'm curious whether the European Spring will break the notorious silence about colonial history. Good question. So I was just heard nodding and I guess that's how I ended up with the microphone and answering that question. I nodded because I think it is the elephant in a room, so to say. It is also part of the reason why the far-right and the xenophobes peddle so much fear stories about immigrants, particularly from countries that were under European colonial power in the past. While they negate the crimes, the atrocities and all the traumatic aspects of European colonialism in Africa, for instance, that they try to deny that ever happened, I think that in their subconscious, they know very well what colonial rule was about. And that's why they peddled all these fears about population substitution and the rest because they know, and in a sense, we all know what Europe did. Europe sat in a room in this very city and decided to, with a map and a ruler to break up Africa among European powers. So there are two, I don't have an immediate answer to that, except as to say that I'm glad that you made that question and I think that we have to start talking about that more because the European and African nexus is one that is already very important and then spoken and it's going to become ever more important in the next decades, but also because of another aspect which is Europe has to find itself as a broader aspect, not only to do with immigration, but European politics in general. We have to finally understand that Europe needs to be a post-colonial, post-imperial project. When nationalists in the right and the left having said that we have to go back to the nation state, I sometimes ask, my problem is not exactly with the nation state, it's with the go back, go back to what? Has the United Kingdom ever been a nation state? No, they were the head of an empire. My country was an empire until 74. We decolonized in 75, in 76, we asked to exceed the European Union. So clearly the creation of an European democracy of solidarity between Europeans via their states, but also as citizens to one another, and solidarity with the wider world around us needs to be the conclusion that we need to arrive at when finally we understand that happily the colonial project is not coming back, that you cannot do as Brexiteers think that you just need to disengage from the European project and then the Indians and the Chinese and the Commonwealth will come running at their succor with markets as in the past, that is not coming back and happily sell. But to go back and I'll finish with this, it's really about how to create a harmonious, you look at Europe, Europe is not even a continent. We are a peninsula of Asia and we are kind of a little head on the top of Africa. Can we live with extreme poverty, war and persecution and expect that by closing our borders we will be outside of that reality, that we will be immune? I don't think that we can. So there is a great and spoken there to be open. Thank you. David. Yes, very, very quickly. As the policy coordinator for European Spring, I would be very remiss not to respond very briefly by saying to both of your questions that these are things that we attempt to address in really substantive ways in the program. When it comes to the question of colonialism, that has to do with a radical stance against social and environmental dumping through European trade policies, has to do with the way that we rail against the import export model where Europe exports war and then refuses to take the imports that war yields. And then when it comes to deportation, just taking a hard stance against the hotspot system, it's ending the externalization of the EU borders, terminating the EU-Turkey deal, eliminating these shady contracts we have that connect us to all sorts of Sudanese authorities who are deporting, detaining and otherwise torturing migrants. So, you know, I'm happy to have a conversation with anyone in this room about how we as a coalition take substantive steps to try to address many of these huge problems that we're talking about here, but that's for another day. Great, huge applause for these fantastic. So the next topic we're trying to talk about is poverty and austerity. And I want to ask Dani Platsch in Elenora de Mayo and Davide Castro on stage. Yes, give them applause. Perfect, now we have, yes. After, when we do the questions, like get them briefly so that we can answer briefly so that we can cover more questions because it actually was heartbreaking to reject the four questions that was in the room. So on this stage, we have Dani Platsch who is also part of the list of Democrat in Europa. There's Austria-Germany. She is the founder of Der Wandel, which is a progressive party in Austria. Then we have Elenora de Mayo and you're from the Neapolis City Administration of Luigi de Magistris. And we have Davide Castro. He's an activist writer and campaign coordinator for the Belgium European Spring. So these are the people up in front of you. Davide, like the huge topic of poverty and austerity. We talked this afternoon. I know it's a deep topic for you. What's broken? How is the European Spring fixing it? Well, thanks very much. I'm very happy to be here first of all. Let me just start by saying that I'll talk a little bit about my personal story which touches upon migration, but also austerity. It actually begins with austerity and ends with migration. And that's why, no, I'm in Belgium, but I was before in the UK and before that in Portugal. And I'm one of those people that Huy just very eloquently talked about earlier as one of the thousands of people that had to forcibly, unfortunately, move out of their home without wishing to go out to the UK ever. But I went because my parents had both lost their jobs. They were in a situation of precarity. We were almost losing our house. And so we had to go. I didn't have a choice. I didn't move because of the weather. I went because I had to. And I remember one of the first things that I did when I was learning Shakespeare and the slang at the same time, which of course provided for quite a few laughs as my language developed into something that could be somewhat understood. I was doing what in England, it's called a paper round. I don't know if you've heard about this. I don't know if you do it in Germany, but a paper round is when you go around as a schoolboy and you deliver newspapers to kids, sorry, not to kids, to families. And so I was collecting these newspapers from a Pakistani shop. Well, the owner was Pakistani. I was ordering these newspapers, mostly the Sun and the Daily Mail because they were the highest circulation. And I was ordering them and delivering them. When I was ordering them, one of the first things I realized was the headlines. If you read the Daily Mail and the Sun, this won't come as a surprise, of course. But some of the headlines were things like British jobs for British workers, amongst many others, of course. You know, scapegoating migrants and refugees and all that. And I was looking at these headlines, I was thinking, well, I think this is about me. I think this is about me, and it's about me and other people. And I was delivering these newspapers to mostly middle-class English families. And of course, at the time I wasn't realizing what I was doing, but I should have put a note or something on those newspapers to say, actually, you know, it's a Portuguese kid delivering these newspapers to you and I'm getting them from Pakistani shop. And this is why you're actually reading them. But anyways, I'm digressing. I wanna talk a little bit about what's actually problematic. Austerity was the reason why I moved out of Portugal, my parents left. But then the story turned into migration and as a sort of soft transition to what the other two panelists will be talking about. But I think today what we are seeing is the lack of courage amongst mainstream political parties when there's a little appetite to talk about the topic of migration. Instead, what we're seeing is the rise of a toxic and dangerous narrative which is causing, you know, whose aim is to actually propel the far right into power. And we need to challenge this narrative if we are to be successful on this. What I'm gonna mention now, as Bianca meant, said, I'm actually living in Belgium now. I'm coordinating together with others our campaign, our B-European Spring campaign there. And what one of the leading figures of a mainstream political party in Belgium recently told me, I'm not gonna mention his name, but what he told me was that we won't be campaigning on migration. And I quote, because this is a fight that we cannot win. Now, just let that sink in for a moment. When you have mainstream political parties coming out, so-called progressives, coming out and saying that they will not be talking about migration because they cannot win that fight, that is like handing over power to the dangerous toxic narrative that I was talking about that mainstream newspapers, unfortunately, are putting forward as well. So we have to challenge this narrative. Now, so it's no surprise that, of course, then people turn to reactionary proposals because that's the only thing that they are actually seeing. But there is a larger point to be made here and I will end very soon after, which is to say that the crisis that we're witnessing, not only can they not be resolved at the national level, we need transnationality. That's one of the, of course, the principles of European Spring. I'm going to enumerate some of them. There's, of course, a lack of housing. There is a lack of good quality jobs. There are stagnating living standards for the many, not the few. And, of course, underfunded public services which are contributing to the suffering of thousands and thousands of people who are unfortunately not able to tend for themselves because they don't have these things. And so these problems, unfortunately, they are being seen through the prism of migration, but actually what they are, are a problem that requires a transformation of our society which is exactly what our Green New Deal and for Europe is proposing that in order to change Europe, we have to do it, we have to tackle these fundamental root causes in order to change the narrative about migration and many other things. Of course, I'm just going to end very, very soon just to say that migrants, of course, are not responsible for the crimes of the powerful. They're not responsible for industrial scale tax evasion. They are not responsible for the crash of the banks and yet they are being blamed for all these things. How is it possible if the left, if the progressives are not willing to put out a narrative that counteracts this, then we are doomed. And this is precisely why I'm very happy with the program that we have, the Green New Deal for Europe that you should all read, europeanspring.net, by the way. And take a look at it. It's fundamental. It will tackle these root causes and offer some hope because the question is not about whether migrants are good or bad. It's not about whether refugees or offer something to our societies, but the question we must be asking is, why is it that people are being forcibly having to move out of their homes like my family? Why is it that refugees are coming into Europe? And you have to ask what Sresko Horvat, our DM-25 friend often says, what Europe is suffering from is a kind of export-import type of foreign policy. First we export wars and then we import refugees. And this is the fundamental question of our time. We have to answer it. We have to put out a narrative that counteracts all these questions so that we can bring hope back. And that's what we're doing as europeanspring. Thank you. And Eleonora, you're an active in Naples and there's reasons why you joined the europeanspring. Can you briefly paint the picture, what you're experiencing with poverty and austerity and not working? So that made you join the europeanspring. Okay. Hi, Eleonora. Let me introduce myself just for one or two seconds. I was a social activist. I come from social movements of Napoli. You know, it's a southern european city and I was elected in the city council two years and a half ago. I'm the youngest member of the city council at the moment in Naples. And so, you know, Naples is maybe in this moment one of the poorest city in the european space in this moment, one of, of course, not the poorest, but is one of the poorest city, is maybe one of the city with the highest level of unemployment and a lot of problems connected with the poverty and, of course, with austerity. Naples is also one of the city that is linked with that so-called movement of new municipalistic city in this moment, in this moment in Europe, linked with Barcelona, with Madrid, with Grenoble, with Cadiz, with many other cities that decide to break with establishment and lobbyist powers and parties, of course, in Europe in the local government, I mean. And on the other side, with parties of radical right, xenophobic parties, et cetera, et cetera. And we took the power in the local government in 2011 and we were elected again in 2016 and we started our local battles and, of course, European battles, but I arrived on this plan in the second part of my speech. We started our local fight against, of course, against austerity and with all the effects of European dictates, of European treaties, of fiscal compact and all the reforms that during these years decide to transform Europe in a desert, in a place of unemployment and the poverty and the desperation. Let me start saying another thing, too. When we speak about new municipalist movement and rebel cities, fearless cities, we are speaking about like a movement of cities, of course, local governors that decide to disobey. It's a really, really important word that we have to remember, to disobey to, of course, European treaties, European austerity policies, but also to, in humanity decisions that in this moment a lot of European governments are using against, for example, human beings, like against the migrants. I think you are following the public debate in this moment in Europe. That's just because I want to tell you what is happening in Naples in this moment, in these hours, I mean, there's a German ONG, that is a sea watch tree, that in this moment is in Mediterranean, they saved 47 people in last days in the Mediterranean Sea and Napoleon, together with Palermo, decide to open the port of the city and we are disobeying to the law of Matteo Salvini, you know? And so we are waiting them in this moment and they are deciding to go in Palermo, in Naples, we are in continuous, we are speaking with them in this moment, in these hours and they are deciding between Naples and Palermo but our port is open and it will be open and permanently will be open during these months, during this important electoral campaign. That is, in my opinion, an historically electoral campaign just because there's a division between inhumanity and the people that want to answer with, you know, important acts like act of disobedience against this, I don't know, barbaric behavior of this European government, like our government in this moment. Anyway, coming back to austerity and poverty, sorry for that, but of course, I was explaining to you that Naples is a really, really poor city and so maybe the effect of austerity, the European austerity during these seven, eight years have been really, really, really dramatic and so also on this topic, we did a lot of acts of disobedience, for example, against the cut to social spending and we decide to open and we take a lot of new teachers in our schools against fiscal compact because we can't because, you know, we have a really, really big public debt in the city and we decide to disobey, to refuse that public debt and to have new teachers in the school because we have to respect the right to the education for the people of the city and so we disobey to fiscal compact, not one times but several times during these seven years and like this story about schools, we have a lot of different stories about disobedience to fiscal compact and in general to our problems with austerity. We have, I always say this story, this funny story, we have a really important and big public debt in Naples. One of this, one part of this public debt is connected with environmental disaster that we have in the city. One is rubbish disaster. Yeah, I don't know if you have heard something about this in, but Naples had a big problem with environmental disaster and rubbish and the other one with the earthquake management of the emergency that was 1980 and we have this public debt that is connected with these two things that terrible effects on the people and the inhabitants of the city and now we are paying this public debt, it's like a joke. So we are trying to resist, we are trying to find this public debt in general, the austerity and I don't know, I stop because we know. I know. Okay, well, although I do have a small follow-up question on that, so because you're active already in Naples and like you've seen the everyday politics, what is so important for you to join the transnational European movement and what can you see in solutions that the European Spring is bringing on the table to fix all the stuff that you. In two words, I think the best thing of European Spring program is that there's no division between North and South, I think it's a really, really, really pan-European program. And there are a lot of concrete to be honest, I'm a citizen of South of Europe. There are a lot of concrete solution to live in the same way between all the European citizens about market labor, about minimal European wage, about a lot of policies that we have to share and against internal migration, that's one of the most terrible things inside Europe. I heard a lot of internal migration stories like you. Great, thank you, thank you, yes, it was good. Danny, Danny, you founded a party in Austria and now you've joined the German list of Demokratie in Europa, can you? A, tell a bit more why you thought, okay, we actually need another party in Austria and tell about how, like what's the story of austerity and poverty that brought you to the point that you're at now? Yeah. Danny's number two on the list, it's a very important person in this country. I'm a very important person. Mainly I have two passports, Austrian and German, two very pricey passports when you sell them on the market. And this is when you ask me why am I sitting here? Like I was asking myself, no, like when I listened to David's story of like you never wanted to go to London. I lived four years in London because I wanted to. I'm from a country where no one has to leave, but we can choose to leave. We can choose to live basically wherever we want, right? And when you talked about Naples, I thought, okay, when you talk about devastating austerity, I live in Vienna. We have probably the highest quality of life. This is what the index always says in the world. So why on earth did I say I want to say something on poverty and austerity? And I guess this is also the answer to your questions. Like why do something in Austria, why do something here in Germany? Because of Europe, this is the answer. I think there's a lot of Germany in this room and you're all in the same boat as me. Like we don't feel the austerity in our own lives as much as people in other parts of Europe. To be honest, we probably have no idea what it means when countries have to close hospitals because of austerity and because of economic reasoning of the German government. But that doesn't mean that we don't have the responsibility to speak up against it. And being from Austria is similar. I think we're just a little sister of Germany, right? We have a unique position to do so because when austerity and poverty in Europe is like a thunderstorm, we're the ones who stay in the calm middle of the storm. We see what's happening on the outside, but we can watch it from the inside. And when you stand in the storm in the inside, you can watch it calmly and see the mechanism of how a storm evolves. And from my perspective, I think we should all say, look, whatever someone is telling us about austerity and how it's important to save in Europe to, I don't know, they don't even say why, they just say we have hard times, we have to save. Whenever they say this, and I also say this as an economist, we have to say, no, this is a hoax, this is a total hoax. Like this whole story that you, like we Germans, have been told about the Swabian housewife is just a big lie. And we know this, right? We know that it's not the Swabian housewife, which is a housewife. It's about the Swabian nurse or teacher where the government decides to cut down their wages. This is a different story than like, oh, we're saving for hard times. Especially as we're not saving anything, that's like the second part of the story, that to tell Greece or Spain or Portugal, you have to save because we have hard times. It's not true when we're spending like billions and billions of euros from Greek and Spanish and Portuguese money bailing out banks. So I think like this is our main responsibility. And just one, like everyone can say one more thing, right? So I want to say one more thing. Being from Austria, I can tell you about, like give you a preview of what austerity will be like in a couple of years all across Europe because Austria, we have low unemployment. We have a booming economy. Everything is fine in Austria, same as in Germany, but still the government is cutting down on the social state and they're still cutting down. And so the question is like, wait, I thought like austerity was for the bad times. So why are we still cutting down services in the good times? And they say, because there are some people who don't deserve it. There's people who are freeloading on our economy. Like people who are unemployed or people who are sick. And so they go divide, like within the country, they start dividing people again. So it's not north or south anymore. It's just like you and your neighbor. Like I do care about you, but I don't care about her because she's freeloading on your wealth. So this is what's gonna happen. In Austria, they have two main adjectives they use for it. One is brave politics. Our conservative fascist coalition says, we do brave politics. And the second thing to say is, we want new justice. And this is what new justice will look like in a couple of years all across Europe. Where it's not about austerity anymore. It's about, oh, you know, we're having a good time. We just have to get rid of the freeloaders. And you will put, when you put their brave new justice together in your head, you would find out that it's not brave new justice. It's like a brave new world, a kind of trying to build and in the truest meaning of the title of the book. I love the point that you just said because the interesting part of this whole movement is really that for the first time when you mentioned, it's a very different reality living in Germany, living in Naples, living in Belgium and living in Portugal, it's very different. And to refuse that there is these borders and that there's this country, but to say, yes, it's full one European and I refuse to see, to make those differences. That's really one of the points why this is so important and so strong. These are the two minutes that I want to give you for questions. So have them brief, we're gonna try to answer brief, but raise your hand if you wanna ask something. I see one equipment. Hi, I'm Jonathan, I'm from Brexitland. And my question is kind of, it's like a pan question for the whole thing. Well, how can we get our message out as effectively, you know, but again, our votes better do the things we want to do. Can you repeat the actual question? I'm making. How can we communicate our message enough when it's not really gonna be communicated in the big media so that we can get the votes that we need when we're fighting against the tablets? I mean, I don't know if you, I'll be very brief on this. At the launch of the Progressive International in December, when Bernie Sanders was there, I think he mentioned this, what did he do? Burning social media. I mean, you know that the media will necessarily put a front against you. You have to use the media, you have to talk to the journalists, of course you have to. But you have to use social media in ways that bypass it. This is, I think, one of the ways that you can get the message across in a totally different way in order to convince people. But what I was saying is that it's not just about the channels that you use, but also the narrative that you have to build in order to convince people of your message. And I think that's just as important. One space for one more question, yes. I've got it here. You just have to fight for the microphone, so. Oh yes, oh no, actually, okay. Hi, I didn't see you, can you stand? My list, I'm from Nouvelle-Donne, France. And I think we didn't really discuss the topic that we think is really important, which is unemployment in Europe. And how do we have to fight unemployment and what are our solutions to be sure that unemployment would not be a real issue in the next years? Because actually a huge part of austerity is now caused by mass unemployment. And maybe we thought about reduction of work time, but there are so many solutions that could be proposed all over Europe. So what would be other proposals for other countries for reduction of mass unemployment? Okay, so yeah, there is a lot in the European Spring program about a job guarantee, reducing the average working hours to 35 hours all across Europe. I think, like, if I understood your question correctly, you were answering like, what else can we do? Like, except for the things that are already in the program. I think if we do everything that's in the program, we've done just fine with what we can achieve with this European election. But I think what we can do is we have to also think of like, what is the bad thing about mass unemployment, right? I think it can be a goal for us to have as little work as possible and let machines do most of the things. There is a lot, like, everyone's talking about technological progress, and maybe Bianca wants to say something to this, but why are we not using this for the people? Like, why are we just using this just to make more profit, right? So I think we should like get the discourse in a different direction. And also, it's not that like, we should ever accept that people who are unemployed, like this whole thing of unemployment is always framed as, and then you don't have a contribution to economy anymore. And this is what mass unemployment sounds like a lot. And I think we should never accept this. There is so much work to be done, and there will always be enough work to be done. And this is care work, social work. We have so much work that is done at the moment which is not paid. So when you have a job guarantee, for example, and we pay people to do, to their contributions to having for society at the moment, I think then we should never even talk about mass unemployment in the bright future. Yes. Yeah. I also want to add one link to, I can't see the young lady anymore, yes. But so the word, one of the points in the program that you maybe want to look at is the basic universal dividend. So to see how can we build a link between the rise of technology and maybe automation and many job losses and link this to the common good that, so that the technology and the automation doesn't become the enemy anymore, but has an automatic link to, the more gets automated, the actual better the society can live. And so that's a very long-term plan, but this is where we have to head towards that exactly this is not the threat anymore, the mass unemployment. There's one gentleman back who really raised the hand all the time, so I feel that you have something burning to ask, is that correct? You did this, like for a minute. I'm going far enough. Like if it could be formation, or is it, was it really possible? So my question is, do you feel like the security has started to really actually address all the specific issues that you presented? Did you read the manifesto of DM or did you read the program of European Spring? Manifesto. All the pages? Maybe not, because maybe that was your answer. Well, that's in a way, it's good news because next tomorrow we actually have a European Spring Council meeting where we will be discussing the amendments that we received from hundreds and hundreds of our members all across Europe and we've been putting together all these amendments into a final version of the program that you can read tomorrow, if you wish. And that is much more comprehensive and I hope that you like it, so yeah. Thank you. You wanna say something last word? Yes? Yes, come on. I just want to say like yes, like no program is ever going far enough. Like that's also my opinion. But we're only living in 2018, right? So we start with the steps today to reach Utopia in 2025. This is what the program says. Thank you, huge applause for these ladies and gentlemen. Yes, our next panel is about the Euro and all the exits we are having and we're gonna have and hopefully not have. Can I get on stage? Janos Varoufakis, Lorenzo Massili and is Isabel Thomas in the house? Yes, and Ellie Schlein. Okay, who do we have here? I start from here. This is Lorenzo Massili. He's the co-founder of D25 and also founder of the European Internatives. Then we have, on my right. Yeah, exactly, Isabel Thomas. You're actually a member of the European Parliament already for Generation from France. So we have Italy there, we have France here. You maybe have met Janos. He's a member of, I know he's from DM but he's also on the list in Germany running for the German elections. And then we have Ellie Schlein, also member of the European Parliament of Possibilité in Italy. Great, so we're talking about exits and euros and I'm just gonna give the stage away. Who, what's broken? How is European Spring gonna fix it? That's not what I expected. Yeah, well the question is, Janos, what is broken in Europe? So who do you want to answer? I have no, maybe we've heard you before. Lorenzo, would you say something about what's actually broken and how is the European Spring, the program gonna fix it? The goal is to make the people who don't know the European Spring and our ideas to teach them about what we're having in plan. Thank you, Janos. Well look, I think it's an easy question to answer. Because to a good extent, the solution is in this room and the solution is ourselves. They often tell you the nationalists on the right as much as the nationalists on the left with full disregard to the principle of non-contradiction that the Euro benefits some countries over others. The nationalists on the left and on the right in Italy will tell us that the Euro benefits Germany against Italy. The nationalists on the right, but increasingly so on the left in Germany will tell you that the Euro boxed German industry and German productivity with those lazy southerners of which I am one example. And the truth is that the Euro and the economic system is not so much at the benefit of one country over another as much as at the benefit of some people over other people. It is true that we have a deep seated problem with the way that our financial system operates and we have a deep seated problem with the way that our capitalism operates. But this is not something that goes to benefit one country over another. This is something that goes to benefit the tax evading oligarch of Athens as much as the tax evading banker of Frankfurt and that plays itself squarely against the mini-jobber in the east of Germany as much as the precarious worker in the south of Italy. What we have is, well, if you want to quote a banker, Warren Buffett, what we have is class war. What we have is a very clear struggle between a group of people that benefit from an economic system which is scandalous, which is unacceptable, which is unjust, which should be reserved to dustbin of history and a vast majority of people, the many who suffer under a system that is unequal and unjust. And what this room represents, what the European spring represents, what the experience of DiEM25 stands for, is the capacity of building bridges, building unity, building solidarity and building political power and political force amongst all those who are on the losing end of the current economic system, whether they be in Greece, in Italy, in Ireland, in Germany, or in Poland. And so, to some extent, the answer to the crisis of the euro is the kind of bottom-up transnational solidarity and transnational political mobilization that we represent here. If I have to say something about exits, I don't want to talk about the economy because Yanis will do so. I mean, it's in the nature of an economist, especially the Greek one, nature is also a very Greek concept and okay, let's not get into the essentialism of Greek philosophy, which I think causes a lot of problems and it also gave rise to Christianity and all of that. But anyway, beyond the economic understanding of exit, I think when we talk about exit and the nationalist left and right passion for exit, we are really looking at a sentimental, emotional feeling. What we're looking at is an attempt to exit from history, to exit from possibility, to exit from hope. Think about this, for many years they've been telling us for the last 30 years, there is no alternative. History has ended, for we are chanted at the beginning of the 90s. There is only one system that is possible, it's liberal capitalist democracy. And suddenly in 2008, we discovered that history has not ended, that there is not only one system that is possible and the system that we have and that we inhabit is actually rigged. It's a rigged economy in a rigged democracy. And the answer to this betrayal, they told us that history had ended, they told us that utopia had come, they told us that the world has finished in the best possible of ways. The betrayal of the end of history transforms itself into an abdication on the role of politics to transform history itself. And what those who tell you that the Euro cannot be reformed, that the European Union cannot be changed, that globalization cannot be reshaped, are transmitting you a sense of hopelessness, a sense of misery, a dystopian abdication on what should be the responsibility of every single sentient human being on this planet, which is to change the course of history, to change society around us and to turn it towards a more just and a more equal course. And against this dystopian abdication of possibility, maybe I'm a man from the last century, but I would like to say that we stand by those who, for instance, in 1818, in Peter Liu in Manchester, went in the thousands on the streets to demand an extension of universal suffrage and a right for the democratic say of the majority of the English population and the braved, the British cavalry charging against them and killing very many of them in order to demand something that has been achieved, which is universal suffrage. Maybe I'm a man from the past, but I think that those like us should stand with the ideas that in 1870, let thousands of people to the barricades to say that it is possible to craft a unity across nations based on a different economic and political model to the ancient regimes of the kings, of the oligarchs, of the capitalists. Maybe I'm a man of the past, but I think those of us are the ones who stood in 1913 with the women's movements in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, demanding full and equal democratic representation for the other half of the world that everybody had forgotten in extending the franchise for democratic participation in the matters of the state. We are the ones that in the 1940s brought back hope to countries from Yugoslavia to Italy, from France to Romania fighting fascism not only through the organized violence of the allies, but through the passion and the courage of individual partisans who said that their country's governments did not represent them and they were ready to take up arms against them. We are those that in the 60s in the United States of all places demonstrated and managed to achieve racial equality against a system that might have been the largest democracy on earth but one that deprived its black population of the same rights as its white population. Something that in the 80s was still the case in South Africa and we are the ones that fought against the apartheid and managed to achieve the transformation of one of the greatest sins on humanity in a matter of decades, it takes time, but we got there. I dare say that what we stand for, what we represent is this sense of historical hope, this sense of history of the possibility that history brings about a radically alternative future. That Utopia's Max Weber said in his famous speech to the students of Bavaria in 1919 demonstrates that only by inspiring to the impossible is the impossible made possible and this is what history repeatedly and over and over again has demonstrated. So to conclude, if you tell me about the Euro and if you tell me about this dystopian longing for a return to the organic nation state because things are so bad with the current setup that we cannot change anything, what I think DM brings to the fore is this Utopian, is this courageous inclination towards the transformation of history and of our common life predicament and community. When we launched in 2016, DM we didn't launch it in order to change a little policy here or there, we launched a transnational movement that would aim at nothing less but to revolutionize the European Union and at nothing less but to construct the transnational political force that aimed to do just that. Two years later in Vermont and New York, Giannis, David Adler and many others stepped even beyond that and said the world is so much out of joint that rather than cheering or having to choose between Trump's support for Maduro for the golpistas in Venezuela and China's and Russia's support for Maduro, we need a new global system and we're going to construct a progressive international that is going to bring together all those who are on the losing end of a rigged economic and political system to join hands in constructing a new global aspiration and the new global vision. What DM25, what the European Spring is about is responding with hope to the terror and the impotence that the Euro exit years, the lexity years represent and would like us to embody in our own consciousness. There is nothing that functions better as a tool of social control than losing hope, than being afraid, than feeling that there is no alternative and we must recoil to the bosom of the nation state, of the family, of the folk, of the high mat of protection. We know better and we know that in a hundred years of democratic history we have radically transformed our communities and that is the aspiration that the DM25 and the European Spring bring with themselves and for nothing less will we set. Thank you. And Elizabeth, I have questions to you guys as members of the European Parliament already. What is the case at the moment for the progressives? Where do they divide into internationalists, nationalists and why does it need a movement like the DM25 and the European Spring? What made you like income here? So, thank you. I'm very pleased for us to be there and I'm very pleased to see all the people in the room but as MEP it's not easy because in fact we are not happy. We are sad. We wanted that a lot of... We want that a lot of members of the European Spring and all the movement of the European Spring will be in the next European Parliament because we have to change a lot of things. First of all, about exit. The question is first, why... So, I don't answer to your question but first I would like to answer to the first one. Why UK voted in favour of Brexit? Why a lot of people turned to nationalism last year? I think that it is very important to say that because especially on economic policies there is no democracy. It's like a captation. It's like a dictate from some very few people who decided austerity but not only austerity. What is austerity? In fact, we speak often on austerity but what is it? It's only no redistribution. It's only to protect people who have a lot of money and to take money from the other people or the majority of people. In France, you know, there is a movement, a social movement called gilet jaune. I know that it's very difficult to appreciate what is it exactly because people say yes but their nationality is... No, the reality is because at the beginning the question was on carbon tax. So maybe they are against environment, they are against climate. They want to keep the situation on climate. It's not true. The more important claim from them is redistribution with redistribution. That means they want to... Because, you know, they come from people who win maybe between 1,000 euros and 1,500 euros. It is all people in the streets who win about these wages. So it's very people who think that probably their child, their children, will not have the same life they have, maybe less, probably less. So they don't accept that and they are in the streets for that. Of course, there's only question but that is a more important question. So to come back... So Europe is Europe, institution for the moment. I've tapped, I've catch all economics policies, all economics power and against redistribution. I think that is a more important question in the moment. And without money, for example, I am in committee of budget. And like I can say you that Australia is not only a national budget, Australia is also in European budget. European budget is only 1% of the wealth in Europe. It's nothing, we can do nothing. For example, for European Spring, we have decided to put in the programme a very important investment for climate. Maybe it's 500 billion for climate change, for the next parliament, for the next after the election. It's not only investment, it's also taking money from where there's money. And especially because, as you said, Lorenzo, we protect people with money, we protect multinational, we protect industrial lobby, we protect people, not people, but organisations which can participate to the redistribution. So to answer, we have to change all. And to change all, we have to change alliances. Too long, a long time ago, we had in the parliament coalition, like in Germany, sorry to say that, but this coalition between the part of the left and the right is destructive. Because it's not the question of compromise, because in the European Parliament, we need compromises. It's normal, we have to find a majority. But this kind of compromise is not compromise, it's compromising, because this part of the left always follows, in fact, the right. And we never have the choice on an economic question, but also on environmental question, on social question. And we have to change that. That is the reason why we try to build a new, also now, because Yanis came two weeks ago in the European Parliament, and we try to build a new alliance, a left and ecologist alliance. And this is exactly what we try to do in the European Spring, creating ecologists and left and democratic and feminist alliance to change the European policies. Thank you. Would you like to add something? Would you like to add anything? Absolutely, yes, thanks. First of all, let me thank you. Thank Yanis, thank Lorenzo, and thank all the friends of the European Spring for this very kind invitation. I think that you invited me to bring some good news from Italy. Yes. The good news of today. It's something possible. It's possible, because the good thing that I want to share with you to start the intervention is that today, some judges in Catania, in Sicily decided that they want to proceed against Minister Salvini for having kidnapped more than 100 people in the harbor with the ship Di Ciotti that you might have heard about. So we can't say tonight there are still judges in Catania. And it's important. Because these people and Orban as well, they think they're above any law and any constitution and any treaty, the European treaties or the international treaties. So it's good to have still judges in Catania. Why am I starting from Salvini? Because I think that it's... We're living in times of a big historical paradox. And you, Yanis and Lorenzo as well, gave a perfect name to this paradox. The International of Nationalists. It's true. If you think about it, the wall of Orban strengthened Mr. Salvini and Mr. Trump and Madame Le Pen and Mr. Farage as well. So these people are strengthening each other with the same rhetoric of hatred, of intolerance and walls. It's a paradox, because if you bring that rhetoric to the end, of course they will be opposite, one to the other, on opposite sides of the walls that they want to build. So the International of Nationalists is full of contradictions. And our role is to make this contradiction emerge and explode. On migration, this is particularly clear. Last week we were in Strasbourg, Isabelle. We had an incredible debate on migration. You know, the council started with the usual intervention. Business as usual, they say. I mean, I might be naive, but I was thinking that at least they would have apologized. With the 49 people that they left for 20 days, including Christmas night and New Year's Eve, in the middle of the Mediterranean, without doing what the International Law of the Sea requires you to do, give a safe harbor to disembark. For 20 days, it's a shame. The European Union on this issue is going backwards instead of forward. You remember in 2015, after the Balkan route, after that flow of human hope that was walking through the different national borders, trying to reach the northern countries, including Germany, in that year for one second there was clarity and they decided to commit to do 160,000 relocation from Italy and Greece to show internal solidarity. Does any one of you know how many they actually did in two years? 30,000. It's a shame. In four months, Canada has resettled more than 40,000 people, Syrians, directly to its territory. That shows you very well that the European problem is not an issue of how many people are coming or resources. It's just the lack of political will by European governments to put together the common European solution that we desperately need. And to put back at the center the principle of solidarity and they do not have to look very far to find it, huh? It's in the European treaties, guess what? Article 78 and 80 of the treaties talk about solidarity and equal sharing of responsibility on asylum. But if it's true that in these years, six member states on 28 have dealt alone with 80% of asylum requests then we are violating the treaties. So my point is, last week, not only the council did not apologize with the 49 people and also the workers of Seawatch and CI, they did not even mention them. They started by saying all the ways in which the council managed to reduce the flows. So I made my intervention, I was very angry and I said, look, if that's your only aim, what's next? Are you gonna shoot to the boats directly or what? I mean, it hurts. It hurts for people who believe deeply in the European project to see the full lack of leadership of the people sitting at the European council that are opening the way for nationalists. Because when I attacked Donald Tusk on the same issue and I said, look, why are you even meeting at the European council if you don't manage for two years to find a simple agreement on the doubly regulation reform that the European parliament has already voted for? You know what's the doubly regulation? It set the responsibility for every asylum request to one single member state. I am one of the rapporteurs of the doubly regulation reform. We negotiated for two years. It was very difficult and delicate, 22 meetings, but in the end, what we managed to do was historical. We managed to have a majority of two thirds of the parliament asking to cancel the hypocritical criterion of the first country of irregular entry and replace it with a full system, giving value to the meaningful links of these people because they're not packages, and at the same time setting an obligation for all member states, including Hungary, dear Orban, to play their part in welcoming refugees and migrants as simple as that, can you imagine? Two thirds majority in the European parliament. Then what? We are blocked. Why? Because at the council for two years, they didn't manage to find any agreement. But you see here the nationalist hypocrisy. The people from the Lega Nord of Salvini in the room last week, they were complaining about the missing relocation. And I had to remind them that when we voted in the same room for relocation, they voted against with Orban and their friends from Poland. So, you see we have room there to show where the contradiction lie. And, sorry, it was a long travel, it was a long trip. So what I'm saying here is that on this issue, but also on economics, you know, Yanis, you remember who asked to the commission to kill the budget law in Italy? It was Mr. Kurz that Salvini thought was his friend because on migration they have the same ideas. So, you see, that's the role that we will have. But in the European Parliament, and it's quite frustrating to admit it through Isabel, because we have worked and we have obtained many, many ambitious position on the crucial issues. Why don't we believe in exits? Because if you think about the challenges on which we are playing with our future here, you see migration. No member states can alone face what is happening. We need a shared solidarity with the Dublin Regulation Reform and open and safe and legal ways of access to all European member states. Otherwise, people will continue to die and the traffickers will continue to get more and more money. The second point is climate. What can, and we're gonna discuss it in the next panel, but just a quick word, what can member states can alone face the effects of climate change? We need a very strong, sanctionable framework of rules at the European and the global level. And it's because of the European Parliament that at least we have some mandatory targets because as usual, the government sitting at the council, they wanted to get away with just a shake of hands. But at least on energy efficiency, on renewables, on reduction of the emissions, we have mandatory targets because the Parliament has managed to obtain them in the negotiation with the council. The third challenge, I will not say anything more like that because we have the real, let's say, protagonist of that phase, but on economic and social policy, what have we seen on Greece? Arrogance, dogmatic arrogance. If we don't imagine a creative way to get out of this crisis, investing on the things that we have left behind, innovation, research, technology, you know that in Italy there are more Italian students that are emigrating than the immigrants that are arriving in Italy. And nobody talks about that. Okay, because where they are winning this International of Nationalists is when they point the finger at the bottom by claiming that because all the situation and the difficulties that citizens have in our countries and the rest of Europe, it's their fault. It's the fault of the last who comes with a boat. And never once they point the finger up to show who are the real responsible of this crisis and of the increasing inequality. For example, the multinational companies that are stealing our future for a trillion euros every year in tax avoidance and tax evasion. Not a single word from Mr. Salvini on them. So that's where we need to work together. And I will conclude with this. There is another challenge that, you say, entails them all, which is democratizing the EU on which DM has done an extraordinary work, okay? But just to conclude, why if at the European Parliament we manage to build majorities also on tax justice and transparency that we need to oblige the multinational companies to the CBCR? What's CBCR? Well, we asked the multinational companies to tell us how many profits they do and how many taxes they pay in all the countries where they work. It might sound simple, but it would be enough to recover part of that money and give it in resources and services and investments. Okay, so why if the European Parliament has this strong position they are not reality yet? And we discussed many times with Lorenzo about this because the weakness of this European project is that it's in the hands of the European government sitting at the council. It's a round table, but they're sitting looking at the opposite side to their public opinion. So why are we here sharing our efforts? Because in order to win these fights, the European Parliament and our commitment is not enough. We need much more European parties, much more European press, much more European trade unions and intermediate corps and much more European squares of people mobilizing together because if we fight the national safe niches that is preventing the EU to deliver the answer, then we can finally win. Thanks a lot for your attention and invitation. Thank you. Very powerful. Thank you so much. Janis, as yes, as one of the protagonists for exactly that, could I ask you to draw this narrative because we spoke about this this afternoon, but to draw, why is the EU disintegrating and how can we change that stuff? So what's broken? The cartel upon which the European Union was created, it was created as a cartel of big business, steel and coal initially, car makers, then French farmers, large-scale French farmers, not the little ones, and of course the bankers eventually. That cartel, you know, cartels are pretty good at distributing profits during the good times, but when you have a crisis like that of 2008, cartels are terrible, are distributing burdens. And when you have a technocracy in Brussels which was created to manage the European Union in the interest of big business, they will deliver austerity for the many and socialism for the very few upon the first sign of a crisis. And then xenophobia springs out of the woodwork like in the 1930s when the many are suffering and they don't even know why in a country like Germany, which is sinking in money, swimming in surpluses. The federal government has a surplus. The banks have a tsunami of capital coming from Italy, from Greece, from Latin America. It's flooding the German banks in Frankfurt which are still bankrupt, but that's another matter. You have households which are in surplus in terms of savings and you have corporations, Siemens and Volkswagen have huge savings which is absurd because businesses are supposed to borrow in order to invest. So everybody, seemingly everybody in this country has a surplus and yet half of the population of this country is worse off today than they were 15 years ago. And then they hear that, oh, we're going to give 100 billion this year and another 130 next year to the Greeks. And they say, our hospitals are sinking. We are swimming in money, but we are suffering and you are giving all these billions to the Greeks. Of course the money never went to the Greeks. It went to Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank and Finance Bank. But the average German voter never hears that. So a proud nation is turning against another proud nation. The Germans hate the Greeks because the Greeks, they live under the sun in nice weather, they drink Uso, okay, and they don't work and they're caught up. That's what they're being portrayed as. And so at the same time they are taking all the billions away from the hospitals and from the infrastructure of a country swimming in money. And they hate the Greeks and then the Greeks say, but you are Nazis and they hate the Germans. So we end up with a Europe which is broken because of a broken cartel-like capitalist model, the effect of which is to turn our peoples against one another and to give immense energy and power to the xenophobes in Greece, in Germany, in France, in Italy and the new Mussolini's, called them Salvini's, whatever you call them, they are rising up and they are the only ones that are triumphant. So that's what's broken. What do we do about this? Well, let me tell you what we're not going to do. We are not going to follow our comrades and friends of our stand of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the logical conclusion that they're bringing to the table that this is broken. Therefore, let it go to waste and let's go back to the nation state and build socialism in one country. Stalin tried that, didn't work out very well. And we're not going to do this, not because they are wrong about their analysis that the European Union is unreformable. The European Union comrades is unreformable and we're not going to reform it because we cannot reform the European Union. We can only transform it. And how are we going to do this? I will answer very specifically with an example, but before I do that, let me say that when we inaugurated DiEM25 in the Volksbühne Theater, not far from here, in February 2016, we had an opportunity to look at the people there who had come in order to feel a sense of togetherness that there is hope. I could have gotten up on the stage and I could have said, this European Union doesn't work. Let's disintegrate it. I will now catch a flight of the Aegean Airlines or whatever, Lufthansa and go to Greece and I'm going to fight there for socialism and you do this here. And then let's exchange notes at some point. If I had done that, the people in the Volksbühne would have been grossly disappointed because suddenly they would feel that they are alone. That they are Germans that must fight the German establishment as Germans. And we would feel alone in Greece because we would have to fight the Greek oligarchy as Greeks alone. What we said instead was, let's all get together and fight our oligarchies together through a common program of change. And that means we are not going to give away the European institutions that are unreformable to those that use them against the many. We are not going to say, the European Investment Bank, do away with it. We're not going to say the European Central Bank, ah, well, shut it down. We're not going to say that all the various achievements of parliamentarians in Europe, trade unions in Europe, to create some kind of protection of the environment at the European level, at the level of labor markets, that we're going to give them all up. No, we're going to take them over. And we're going to take them over and put them to use, press them into the service of genuine solidarity against the big business cartel. We are going to take them and turn them against both the business as usual establishment, which is creating the crisis that is feeding the Salvines and against the Salvines. But comrades, the worst enemy of progressives is hot air, fanciful, wishful thinking. Another Europe is possible. If I hear this again, I am going to kill myself. We know it's possible. But this is not a policy agenda. In order to make a difference, you see, all of us who are in this room are irrelevant because for you to be in this room, you're already politicized. You already have hope in your hearts, otherwise you wouldn't be here. What matters is the taxi driver who brought me here, it is the person on a mini job, the person working in a warehouse operated by Amazon on zero hours contract who don't give a damn about you and me, about political parties, about the political process, they've given up hope on democracy. It is they that we must address. And they will ask a very simple question. What are you going to do on Monday morning? If I give you my vote and you win power, what are you going to do on Monday morning? If we say to them, we dream of a better world, they say, bugger off. If we say to them that we are going to change the treaties and create a federal view of the USA, yeah, yeah, yeah, by that time I will be dead. You think of the long run, I'm trying to work out how I'm going to make ends meet this week. What do you have to offer me? This is where the European Spring program comes in, because not only does it have the framework of the big picture of democratizing Europe, of moving towards a democratic federation, all those things, but it answers the question of what to do on Monday morning and allow me to give you an example. We are going to have a press conference on Monday morning. Once we win power, right? We are going to have a press conference. Now imagine the following. At the press conference, we have the European Union Council, who of course will be a member of the European Spring, the President of the European Central Bank, the President of the European Investment Bank, and the President of the European Commission, who is not going to be younger. And the announcement, the press conference lasts 45 minutes. And we announce the following, okay? Then we have further press conferences, to begin with on Monday morning. First thing, the European Investment Bank is going to issue bonds, as it always does, but this time it will issue bonds to the tune of 500 billion euros every year for five years. And that money, which together in four years, five years will be two and a half trillion euros, is going to be placed in an agency for planning and implementing green transition, green energy, green transport, research and development into green technologies across Europe. They worry that the European Investment Bank would have, if we were simply going to say that, is that if we issue all these bonds and we sell them, their price would start going down, so interest rates will go up, so the borrowing costs for this will be very high. That's why we have the President of the European Central Bank next to the President of the European Investment Bank, who makes a very simple announcement. If the price of those bonds starts coming down, we are going to buy them in the secondary markets. A smaller site, there is nothing new in what I've said. The European Investment Bank is issuing bonds. The European Central Bank is buying them. We are not inventing the will, but do it at a level of 500 billion every year across Europe to fund the green transition and create the agency that is going to identify the green energy union projects which Germany needs more than any other country in Europe. We all need it, but Germany needs it a lot more than any other country, okay? So suddenly, somebody asked from Brexitland, I believe, the question about unemployment. If you pump 500 billion euros every year, it's 5% of GDP, that's the new deal of Roosevelt brought to Europe today without even a federal government, without new rules, without new institutions, without the treaty change, Monday morning, everything I said and described is legal, it can happen now. That's the first part of the announcement, it lasts for about five, six minutes. We move to the second part. Did you know that last year, the European Central Bank made 91 billion euros in profits? There's no sense in a central bank making profits. It's not a private bank, it's not a business. Those profits, it's like money begetting money only because you have the authority to print it. So this money belongs to the Eurozone, it belongs to the citizens, to the peoples of Europe, it is not German money, it is not Greek money, it is not taxes, it is not a return to investment, it is not wages, it is money begetting money. So let's take this money and fund an anti-poverty program across Europe, where poor families receive checks signed by the President of the European Central Bank, another aside, fully legal within the existing treaties, the Charter of the European Central Bank, all it takes is a decision by the European Union Council. And when the European Council is not taking this decision, it is guilty of neglect and negligence for not having taken that decision, which is within its limit to take. Okay, that announcement takes another four minutes. Let's move to the third announcement, public debt, which is the excuse for austerity. Every government imposing austerity in Germany, in Greece, in Italy, everywhere, uses public debt as a great scarecrow. Public debt will sink us, therefore we need to cut down austerity. Of course austerity has never worked in the history of the world, I never will, but that's another matter. Public debt is an issue. But think of how easy it is to reduce the Eurozone's public debt by 40% with one press conference completely legally and within the rules of the European Union. The third announcement goes like this. We are going to take the public debt of every country. Take Italy, for instance, because it's in the news and because it has the largest public debt in Europe, and which is not sustained. This is why Mario Draghi has been printing, not him, the European Central Bank, they've been printing money as if there's no tomorrow, 2.7 trillion has been printed in order to support effectively to keep struggling to keep Italy within the Europe. And you have the Buddhist bank, the central bank of this country, being up in arms about that. You have the Free Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, even parts of the SPD here saying, oh, we can't be doing this, we can't keep printing money and so on. So, stop printing money. And let's do the following. We take the debt of Italy, the debt of Greece, of Ireland, of Germany, of everyone, and to divide it between two parts. The part that we were allowed to have, according to the Maastricht Treaty, I hate the Maastricht Treaty, but let's respect it. Maastricht said you can have debt up to 60% of GDP. Well, let's call this the good debt. And everything above that, in the case of Italy, more debt is above it, the debt is below it, yeah? Not to talk about Greece. In the case of Italy, about 55% of the debt is bad debt, and 45% is the legal good debt, yeah? So what we do is very simple. The European Central Bank announces what we call, as part of the European Spring Program, a debt conversion project. So what did the European Central Bank say? It doesn't print any money, but it mediates between private investors and our states so that our states can borrow at the interest rates that the European Central Bank charges the bankers. Zero, zero. If the debt repayments of our states for the good debt, the interest rate goes to zero, do you know what happens? I can do the mathematics if you want up on the board if we were at the university, I would do it. 40% of the total debt repayments in the Eurozone, in aggregate, for the next 20 years, disappears. We reduce total debt repayments for the next 20 years in the Eurozone altogether by 40% with just that one small administrative policy. The European Central Bank is not paying anything because Italy will pay its debt, but it will pay less for the good debt than for the bad debt. And that is completely legal. It does contradict the spirit of the Buddhist bank, but it does not contradict the letter of the law. As far as I'm concerned, I don't mind contradicting the spirit of the Buddhist bank. So you asked me, what can we do? This agenda, which is part of the European Spring, a new deal for Europe, creates the circumstances with one press conference, maybe two, maybe three, for changing the climate in Europe. Suddenly, after these announcements, Europe ceases to be in the mind of the tax driver out there of the person who doesn't give a damn about us, ceases to be necessarily the source of problems, becomes the source of solutions. Changing that atmosphere, bringing hope back at the pan-European level is going to be the prerequisite for us to have the discussion of democratizing Europe, of creating a democratic constitution by which to replace the treaties, and moving ahead, if we so choose in the context of citizens assemblies, where from the grassroots up, we discuss what kind of future governance we want for Europe, we can create the circumstances for the democratization process. Now, some skeptics from the left, say, ah, that will never work. You will run in the May elections. Even if you do well, the European Parliament cannot enact anything of what you're saying. You have to take over the governments in order to do that. By that time, there will be a coup d'etat like there was in Greece against you in July 2015. It's now going to work. It's going to fail. Well, maybe. But think about it. Who is going to pick up the pieces if this Europe collapses? Who is going to do it? The nationalists of the right or of the left? Or those of us who struggle to save Europe from itself? Or those of us who try to bring everybody together on the basis of something like the European Spring Program? We are the ones that will pick up the pieces if Europe collapses. And to be together across Europe, from Portugal, all the way to Ireland, from France, all the way to Greece, the Baltics, and so on. We need a pan-European transnational list with one program that binds us together, which shows us what is possible within the existing rules, paves the ground for us to change the rules. And that very movement will also be the only movement that is capable of preserving civilization in Europe if the whole thing collapses because of the fascists, the nationalists, and the European bureaucracy. Now, before we enter in here, and this is how I finish. Danny Platsch, where are you, Danny? She's disappeared. Ah, there she is. Danny Platsch asked me at the bar. She said, after this meeting, I want to discuss with you something really very important. Donald Trump said, train the swamp, build the wall, make America great again. Now, our program is great, but how can we summarize it in three lines? I've been thinking about it during this. So how about juxtaposing against the nationalists, the fascists, drain the swamp? What if we say drain the technocracy and put the demos back into democracy? Why, how about saying instead of build the wall, bring down the wall, and give them humanitarian passports? And how about saying, Europe has to be made worthy again. Let's make Europe worthy again. Thank you. And that's exactly why we're here. Thank you. I have the easiest job in the world now to have a spot for one questions, just out of fairness. Stand up, raise your hand. My question is specifically to Yanis about the... No, no. All right, sorry. It's about the Franco-German Treaty, which was just signed last Tuesday. How do you see that in creating access within the EU? And is Merkel and Macron already trying to save up their legacy within the EU? Thank you. All I have to say in the response to the Ahem Treaty is a big yawn. Yawn. I guess, I mean. They didn't mention the Eurozone. If the problem of the European Union is that it's in the hands of the governments, the solution cannot come from two governments. So it's as simple as that, but it's true that we are very angry with the so-called Visigra Group because the Dublin Regulation Reform is stuck because they don't want to take responsibility on anything. By the way, by the way, to give you a quick example, in the reform that we voted with the two first majority, we also put an amendment that I wrote saying that the countries that will refuse to take part in the relocation will see consequences in the structural funds they receive because you cannot want only the benefit of belonging to a larger union and always decline any responsibility that comes with it. So it cannot bring anything. It's true, we are angry with the Visigra Group, but we are even angrier with Merkel and Macron because it's their incapability to put together the competences and the answers that we need to these big issues that has paved the way for the nationalists. And I didn't conclude my sentence before, I'm gonna do it now because it's the perfect answer. When I attacked Donald Taas, the president of the European Council in the chamber in Strasbourg in Plenary, I said, why are you even meeting? You know what he answered to me? He answered, it's not true that all migration of the European Council is not doing anything. The real progress is that today, all the government sitting at the council are aware that the solution is to block them before they arrive, not to redistribute them. And they thought, look, where did I hear this before? It was some days before from Salvini and from Orban. So we understand when the head of the European Council takes the same language and the same policies of the extreme right nationalists, that's where you understand why we have to create an alternative to both because they are the two faces of the same medal we will say in Italy. Yes. First of all, I agree with Elie. There is nothing to expect from Macron Merkel because we have nothing to expect from two people, the queen and the king of Europe. It's not possible. Of course, solutions have to come from democracy and citizens. Second, it's not possible to continue with this couple, Germany and France because Europe is 28, maybe in two months, 27, but it's 28 or 27 countries, not only France and Germany. It's not acceptable to continue with this king and queen of Europe. We are so over time. Please give a huge applause for Janice, Elie, Nisabel and Lorenzo. Thank you. So the name of the panel is the environment and also the green transition. What is the steps of the European Spring Program that we can put forward to actually fix this over the big topic that defines our time with climate change and nobody seems to have solutions? The European Spring claims to have some. Who would like to talk about it? Yes, Rasmus? I can give it a go. Hello and thank you for still sitting here, even though we're time over, one hour over time. Basically, I think we have touched upon what we're doing that can also change the climate crisis and that is a change of system because basically that's what we need. The climate crisis changes everything. It changes how we eat, how we live, how we travel, how we work, and how the economy functions. And that's what we're doing in this program. Also, as I was mentioned before, we have the Green New Deal with actually putting 500 billion euros out to work for green transition every year. And we need those money if we have to change our way of eating, of living, of transporting ourselves, of working. So that is one big step, but also I think it's important to mention our policy on agriculture because one thing is the climate crisis, when we talk about environment, we also have to talk about the biodiversity crisis we are facing, which is really tough and it's got to break us at some point if we don't do something. And that's the reason why we want to focus the agricultural policy to watch much bigger biodiversity, smaller agricultural production, and also more healthy food away from focus on animal production to more vegetable production. And I know from coming from Denmark that we are almost a monocultural, agricultural country. I mean, we have one thing and that's pigs. And it's breaking down. I mean, if you come to Denmark, I mean, you don't see that many different birds and the bees are disappearing because there's no biodiversity. So that's a big task ahead of us as well. And we're answering that through the common agricultural policy that we're putting forward. Thank you, yes. But of that, I would love to have a question for you, which is, so you've thought a lot about anti-corruption. What can you report from the dependencies of not actually getting through climate change and not doing this in conditions with those corruption cases that you've been judging on? Good evening. Good night. Good evening. First of all, I want to give you a say hi from my friend and my client, Juliena San, who knows we are here and we want you to say hi to you. Bien. La corrupción con el medio ambiente tiene no solo mucho que ver, sino que es probablemente las agresiones al medio ambiente es uno de los mecanismos más habituales y más graves de la corrupción. Yeah, corruption and environment has a lot to do because the aggression against the environments are one of the mechanisms of corruption. El medio ambiente, nosotros abogamos por su defensa, otros buscan el beneficio, buscan la explotación, y para ello acuden a cualquiera de los mecanismos posibles. Yeah, we try to fight for against climate change, we try to fight for environment, but other people try to gain the more profits they can with the environment. De alguna forma, cuando hablamos de crímenes internacionales, hoy día en la base de esos crímenes internacionales hay un componente económico y de agresión al medio ambiente y por tanto también de mecanismos de corrupción de las grandes corporaciones. Yeah, when we talk about international crimes in the basis of those international crimes, many times now there are economic and environmental issues and mechanisms of corruption that have to do with that. Probablemente en España un más de un 70% de los casos de corrupción tienen que ver con medio ambiente. Yeah, in Spain more than 60% or 70% of the cases of corruption has to do with environment. Aparte de ello, la defensa del medio ambiente se ha convertido ya desde hace tiempo en una profesión o en una dedicación de alto riesgo. And also fighting for the environment has been external profession of high risk in the last years. Basta solamente ver las cifras de defensores de derechos humanos que el año pasado, 321 defensores de derechos humanos de los cuales el 77% eran ambientalistas fueron asesinados. And overall, in the whole world, we have to look at last year's human right defenders who were killed. We had 321 and 67% of that were environmental defenders. El papel de las empresas multinacionales de las grandes corporaciones es fundamental en los mecanismos de corrupción, principalmente en terceros países en donde la vulnerabilidad de los ciudadanos y el medio ambiente es la norma y por tanto se expande la acción contra ellos. And for the companies, they usually use those corruption mechanisms in third parties where the environment is really important and they use those mechanisms against the environment to get more profit in those other countries. El problema es que no hay unos mecanismos internacionales adecuados para hacer frente a estas agresiones masivas de grandes corporaciones como pueden ser Monsanto u otras que atacan directamente mediante transgénicos, explotaciones abusivas al medio ambiente. And the problem is that we don't have juris mechanisms and transnational laws or anything that protects those companies like for example Monsanto and other countries can do whatever they want to do in those other countries. For example, big spoliation or using of transgénicos. Por tanto tenemos que definir esos mecanismos. And then we have to define those mechanisms. Por ejemplo, en el programa de primavera europea se habla de una sala de tribunal de justicia de la Unión Europea dedicado a temas ambientalistas. For example, in the European Spring we talk about setting up a tribunal on environment in Europe and that's important and we have to go farther. Yeah, someone told us before that we have to go beyond. Yo creo que en el ámbito de la lucha contra la corrupción de la protección del medio ambiente hoy día son ataques transnacionales. Por tanto, la respuesta tiene que ser universal, transnacional por mecanismos de justicia universal y desde luego justicia europea. Yeah, I think nowadays corruption and attacks against the environment are transnational issues and so the mechanisms to fight that must be transnational. For example, with universal justice or mechanism that we have to build to fight that in a global way. Thank you. So that's what we're trying with the Green New Deal. So if you haven't read the program, please, it's very worth looking at it. Exactly all these bits in detail. Franca, as an environmental engineer, can you, the specific steps what will be part of this green transition to get us to where we think we can get in the next decade. What's the most important step of that from yours? Okay. I mean, this is not that hard because the steps you have to go are already written down. You know, somebody thought about, some others thought about scientific papers are about that. You can find thousands of that, how to do that. The point is, and there comes my personal story. When I was 18, I decided to study this kind of technological direction of environmental and energy systems because I thought we need to develop the technology to fight against the climate change and to stabilize the global balance. You know, I mean, for me it's like a very easy box of if we do this, something happen, like if we do not stabilize the climate, the whole system is going in a very dangerous disbalance which will make all these problems we already talked about. So this is something we really have to face. And I stopped my scientific career because I recognized that making more technology is not a solution. We have to really fight for the political decision because somebody already said that the political will is what is missed. You know, and this is what we really have to bring forward as an entire and taking all around policies to really build a picture, you know, to make a vision in the head of the people how the world of tomorrow can look like because they are feared of change. And this is something we really have to remember during our fight for this to take the perspectives of the people who really have to make this change with us together. Okay, great. Yes. What a beautiful super clear message that the tools to give back hope to all the people around Europe are already there. We just have to have the built political will to implement them. The technologies for the green transition, they're already there. We don't need to new build them. We just need the political will to implement them. That is exactly what the European spring will do. Because of time, I hope it's okay if it's a shorter panel, but I still want to keep two questions, statements if anybody has something in their heart. That's the space. Hi, my name is Mark. I'm from Berlin. I'm active in the degrowth movement and that pretty much explains my question is how much do you believe that we have to overcome the paradigm of economic growth to solve all kinds of problems? I think what we have to understand the big problem is that we are depending so much on growth. Growth in itself is not bad or good. It's our dependentness on it, which is the problem. And that's why what I simply... I mean, it's a declaration of love. What I love about the European spring program is basically that all the time through every page you see a triple bottom line. Yes, we're talking economy, but there's a balance for people and there's a balance for the planet. And that goes through the whole program. We actually quite... When we were discussing it, we've been working on this for a long time and I think really a strong point is that when we're talking about the Green New Deal, the Green Transition, it's for people too. I mean, if we're going to have a social sustainable Europe, it has to do with our planet as well. We're living together. So the big problem is how we are dependent on things. One thing we're dependent on is Mother Earth, that we should work for. Yes, thank you. Franka has also something. I just want to answer on this shortly because I think the question is how we define growth, you know? And this is the point. I mean, growth can be development and if we define it like development and we need development, of course, it should not be growth like using resources which are not there, you know, this is stupid. So growth should be development and then we can further move kind of economically but not destroying our own base. Okay. Yes, is there more? Yes, you were first. Hello. So I'm also from Britain and I wanted to say a little bit. I'm really pleased this evening how all the themes are really like, you know, related because I think they are very difficult to separate. We can't see them as separate issues. But I wanted to say that actually this idea of poverty and austerity has been maybe a major motivation behind Brexit because people, that is the key thing that if you have then your needs solved in terms of having enough wealth and welfare, then you can care, then you can afford to care more about the environment. You can afford to care more about participation in politics and being involved, reaching out also a hand to other people to help your fellow man in terms of migration or charity begins at home, that kind of thing. So I wanted to ask how can we encourage participation on a European scale? I think the issue is that a lot of people if they're suffering from poverty and austerity they don't have they're not taking the advantages of a united Europe. I think that then work to involve people from all classes all levels, walks of life. The question was how much time we think we have? The question was But I think it has a lot to do with what is the policy we're putting forward. What is it we want to change for Europe? What is it we want to change for Europeans? I mean what we're doing and I can say I'm coming from Denmark, the small rich country there's a lot of Euroscepticism and when I go out and talk to the Danes I say we don't run for the European Parliament to do Danish EU policy we run as European because we should do this together we have to change these things together and we have relevant policy for all kinds of people in all kinds of stages of their life I mean in our program we talk a lot about Erasmus yes but we also talk about Erasmus for public servants so it's about making policy relevant for everybody I think that's the big thing and right now I mean you could hear it on the panel before I mean a lot of the European policy is not made for all of us it's made for banks Yes, because the one thing that yes, you clapped if you want to clap applause maybe the people that you feel have no space to actually act for environmental because they have other issues they don't need to do that we don't have to put the environment on their shoulders but to take the money that is already there to actually force the transition of green technology into your white that is a thing we need to do so that we can stop to ask the person who can hardly make ends meet to then also have please zero waste and not drive a car and all these things so we can stop put the pressure on them and actually solve it from where we can yes I'll give you the last word of the evening big no pressure and help you recall that and then you can translate it I hope you recall that, and then you can translate it into somewhere else. You were saying about participation, how can we do so that people participate more? Well, it's not about the convenience of doing things, it's about the convention. We have to do it. All the efforts are worth. The effort of one person is the convention of all of us. It's not that we should fight for environment. No, we have to fight for environment. We have an obligation. It's not an option not to do it. Because there are a lot of laws, but the only problems, there are a lot of instruments, there are a lot of mechanisms, but the only problem is that there's not a will. There's not a political will to do it. And the environment is taking lives of people, so that's why it's not an option for us not to fight for the environment. It's an obligation. And we have to defend lives, and we are also the earth, and the earth is us. That's what he was trying to say, and that's all about. Great. Thank you. So, thank you, yes. Let us end with this one thing. So, we know we have the right people having the program. We have absolutely the right set of ideals. The only thing that is missing is the political, like, will to actually get things going. So, we have until May 26th to get this noise out there and to let everybody know the tax he drives. People know about this. So, the smallest thing I can ask you is, there's a hashtag called Hope is Back, and there's another hashtag called Dino Europa. Please use it. Tell everybody that you know about this, and give a huge applause to the people on the panel. Thank you so much.