In these last few days we have heard (and published on Pressenza) a number of points of view formulated around the results of the European elections: Here we shall endeavour to make a further analysis, bearing in mind some of the themes, i.e. peace, humanism, nonviolence, human rights, and non-descrimination are all closely linked to the core issues of our press-agency
Democracy
First of all we WILL set out to consider the figures regarding actual people voting in the election (only 43% in the whole of Europe) which point out that the number of voters is still going down. We shall disregard any proclamations made by the major powers; for the less voters there are, the easier it is to manipulate those who are not represented and to corrupt those elected. Moreover, it is clear that election campaigns cost a lot of money and any candidate with little or no cash will only end up with some of the left-overs (if they’re very lucky).
Democracy is getting more and more formal and regulations specifically conceived to steer and regulate elections through measures that discriminate against minorities and new parties, such as minimum vote thresholds or majority vote bonuses, that are always on the increase.
Nowadays, in Italy the par-condicio (equal treatment) law is hardly mentioned any more: and what’s even worse, when you put barriers around the network (because wasn’t the Internet meant to be the place where you can find everything you’re looking for ?) it is difficult to find accurate lists of the actual parties taking part in the elections, a clear description of their programmes, a profile of the candidates involved, and what alliances have been created. Google increasingly gives results that have been sponsored, this means it’s becoming a difficult job to find a site which summarises all the results with a minimum of comment even for someone as stubborn as myself, let alone an average reader. Finally, we find that the results issued by the official site of the European Union appear only on Google’s second page ( http://www.results-elections2014.eu/en/election-results-2014.html) and even then come in an incomplete form.
Discrimination
The worst aspect at the European level, lies in the increase of number of parties that openly support discrimination by race, regional origin, gender or sexual orientation, and have turned this into their very banner: This should be looked at and dealt with not only by the small number of parliamentarians who are totally against any type of discrimination, but should also worry right-wing thinkers in social-democratic countries, who might consider that it is sufficient for such parties to be told “to behave themselves” in order to avoid the situation from becoming dangerous. Just to prettify this problem, fashionable commentators have described these as being “Eurosceptics” whereas they should have called them by their real names: fascists, nazists, racists.
When having to deal with such politicians. it is difficult to address issues concerning new immigrant reception policies or winning new battles in the field of human and civil rights.
Economy
In the battle against the Euro, or rather, in favour of deep changes being applied when applying new parameters to it, we will have to be content with the press statements of Renzi, who is certainly qualified to issue them. The true eurosceptics, or rather those parliamentarians who want to adopt another vision of the economy such as common welfare, anti-growth, a solidarity-based economy, humanist concepts, mutual participation, are only very few, and when a big effort is made to add them up they barely reach 10% of the elected members.
Nonviolence
There will only be a marginal presence of nonviolent ideas in this parliament. Perhaps in the next few days we will be able to find some parliamentarians who are personally inspired by nonviolent ideals, but the only party which has explicitly declared it inspired itself on the ideals of Gandhi, Silo and King is the Humanist Party of Spain which has actually just lost twenty thousand votes recently. Even the Italian Radical Party, which is always ambiguous in nature, is not going to be be present this round. In any case we will let you know if someone surfaces among the Greens, the Five Stars Movement, Tsipras, Podemos and various other left wing parties. Though for the moment, the picture remains a desolate one. At the same time, we find that party forms overtly considering violence as a means of conflict-resolution will unfortunately and tangibly be present.
Humanism
We have already spoken about the only Humanist party that has been present at the elections (and with what show of courage!). Tsipras’s slogan in Italy “people come first” is a promising one. But will the Podemos party in Spain be considered partly representative of the necessity of using assembly running-methods and real democracy among the Indignados? We hope this is going to prove true with all our hearts. There are also many “Civic lists” in which we can trace an effort to start working by basing their policies on human needs and requirements.
Pacifism
In the wider and more amibiguous range of those who ought to be against war and in favour of peaceful conflict-resolution, we can hope to discover some of these ready to carry out some lobbying in favour of disamament and specific pacifist issues, since in this field we will and can count on the presence of some personal and horizontal alliances capable of influencing parliamentarians across different political alignments. But for the moment we can only go on hoping and start trying to understand what’s going on when we know exactly who’s there and what has actually come out of the polls.
To put it in a nutshell, today we find there is a greater distance between people and politics in Europe and that the latter is always less in line with concepts of humanism, nonviolence and non-descriminatory policies. Europe is always farther away from the man in the street and what things human beings really care for, as well asf from the values and issues so dear to the grassroots movements everywhere.
On a political and electoral level, what has happened among these trends and changes to the kind of people striving to build a better world in the course of their express existence? We observe an ever-growing distance between a world which is changing and its counter part, which is striving and hoping to perpetuate itself ad infinitum. Well, from this observation-post or ours, we intend to go on describing this new world with the hope that such ideals will tangibly be re-echoed in the palaces of Brussels and Strasburg.
Translation from italian by Francesca Piatti
