Lisbon declaration for a citizens’ revolution in Europe
“Now, the People!”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon (France Insoumise), Pablo Iglesias (Podemos, Spain) and Catarina Martins (Left Bloc, Portugal) signed on 12 April in Lisbon a joint declaration launching the construction of a European movement in view of the European elections of 2019.
‘Europe has never been as rich as it is today. At the same time, it has never been so unequal. Ten years after the burst of the financial crisis, which our people shouldn’t have paid for, we conclude that our European governants condemned us to a lost decade.
The dogmatic, irrational, ineffective application of austerity policies did not solve any structural problems caused by this crisis. On the contrary, it generated much of the unnecessary suffering of our peoples. With the pretext of the crisis and its adjustment programs, governments tried to tear apart social rights and systems which took decades to become guaranteed. They condemned the youngest generations to immigration, unemployment, precarity and poverty. They attacked with particular cruelty the most vulnerable, the ones who most need politics and State. They tried to force us to get used to the idea that elections are a choice between the liberal status quo and the far-right threaten.
It is time to break with the chains of the European treaties that impose austerity and promote social and fiscal dumping. It is time for those who believe in democracy to take a step and break up with this unacceptable spiral. We shall put an unfair, ineffective and unsustainable economical system at the service of life and under citizens’ democratic control. We need institutions that serve civil liberties and social rights, which are the basis of democracy. We need a popular, sovereign and democratic movement that defends better the conquests of our ancestors and attains a fair, viable and sustainable social order for the coming generations.
In this spirit of insubmission relative to the current state, of citizens’ revolt and trust in the democratic capacity of our peoples facing the extinct project of Brussels’ elites, today here in Lisbon, we take a step forward. We urge peoples from Europe to unite around the task of building an international, popular and democratic political movement as a means to organize ourselves to defend our rights and peoples sovereignty against an old and unfair order, which will lead us to catastrophe.
Those who want to defend: economic democracy against the big offenders e the 1% which holds more wealth than the rest of the planet; political democracy against those who revive hate and xenophobic speech; feminist democracy against a system that daily and in all areas of life discriminate half of the population; ecological democracy against an unsustainable economical system that threatens life in the planet; international democracy and peace, against those who are trying to build, once again, a war in Europe; those who defend human rights and basic principles of a dignifying life will find their place in this movement.
We are tired of waiting. We are tired of believing in those who govern us from Berlin and Brussels. We are working hard to build a new project for Europe’s organisation. A democratic, fair and equal organisation that respects people’s sovereignty. An organization that responds to our hopes and needs. An organisation serving peoples.’
