Good evening. Thank you so much for coming on behalf of Merit 25. So I've been asked a question, how do we take our future back? Well, what did we lose our future? I'll tell you when, 1978. How do I know? Because the Sex Pistols told me. Do you remember Sex Pistols? Do you remember a song, God Save the Queen and Her Fascist Regime? Well, there's a lyric in there, which says, there is no future. Another thing that they were very prescient in 1978, because they are about a year later, Margaret Thatcher came in and stole the whole of Europe's future, not just Britain's future. Now, why is Deutsche Bahn so terrible? I traveled on Deutsche Bahn yesterday and today. It is third world standards. Third world standards. Why do you still have fax machines in your ministries? Why do you have a Germany that is the greatest contradiction in the history of the planet? You have the greatest accumulation of wealth, of surpluses, and the greatest number of people who are worse off today than they were 20 years ago. Now, how is this possible? The world has gone through a process whereby capitalism, after the 1970s, around the time, the Sex Pistols were warning us that we lost our future. And what do I mean by that? Well, from the 1820s to 1978, every generation under capitalism, however hard their life was, believed that their children would have a better life. And usually that did. Okay, we went through the second world war. We went through various catastrophes. But if you look at it generation by generation, every generation of workers and the middle class was better off, a little bit better off than the previous one, from 1820 to 1978 and the Sex Pistols. That's when we lost our future. Today, especially after the catastrophe of the 2008 banking collapse, where Deutsche Bank, Finanz Bank, Societe Generale, Ben Peppariba, those four banks spearheaded the complete bankruptcy of every single European bank, which then led to the bailouts, first of Greece, first of the banks, then of states like Greece and so on, with austerity for the majority of the Greeks, the majority of the Germans, of the French and so on. Since 2008, this dream that the next generation will be better off, kaput, finito, finished, no future, or a future bleaker than the past. And the society less confident, worse educated, not as well informed, with media that was concentrating more and more and more in the hands of the few that were concentrating the ownership of the means of production, of distribution, of exchange, of trade, of communications. And since then, since 2008, especially, I remember I was here in this city, early 11th of February 2015, to negotiate with the European Central Bank, that they just moved into this monster, ugly building of the European Central Bank. Have you seen an uglier building than the ECB? I haven't. It was about then that the European Central Bank started printing trillions of euros, which they gave to the financiers. Next door, Frankfurt, city of London. Volkswagen, Siemens, they took the money, they didn't invest it. This is why Volkswagen is now irrelevant, absolutely irrelevant. They produce a lot of cars, but they make no money out of them because they have not invested in technologies. All these money that the European Central Bank printed, that the Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of America printed, the Bank of England printed, went into building up house prices, share prices, bond prices, not investment, not jobs, not prospects, no future. So you have inequality as a result, and you had something else. The only capitalists who invested money in machinery were the people in Silicon Valley of Big Tech, and the Chinese Big Tech in Shanghai. Now we have a new form of capital. I call it cloud capital. It's the capital that lives in your phone. It is the capital that lives in your laptop. It is a new form of capital that for the first time doesn't produce anything. It modifies your behavior and mind, and it modifies in the interests of the orders Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Alibaba, 10 cent, in order to take around 40 percent, 40 percent, 40 percent of international wealth away from workers, even away from capitalists, towards those cloud capitalists or cloud delis, I call them. They are algorithms, not only take our work, take our values, take essentially any possibility away from us for communicating with one another without the algorithm poisoning the conversation and causing huge degrees of discontent, because those algorithms make a lot of money for their owners when we hate each other, when we can't have a democratic dialogue with each other. Think of Twitter. As somebody put it, it's like every tweet, if you put it next to one another, it's a bit like collecting the graffiti from inside men's toilets in pubs and bars. It's just ugliness, hatred, poison. That is what's happening to our public debates, while politicians are in another universe. Germany is indeed industrializing, and there's not a single political party in Germany discussing it, not a single, everybody's trying to do that which the Greek bourgeoisie was doing in 2010. 2010, we, the Greeks were bankrupt, and our rulers tried to do one thing, to make sure that nothing changes. Similarly, with your political class, from the Linke all the way to the IFD, everybody's trying to think of how we're going to subsidize the conglomerates, the electricity markets. Nobody's discussing what is the next step, how do we move away from a failed model, the new model for Germany, the new model for Europe, the new model for the world. So, how do we take our future back? Well, there is an old idea, which is extraordinarily radical, and that is why it's so hated. That is why they are trying to do their best to destroy it. It's called democracy. But not the democracy that these people are talking about, who claim that whatever they do, they do it for democracy. They continue the war in Ukraine forever for democracy. They are massacring Palestinians for democracy. They are destroying the planet for democracy or democratically. No, democracy meant one thing in ancient Athens, rule by the poor. That's how Aristotle, who didn't like democracy by the way, that's how he defined it. Democracy is a system where the poor govern, because by definition the poor are in the majority. Our democracy was designed so the majority is never in power. That was the whole point of the Constitution of the United States of America, which then we inherited here in Europe, because the American Constitution was the first liberal democratic constitution. If you read the memoirs of those who wrote it, who wrote the American Constitution, it's clear. One concern they had was how to stop the people from governing through representation, through elections. So our elections are there to legitimize us not having democracy. So how do I take our future back? By putting the demos back into democracy. And this is what we're trying to do with Mellon 25. Thank you so much for being here. We haven't filled too soon, as you might say. It's not going to be easy, but let's have a go. We'll probably fail, okay? We'll probably fail. I give it a very high probability. But so what?  I don't believe in the afterlife. I'm an atheist. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to enjoy every day that I live. Similarly, we will keep fighting every day we live, because it's the only way of having a good life and reclaiming the future. Thank you. Yeah, many thanks to Yanis for your distribution here. And so on. Now we come to the second guest tonight. I will tell something about Helge Poekhardt. Helge Poekhardt? Yeah, I will tell something about you, Helge. Little things. Is it okay? All right. Yeah. I mean, I can say a lot, but I will do it shortly. He received the degree in sociology in 1983 and economics in 1986. He was awarded a doctor in political science and economics in 1991 and doctorate in philosophy in 1994. In 1996, he was appointed professor of economics at the University of Latvia, where he remained until June 97. He was also a private lecturer at the University here in Frankfurt from April 2003. Poekhardt was a university lecturer at the University of Erfurt. He had been a professor at the University of Siegen since 2006. And his focus is on the history of economic thoughts, economic history, heterodox theory, formation, fundamental ecological ecology, and financial markets, as well as post-autistic economic, plural economic, real-world economics. He works as an author for the Gabler Economic Lexicon. Poekhardt is a member of the Visory Board of Attic Germany and a founding member of the Science for Socioeconomic Education and Science. Poekhardt is a signatory of an open letter in support of the demands of scientists rebellion and off-shot for scientists of extinction rebellion, compatible to science for future. Yeah, I would now ask Helge Poekhardt to explain his ideas and thoughts on this question as well. Please, Hoek. You didn't leave out anything. Thanks for that. Ten minutes already, almost over. Yes, nice to see you. Hello, Fox. The MIRRA program addresses the topic of the ecological threats and I will concentrate on this. Now, if we have a look at the last IPCC report, when you have a look at the objective data, then you see that we have a remaining emissions budget of zero. So, it's not 1,000 megatons or so. No, it's zero. If you don't believe it, I have the chart here. So, come to me later on. I'll show you. And now this has a consequence. And the consequence is that our way of life, that everything is questioned. That's the main problem. Our usual way of living, our civilization, the basics of economy and society, they don't hold even more. Now, usually an active person would deal with these things, but unfortunately, many humans have the human genome and then they react in a different way. There is uncertainty and then they react with fear, denial, roll back. And that's why we have these conservative, rice-taste, fascist, anti-migration movements. It's an expression of this basic fear. And even the German Council of Environmental Experts, this is a public and official institution, even they say that on Karnival, the emissions budget was over. But last year in 2022, when you check their documents, then you can see this. And then you are surprised. Well, why does the government don't talk about this? So, we have a zero emission budget. But in fact, in Germany, last year, we had 750 million tons emissions. And that's a difference. Now, when we have a look at the Paris agreements, you know that the targets are low and even these low targets are failed. And we are approaching at least three degrees global warming. And this means for Germany it can end up with six degrees. And that's a lot. And then we have not even spoken about the planetary boundaries. And as you may have read, six out of nine have already been crossed. And we did not talk about the probable tipping points. And we did not talk about the 1050 rule, which says that 10 percent of the world population consume 50 percent of the resources. And 50 percent use 10 percent of the resources. So, we have here a North-South divergence. And all this is really a problem. Now, we can ask how does the German government and the EU, for example, and the international institutions, how do they deal with this? And they have a wonderful fairy tale. And this is eco-modernism. And what is this? On the one hand, they say, and they have wonderful chance for this. And it's hard to believe that the emissions go down to zero, but growth, sorry, but growth can continue forever, you know? So, indefinite growth. So, that's the story.  And that's why Mera25 addresses this subject. And that's a positive thing.  But in fact, it is a little bit. They discuss the capitalist regulation regime and make it a topic. And that is correct. Why? When you ask, why are these denial mechanisms? Why don't they face the problems? We have to be aware that we are living in a competitive and profit economy. So, growth, cost externalization, land grabbing, expansion, constant expansion, and also innovations, but with new rebound effects, which we don't foresee, is a fact. So, that's the system inherent growth dynamics. And on the other hand, we have a limited state, a very limited state. We have a structural dependency.  No, it's a structural dependency because we have a tax and competitive state. And so, there is necessarily a joint purpose alliance of politics with the holders of economic and financial power. So, it's independent of these, Marxists would say, character masks, you know. And so, that's the the uprise of the problem. And the German Federal Environment Agency, the Umbert Bundesamt, and now I quote, I quote, because maybe you didn't believe it, a global per capita emission of less than one ton of CO2 would be climate compatible, which would require a reduction of around 95% compared to today's level, which is 11.5 tons. So, now you ask, and I'm a little bit ill, that oh, I drink a little bit. And now the now the proposal, now the proposal. So, many branches must shrink by well over 50%, if not 70%. So, we need the industrialization. Maybe some of Mera have a different opinion, but in my view, it's impossible to reach acceptable targets when we don't shrink massively the fossil cement energy deforestation companies, the automobile chemical fertilizer, airlines, metal and financial sector point point point. What's this translate? So, these these companies and sectors must shrink dramatically. And how can this be? We need an orderly radical conversion. And we need a German or people who live in Germany, German skilled employees. We need around 500,000 persons per year as doctor, nurses, IT, research, bus and train drivers, pharmaceuticals, etc. And I think it's not okay when we take the employees, the competent employees of developing countries because they should be there. Otherwise, people are starving there because we say thank you, give us your good people, and you can stay alone. You know, that's no that's no policy in my view. That's leapfrogging in a very bad manner. So 500,000 persons per year are required, so we need a great conversion. And now how can this be? How can this be financed because there will be a great of stress, you know. And in my view, and this is hinted at more or less indirectly in the in the Mera program by central banks, not this central banks against which we protested, a blockchip, etc. But a reformed central bank and we would need gift money. Now gift money, what does it mean? Don't take the German word. It means Schenkgeld. And this means that the central bank should put money on the table of public bodies, and then they can spend it. They don't have to pay interest and they don't have to pay back the money. So it's free of charge. Why not? Then usually the inflation argument comes and this can be counted. Okay, so we need free money, gift money by the central banks to finance this. Because today it is argued we first need a growing economy to have taxes, and then we can spend money to prevent the consequences of this growth, you know. And this is the cat, you know, the cat. And so that doesn't work. And we need a conditional basic income. In my view, a conditional one. So the public sector has to establish working conditions in the sectors I mentioned, and there must be a living income. And this can be financed via this gift money. In addition, we need, it's okay, so we need an emergency plan. For example, the emission trading system, we need steep and predictable increases up to 300 tons. That's a lot. That's a lot. I know. The maximum income should be, as far as I see it, 10 times the minimum wage. We need a radical tax reform. My understanding is maybe a little bit more radical than MERA. 75% on resources and emissions. 75%. Today it's on labor. And that's really an unfortunate constellation. We need new forms of ownership. Because when we don't have growth and compensatory consumption, then people must be happy at the workplace. It's as easy as that. And maybe we need only 20 or 30, I think maybe 20 hours of formal work in the formal sector. And then we have an informal sector with care, repair, and so-called own work, eigenarbeit. And maybe even we need a CO2 tax for over one or two tons per person per year. And if a person consumes more, and this is not transferable, you know? Poor rich. If people consume more, 5% of their personal annual income per ton should be cashed in. That's an idea. I have many more proposals, just three or four. I wanted also to talk about the financial sector, but I think that's unfair because 10 minutes are over, and maybe this can be a topic of our debate. So just some two or three further proposals. In the primary sector, an end of factory farming, for sure. We have to prohibit environmentally harmful fertilizers and pesticides. The EU Commission has exactly done the opposite two weeks ago. Maybe we even need consumption to ration, consumption via ration cards, because the prices with these high CO2 certificate increases, they will be very expensive, you know, and no pesticides, etc., maybe no Haber-Bosch, etc., then they will be very expensive. And then maybe we even need rationing. I don't like rationing, and I know that there were some countries where rationing occurred, and people have not been very happy. I know it. So a frantic standstill is effect today, and many wheels stand still, and they should do so. So bus and trains should be free of charge. And in my view, 70% of private cars have simply to disappear. Otherwise, it won't work. In intermediate time, private petrol and diesel consumption could be 500 litres per person and per year. That's bad. No more cruise ships and low-cost airlines and even a closure of most, especially the smaller airports. And sure, then all disposal products, including cups, foil and bottles. So I have 20 more proposals here, or 30. Time runs out. And, yes, and I skip, I skip, I skip the financial part. Maybe you can ask this question later, Dada. And then I can talk a little bit about it. Thanks. Many thanks to Helge for his contribution to our question, how we can get our future back. Now I would like to invite Yanis and Helge to take a seat here. I prepare some questions, or we prepare some questions for you. Please. There are all these mobile phones on tables. Well, we are quite good in time. Thanks a lot for this short introducing. And, yeah, we'll start now. I get some questions for both of you in a different ways. I start now because I think you need a little rest. Helge, I start with Yanis. I want to ask him like, we are now, since 2019 now, in the last EU election, what was happened until now? Well, we lost last June. We had won nine seats in Greece in July of 2019. And we lost them. The fascists replaced us in parliament. That's the long and the short of it. And the reason, I mean, my reason, you may have a different reason. I think we did a very good job in parliament. We were widely recognized as having done a very good job in parliament. But you know what? The left gets one opportunity in 20, 30 years. Because, let's face it, we live in societies where the majority of working people of the Petit Bourgeoisie, they fear. They fear change. You know, the system, the media, drum into them the fear and the belief in Tina that there is no alternative to the system. So, the left, if we manage once every 20, 30 years to excite people, we're doing well. And we need to take advantage of that moment of radicalization. 2015, the people trusted us. They set aside their fear. They went against the European Central Bank, Shoible, Merkel, the Greek oligarchy, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, the American government. And they gave us a mandate. And then they gave us the mandate again in the referendum. And we betrayed them. It doesn't matter what I did and Cyprus did and, you know, that doesn't matter. A taxi driver put it to me beautifully recently. Just after the election, he said, I agree with everything you say, but I didn't vote for you. I said, why not? He said, well, you know what? I can't forgive you. I said, what did I do? He said, you didn't do anything. He said, so why can't you forgive me? He said, because you gave me hope. And then you took it away. You failed. So, but you know, comrades, there's no final victory. And there's no final defeat. And we have to keep going because capitalism, what I call now techno feudalism, is constantly creating one crisis after the other. Soon there will be no planet on which we can live. And the producers ourselves, right?  So we need to keep struggling. That's why I said before that, you know, we may not win, but we have to keep fighting. Somehow keep fighting. Maybe another question for Helge. In your view, in your view, what would have to happen to implement the Mera25 proposals? The focus you already told us, explain us, is harmonizing resources, avoiding over production, very important point, preventing growing constructions, eliminating social and climate environments, disasters, and ending wars. Doesn't matter which ones. What are the points? Can you citate for the radical ecological turnout? Oh, yeah, that's a brief question. In my view, what we need is education of the people. And I think I'm very ecologically oriented in the last years that the ecological crisis may open the eyes to many people that this capitalist system can't endure forever. And then we need a re-empowerment of the state. And as I mentioned, the state or public organs are in chain today, in chain. So why? Because private banks create money. And it's not the central bank, which gives free money or gift money to the public bodies. And then they can spend it for reasonable things. And so, yes, I believe maybe in the positive effect of negative effects of climate change, which is not a very good statement, I know. And then maybe we change the basic structure of financing and also a domestication of the financial sectors. And I have some proposals, but I'll tell you later. Oh, so on. Yeah, anyway. Capitalism, now another question for Yanis. I don't want to disturb, actually, just leave all these answers like they are. We can discuss maybe later on on the table and get a little talk. But Yanis, I'm thinking that capitalism is on the end somehow. But the free market has looking since the call of itself from the real economy states are entering in the crisis, you already told, compensations and cuts are being made in social areas. And digitalization is overtaking international society, you already also talked. Where are these phenomenon landing and what steps must be taken to prevent a devastating catastrophe? The problem is not digitalization. I love digital devices. I love science. I love technology. That is not a problem. The problem is that we have a new form of technology, of technological capital. Another technology is the capital that is based on digital technologies, which can change the way we answer the question, the infamous and beautiful question that Vladimir Ilitch Lenin asked. He described politics as the answer to the question, who does what to whom? Who has the power to make you do things? Now we have a new form of capital. This is something we really must take very seriously, because, you see, for the first time, the first time in the history of capitalism, we have machines in a dialectical relationship with us, machines that we train to train us, to train them, to train us, to train them, to train us, to train them, to put ideas into our minds, ideas of what we want to believe and ideas of what we want to buy. And once we get these ideas, they sell them to us directly by passing any capitalist market. Amazon.com is not a market. It's the digital fiefdom belonging to one man who charges 40%. The vassal capital is called selling the stuff. The same algorithm, the same algorithm, think about it, the same algorithm that belongs to Jeff Bezos is trained by us to tell us what we want, sends it to us, and drives the proletarian labor inside the Amazon warehouse that delivers it to us. You know, they have this device on their hand, which actually drives them like Charlie Chaplin's modern times. So that is, you know, that is the future. You see, people say to me, what will artificial intelligence do to us?  The question is, what has it already done to us? This is already reality today. It's not what AI will do, right? So social democracy is dead. The old social democratic ways of redistributing income and wealth and all that, gone. Think of, let's take a very simple example, right? As we speak, AI programs, you can see one up there, can double the productivity of the labor force, take a company that has a hundred workers. You buy one of these bits of AI and suddenly you can do the same work. You can have the same output that 50 workers can produce, okay? Now, there is no tax system. There is no labor market protection program that can prevent that capitalist from firing 50 of the 100 workers. But imagine a different system where that company belonged to the 100 workers who would want to take this AI machine in order for them to work half the time. Imagine the beautiful effect on society if these people can produce the same outcome and half of the time look after the elderly, their children, the community, read poetry, play music. That is prosperity. So we should never turn against the, what I call cloud capital, but we should aim at the old Marxist idea of grabbing the ownership of the means of production, not just of production, not just of distribution, not just of exchange, but also of computation, the digital devices. So let's socialize Google and Amazon.com and all these AI driven applications which are going to deny our future and also regarding climate change. People say to me that Jens, come on, the planet is dying, why do we care about AI? Well, because our public debates take place through AI now, through TikTok, through Instagram, through Facebook. And these algorithms, when they belong to the very, very, very few, they are designed to make us hate each other and not to have a conversation. And if we don't have a conversation, we cannot organize politically, democracy is finished, we cannot do anything about climate change. You want to say something about that? Yes, usually I like to disagree, but in this case it's hard to do. No, I totally agree with you. And the problem is that Instagram, TikTok, etc., at the beginning I thought that's exaggerated, but unfortunately it seems not to be, that it undermines democracy, that hate, etc., is the result and infantilization, etc., etc., so that's very dangerous even for formal democracy and manipulation is overwhelming. When you take chat GPT, at the moment it's more or less neutral, but it's in private hands. And now a person like Elon Musk, one day, persons like him who are right is, they will influence the content of things like chat GPT. For example, to introduce some recommendations or so, and it's hard to check this. And I cannot see that the European Commission or anybody else is really aware or willing to tackle this problem. And so far, I agree with you, this has to be taken out of the hands of private entrepreneurs.  Yes, I will mention a point and I'm sure that many attendants here will not like this. The point is on migration. I see a real problem when you say we accept political and economic migration. We try to have checkpoints in the countries where people apply. And then people have a basic income and a basic pension here. I think that is absolutely not possible. Now you can ask, well, what's your proposal? Do you say they should leave where they are responsible for their own mess? No, I don't say that. In my view, the only reasonable policy and as an abstract principle, that's easy to say I know. But the only way to deal adequately with these problems is to make sure that there are conditions in these countries that people can and like to stay. That's the only possibility. And this influences the EU foreign policy, for example, trade policy in Somalia. There are no more fishes because you have the EU, they bought rides to fish there also north on Africa, etc. And then it's no surprise that people say, well, we follow the fish. So that's very normal. So I would deal with this problem a little bit differently. Yes, as I said, we should support these countries that people can stay there. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And this is an abstract principle now. But to open the borders is in my view, is very, very difficult because there will be not least due to climate change, there will be hundreds of millions who should have the right to migrate. And that's a problem. In my view, Janis, what's your point? Look, I see you, I recognize your concern, especially if we have a basic income, which is a good one that will act as a magnet for millions of people who are already being magnetized anyway, even without the basic income. But, we are in the country of Emmanuel Kant, who taught us one thing. We have no right, and it is not rational, to treat people as a means to an end. 32,000 people have died. We kill them. We Europeans kill them because we have created a big, ugly wall around the European Union, which essentially, consciously or subconsciously, increasingly consciously, drowns people in the Mediterranean Sea, especially in the Aegean Sea, as a means to keep the rest out. Europe is a criminal continent for the reasons that you are putting forward for that logic. It's not an abstract concept. We now have front-ex as we speak in my country. As we speak, there are 25 instances every day of pushing back boats, back to Turkey, back to Lebanon, and people are drowning. This is the human cost of keeping them out, as you say, we should. My view and the view of Meret 25 is let them in, because it is the right thing to do. Let me also speak to your proposal, that we should do our best to help them stay there. I don't disagree with you on this. You know what would help? To remove the colonial extractive industries in Africa, in Asia, that are destroying their lives. However, it is an irrefutable, empirical fact that even if their living standards start rising, the number of migrants who will come to Europe will also rise.  Even more, 25,000 euros. Even more. Even more. So the high, you know, there's going to be this kind of a curve. So you increase the average income in Africa or in Asia or in Afghanistan, right? You increase the average income, if you do, if you manage to do what you are saying, and the number of migrants will increase. They will not decrease for a long while, and only once they reach a certain level of development equivalent to China's per capita, then they don't want to migrate anymore. So this idea that we, and in any case, the concept which is often misrepresented as a Marxist one, that the foreigner comes in and that reduces the bargaining power of the proletariat at home. And sometimes this is ascribed to Marx. This is bad science and bad Marxism. Usually what happens, because I have been, as you probably know, I've been engaged in these debates for decades, there was this letter that you may remember that Marx wrote to comrades in New York regarding Irish migrants. And in that letter, he, which is often quoted by those who are from a left-wing point of view against migration, in which he says that the Irish migrants into New York and New Jersey in particular will be used by the American capitalists in order to depress wages in New Jersey and New York. That's the first part of the letter. This is usually what is being quoted. The second part is not quoted, in which Marx himself says, yeah, but the solution to this is not to keep them out. The solution is to organize them in the trade unions together with the local workers. That must be our objectives and have made no mistake. People not want to leave their homes and make no mistake. There is no distinction between political and economic migrants. I do not care whether somebody took their kid and put them in a boat at the risk of drowning together with their kid because they had a gun to the head or because the kid was starving and couldn't have milk and couldn't have anything to eat. For me, it's one and the same thing. It's television. Well, yeah, the many migrations and we have to talk now about all these wars, but yes, the treat of war and the plight of the Palestine is a key element of your campaign at the moment. Why did you choose these topics? No, no, not a piece. The Palestine and are a key of your elements now in your campaign. Why you choose this, the Palestinians and war, the Palestinians and... Well, you know, if I were living in 1943, I would have chosen the Holocaust as the number one issue that didn't allow me to sleep at night. Today, there's a genocide happening in Gaza and in the West Bank. That keeps me awake. Two years ago, it was the massacre and the famine in Yemen that kept me awake. On the 24th of February of 2022, when I put in order these troops into Ukraine, that kept me awake. War, massacre, genocide, Holocaust keeps me awake. I think that we should all be kept awake by that and it should be the number one priority of any political program. Any political program, peace and the end of wars which result in only in losers, there are no winners in these wars, especially when you've got a European Union, which is complicit in these massacres. Let's look at Ukraine first and then Palestine because these are the two big ones happening now. They are not the only ones. There is Kashmir, there is Yemen, there is Myanmar, there are lots and lots of atrocities taking place with our complicity. But Ukraine and Palestine are our backyard and our responsibility.  There is no doubt about that.  This is the kind of criminal we're talking about, right? But when he invades, I'm not going to go into the question of whether he was provoked or not. He was certainly provoked, but that doesn't absolve him. That doesn't make him that he's right because he was provoked by the United States, which always wanted a war in the backyard of the European Union. He gets in. Our party, Mayor 25, immediately, day after that, we came out with our intervention. We said, this war must end now. Putin is a criminal, but we must prevent an ever-ending war because this war is going to turn into a new Afghanistan, a combination of Afghanistan and the First World War in our backyard. And the only way to safeguard the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine is for the West to go to Putin and cut a deal. And the deal that we were proposing was really very simple. troops go back to where they were before the 24th of February 2022 in exchange for a commitment by the West that Ukraine will not enter NATO along the lines of Austria. In the same way, Austria during the Cold War was not a member of NATO, but it was a liberal democracy. And the Donbass area should be ruled along the lines of something like the Good Friday Agreement that resolved the Northern Irish. Instead of that, what you have is you have Ursula von der Leyen and Stoltenberg to unelected idiots, fools, receiving word directly from Washington DC and dragging the European Union into a permanent, never-ending war, which is going to kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and destroy any possibility of a prosperous Ukraine within a functioning European Union. Who wins from this perpetual war in Ukraine? Putin, the moment that war ends, Putin is finished. He will be overthrown from within. He will not be overthrown as long as this war continues, like Netanyahu. Netanyahu, the moment there is an end to the massacre in Gaza and the kind of calm, not peace, calm, Netanyahu will be overthrown. So these people, Putin and Netanyahu, want a never-ending massacre. That's what they want. Zelensky too, because Zelensky will be finished. The moment there's peace in Ukraine, he's out. Who else benefits? Texan, a new Mexican, fracking oil and natural gas companies, because they are providing now all the natural gas in Europe that Gazprom is not providing. Who else? The arms industry, the weapon manufacturers. These are the only winners. Everybody else is a loser, especially the European Union, especially, of course, the Ukrainians. When it comes to Palestine, look, folks, it's comrades, friends, Europeans, Germans, Greeks, whoever, whatever you are in this room. I never agreed, well, on the 7th of October I happened to be in Berlin and I was being interviewed and I was asked to, whether I condemned Hamas and I said no. But I also added, I condemn every single piece of violence against a civilian. But don't care who has done it, whether it is Israel, Hamas, me, you, any act of violence against a civilian, I condemn. I do not condemn Hamas. And then I added, I do not even condemn the settlers, the Israeli settlers, or even Netanyahu. I condemn us Europeans. We created this massacre there. Only we, Europeans, centuries of antisemitism, centuries of pogroms of the Jewish people here in Europe, not in Africa, not in Jerusalem. Jews and Arabs were living side by side in perfect harmony until we Europeans put our finger into it. So we had pogroms in Ukraine, we had pogroms in Poland, we had pogroms in Greece of the Jews, in Ioannina, in the Saloniki, we had pogroms in, of course, Spain, right? We forgot the South Europe. Yeah, we had pogroms everywhere, right? And those pogroms led to the Holocaust.  You are responsible for the Holocaust. But so are we, because it wasn't just the German Nazis. It was the Greek Nazis, the Croat Nazis, the Serb Nazis, the French Nazis, the Lithuanian Nazis, the Estonian Nazis, the Russian Nazis, the Ukrainian Nazis. There were plenty of Nazis in Europe in the 1940s who were not, who were not German. Remember, one is responsible for that, right? And then we are responsible for the perpetuation of those atrocities by supporting Zionism. Now what is Zionism? One expression, the main slogan of Zionism from the late 19th century to this day is, a land without a people, for a people without a land, a land without a people. Now, who used this first? This is a rhetorical question, the British. The British used this expression first in 1778 in Australia. When they disembarked in Australia, the British looked at five and a half million Aborigines and said, you're not humans. This is a land without people for us. In other words, you are not human. This is the dehumanization process that begins the massacre, the genocide. And the result is that five and a half million Aborigines then, 120,000 today, right? Land without a people. That is a slogan of white supremacist settlement, that Zionism. And we in Europe are politicians across Europe. Effectively, we condoned the idea that the Palestinians will be deemed non-human. Palestine is a land without a people, for a people without a land. The project, the Zionist project from 1948, the Nakba, was a project not of colonialism. Because when the British went to India, they didn't want to replace the local population. They wanted to take over the factories, the ports, the assets, the trade, and they sent managers, the British Empire managers. It was in Australia that they wanted to eliminate the people to take the land, the British. India and Australia are not the same thing. Similarly, they did the same thing to South Africa and Kenya. White settlement colonialism, not the same thing as pure colonialism. And it is this model that has been practiced in Palestine. From 1948, the Zionist project is a project not of colonization, of elimination of the Palestinian people and keeping some of them in order to treat them as in the same way that the Boers in South Africa wanted to have some blacks working for them in their houses, in their mines, in their factories, but not in their cities. They wanted to have them elsewhere around walls in Bantu stands. That's Israeli apartheid today. And that has been happening from 1948. So in on the 7th of October of 9 of 2023, I refused to condemn the attack against Israel because what do people do when you pick them in a prison camp?  Some of these rebels are going to be inhuman. I condemn the inhumanity. I salute the rebellion. Every people who rebel against a portrait, dissolve our support. And in any case, in any case, you know our friend, Iris Heffetz from Berlin. She was arrested in Berlin. She's an Israeli Jew some months ago. She went out of her street with the placard she had written on it, as an Israeli and as a Jew, stopped the killing in Gaza. And she was arrested by a white German policeman for antisemitism. Unless the Palestinians are freed, we are not going to be free in this country, in my country, in Europe. Have I said that? I need to make clear our Mera 25 policy on this. The moment, any moment, a Jewish person, a Jewish person feels threatened just because he or she is Jewish. We are going to wear the start of David here in support. Similarly, the moment the Palestinian is threatened, we will wear the kefir like Dushan is wearing. I don't care personally what kind of state or states or statelets we have between the sea and the river. I don't care. What I care is we have universal human rights and political liberties between these two bodies of water, because I believe in Germany you're not allowed to say from the river to the sea. And this is our policy. And unless we stop being complicit in this crime against humanity as Europeans, we shall never be free, because our regime, which is so complicit in the massacres in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Israel and elsewhere, looks at the majority of you in the same way that they look at the Palestinians. They have no interest in their well-being. Puh, panayiamu. I will not comment totally on it. And it was not easy to understand here. As far as I understood, you called it genocide, right? What's going on there at the moment? Not me. It is genocide. Yes. And in my view, as a German who feels in a certain sense responsible for the Shoah, there should be made differences.  I thought that's the definition of genocide. What is the definition of Holocaust? Well, let me see if we can agree on something. What is the genocide? Well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you. Well, there's a foreign definition in the United Nations. It's a legal definition. It's not a question of opinion. But let me see if we can agree, because it's important that you and I should agree on this, like everybody else should agree on this, right? So that we can have a united front amongst progressives. Look, I agree with you that the Holocaust, the Torah, was the, it was a unique evil. This is not what's happening now in Palestine. It's not what happened by the French in Algeria. And I agree with you that the Holocaust was unique because the Nazis wanted to keep 100 percent of the Jews. They were like stamp collectors. You know, a stamp collector wants to have the whole collection. And if there is one missing, they can sleep at night. That's where the Nazis were the Jews. The Israelis are not like that. The French were not like that. The Turks were not like that with the Armenians. They didn't want to kill everyone. They wanted to kill enough of them to eradicate them from that part of the land for them to shift out. That's what they wanted. So genocide differs from the Holocaust. There was only one Holocaust in the history of the world. And hopefully there won't be another one. And the Jews were the victims. And we're all responsible for it, as I said before, okay? But now what's the definition? The genocide, the definition of genocide is systematic killing, reduction, withdrawal of basic goods for life, like water, like electricity, like electricity today. Back then it was, I don't know what, bread or wheat. For the purposes of killing, a large percentage of an ethnic group saw us to push them out of their native land. So the Armenians, we talk about an Armenian genocide, don't we? It's already been passed in the United Nations. Most of them were killed. No, no, no, they were not. That is not true. 30% were killed. It was a genocide. It was a genocide because it succeeded. They had to shift up to the Caucasus. They came to Greece. They went to Canada. They went to Germany, right? And it was systematic. So according to the United Nations, doesn't matter what you and I think, the massive systematic massacre of the Armenians, which of course did not kill all of them because now there is a country called Armenia, their descendants are there. And the Turks didn't want to follow them up. The Turkish regime that killed them, massacred them, genocided them, didn't mind them moving on.  They wanted simply to do ethnic cleansing. So that was a genocide. They're one then genocide of the Tutsis. That was a genocide. If you call what happened in Germany, in Poland, in Europe, in the 1940s a genocide, you are downgrading the Holocaust. This is why I make a distinction between the Holocaust and genocide, right? What's happening now, it is very clear. Listen to the Israeli members of cabinet. We need to get rid of them, to get rid of them. The whole, the native Palestinians who had been there for 20 generations, they need to be gotten rid of and replaced by settlers from New Jersey and from Brooklyn. This is what they're doing. That is genocide. This is not just killing. It's not just a massacre. It is a systematic plan ethnically to cleanse and to replace one population by a settler population. That is the official definition of genocide in the United Nations and also in the Treaty of Rome that constituted the International Criminal Court. Yes, okay. Well, thank you for the, okay. Only one remark, only one from my side, one final remark. I cannot accept these. I totally reject what Hamas has done, irrespective of maybe reasons. And I want to point out, without discussing it further, that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians. All right. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You'll get your chance. You'll get your chance. You'll get your chance. Okay. Look, look. You know what? You know what? I personally, allow me to say this. You said that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians. Does Netanyahu represent the Israelis? No, I don't think he does. I do not recognize in Netanyahu somebody who speaks for Israelis. My Israeli comrades treat him and look at him like a war criminal. They do not want to be represented by him. No, no. What you're saying is that, what you're saying is that Netanyahu is the head of a government which is recognized by Germany. That's what you're saying. That's what you're saying. That's the only difference, right? That's the only difference. Well, I have certain logical difficulties grasping the position of the German government because the German government claims, if you ask Olaf Scholz, Habek, all of them, they will tell you that their official policy is a two-state solution in Palestine, right? That's what they say since Oslo. And lots of people. I used to support a two-state solution. I don't anymore. No, it's not just unrealistic. Anyway, this doesn't matter what they believe. I'm telling you that, you know, if you ask the German government, the French government, the American government, Joe Biden, two-state solution, and yet they are fully supporting a man, Netanyahu, whom they recognize as the official head of the Israeli state, whose life work was to ensure that the two-state solution never happens and who has violated international law day after day after day, and he has broken the Oslo Accords and who has supported Hamas for 20 years financially.  This country is complicit in war crimes. My country is complicit in war crimes. So that is why I'm refusing to accept that Hamas needs to be condemned. You know what? I'm an atheist. They would probably hang me. I don't know, but I'm not going to condemn them, because when you have a people who have been completely, completely repented and refused any option, where people say to me, ah, but Hamas, you know, they don't recognize Israel. Well, does Israel recognize Palestine? No. Secondly, imagine that today there's a button here. Let's suppose, you know, there's a button here. Mental experiment, science fiction. We press it and Hamas have a conversion.  What's going to happen? We know what's going to happen. It's happening with West Bank, because the PLO recognized Israel and laid down its arms. And what is happening? Ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. So, Hamas is not a problem. The problem is tyranny. The problem is gates. The problem is threats. We are not analyzing the same boots to carry out a genocide in Palestine, in Israel, against the interests of Israelis, against the interests of genus. And this is where the best defenders, the best defenders of both Israel and Palestine, our Jewish comrades, people like Gideon Levy, people like Ilan Pappe, who are like, what? Yes, yes, yes. There's a long list of Jews who are at the forefront of saving us from our complicity with the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israeli apartheid. Well, thanks a lot for the very strange answer. And I think we can continue to talk about that later on. We are like running for the time. And I get another question for Helga. For almost all Europe's wide crisis, we're coming now to the financial part, because you know that all the wars, it's happened because we're pumping, pumping and pumping further on lots of money and producing weapons and so on. So, for almost a wide international crisis such housing shortage, labor force, devaluation, health standards, lack of education, social insecurity and democratic blockheads. But probably we have to define the democracy again, but we call it now here, democratic blockheads. The financial markets is the basis and place at this zeef point in role. What are your concrete proposals? What are your concrete proposals? And what financial reforms would still be necessary? Yes, okay. Not so easy to change the subject, but first of all, we have many mini crashes, you know, Credit Suisse. We had the U.S. regional banks, we had recently the New York Community Bank, and commercial real estate of one trillion is outstanding and that's a lot, even for small banks here in Frankfurt. And the main insight should be that the financial markets are not usual markets. Usually, to give you one example, when prices rise, the demand goes down very often or you have substitution or you have further increase of supply. In this case, it's opposite. You have an increase of asset prices and then the demand goes up and then the demand goes even further up. You can create money out of thin air and you have too big to fail. So, the central banks intervene and the afterglow is that we have hundreds and thousands of problems we are facing now with the increasing inflation, et cetera, et cetera. Interesting story, but very bad in fact. And we have an international of globalists. The central banks belong to it as the bank of the banks, inside job economies, economists, you wrote a nice textbook. I have it at home, by the way, mega-corps, credit card companies, et cetera, et cetera, and the rich and wealthy. And so, what could be done? They prevented and we have power concentration. So, for example, BlackRock, the management under assets, the volume is higher than the German GDP and that's really a lot. So, what can we just to name three or four? First, a one-day minimum holding period. When you talk with people around the corner here, they say, you are crazy because we are dealing in milliseconds and I say, well, why do you do that? To make money exactly, money for nothing. So, a one-day holding period would be revolutionary and the high frequency trade would disappear immediately. Second, as I mentioned, the gift money through central banks. So, a re-empowerment of the state. Third, full, that's a little bit difficult to explain, full or positive money. Vollgeld in German. This means at the moment, private banks can create money via credit and that's very bad because you always have credit cycles and this can hardly be controlled by the central banks. And therefore, a national bank, a central bank should be the only institution to create money. The banks can give credits, they can do this, but only when people have saved. That makes a big difference. Then, sure, we need, as for the IT companies, you mentioned a de-concentration of the megabanks, 50 billion or 100, that should be the maximum. And two more and that's it. Prohibitions, short-selling, should not be allowed. It didn't exist 30 years ago. Very bad effects should not be there. Credit default swaps, credit ausfallversicherung, that's also very bad. You make money when other people have problems, that's bad because then you try to create their problems. And just for insiders, repose, maturity mismatch, very bad. And finally, 30 percent, you mentioned 10 percent in your program, I would put 20 on top and say 30 percent unbalanced equity capital that could serve as a buffer. And at the moment, in the EU, we have very tiny, tiny reformation, little, little reforms. That's not that much. And the next financial crisis is looming, maybe before the European elections, and then maybe you are in parliament. I won't tie you very much, just very briefly. I want you to imagine how the world would change drastically if we were to introduce two small, small-looking pieces of legislation. One, you cannot buy and sell shares to a company. You can only get one share if you work in a company, like you get a library card when you go to university.  You can't sell it. You can't lease it. You can't rent it. You can't buy it. You can use it. You can use it to vote, to use your computer facilities, the library. Imagine if that were the case. So corporate law says that anybody who works in the company is a part owner of the company, and that's it. And these shares are the only shares. The second piece of legislation, just science fiction, I know, but imagine the second piece of legislation, the European Central Bank gives a digital account to each one of us, a digital wallet. It's in your app. You have the app from your bank. You have an app from the ECB, and you have a PIN number, and you can direct all your salary, your wages, or payments made to you in there for the ECB. And you can make any payments to anybody from that app for free. Think of what these two pieces of legislation would do to the world we live in. Firstly, no more stock exchanges. Here in Frankfurt it will close, because if you can't buy and sell shares, the stock exchange is gone. Secondly, no private banks. What's the point of the private bank if you can have a free account in the ECB, and you can transfer your money for free on the ledger of the ECB?  But then again, if they fail because they will do it, then you don't need to save them, because everyone will have a capacity to have their savings on their ECB account, and the payment system will not belong to the bankers. So suddenly you have the complete diminution of the banking sector, the bank sector. But without any rules and regulations they will simply wither, because banks today have two, they exist for two reasons. One is to lend money to stock brokers to play gamble on the stock exchange. If you have no stock exchange, that doesn't happen anymore. And the second reason why the banks are so powerful is because they have a monopoly of the payment system. For you to pay for a coffee, you need to have a bank account. But if the ECB gives you a free bank account, then you don't need to have an account with Deutsche Bank. So these two small changes shares like library cards in the university for employees of a company. And an ECB free bank account, which can happen tomorrow. The technology is here. It can happen tomorrow. Suddenly we have socialism. Thank you very much, Janis Varoufakis. I'll take a little back. I've got a little shift here. Take a drink. Yeah, walk to the toilet and yeah, soon in a bit. So now we are sitting here with three of our candidates for the European election. And one member of the coordinating collective of DM25. I will introduce them one by one to you just in a minute. Starting with our candidate on top of the list, Karin Derigo. Then we have the person right after Karin on the list, Johannes Fair. Also candidate for the European election and actually a local, Vincent is from Frankfurt, Vincent Welch. And then as mentioned, we have a guest from Brussels. It's Eric Edmund, a strategic coordinator of DM25 and also speaker of Meta 25 days. So we wanted to have a couple of questions to each person, but to give you a bit more time to also ask your question to everyone and also to Janis and Helga, we will shorten this part a bit, but I want to start with you, Karin. And I want to ask you a question that I feel gets frequently asked. Now, since the beginning, DM25 has a rather brutally honest analysis of the EU, that the EU is very undemocratic, subject to lobbyists, working for big businesses. Now, in this very sad state, why would you, why would Meta 25 like to enter the European Parliament? Well, that's exactly the reason why we want to enter it, because now it's so shattered the situation that somebody has to do something. So before the pandemic, actually, we were living in a parallel world. I remind you like that now. And we were actually thinking that, yeah, we had some problems, but we didn't have anything major to worry about, at least here in Europe. What happened in the last four years is that we, things have changed so much, so fast that we are living such an uncertainty. And basically, we have a war outside of our door, and then people start to mobilize. I didn't feel the need to engage before, personally. But now that the situation is so catastrophic, I really feel the need, because in 20 years, I don't want to say, where was I at that moment? Why didn't I do anything? So this is what we are doing now today. The European Parliament, as I learned it in the school, it was the temple of democracy. It was a huge, successful story for me. I looked it up as it was really something nice, something to trust. Unfortunately, it turned out totally different, but it has the potential to be that. It is a platform where inequality could be fought, and wealth could be redistributed. Just now, for so many years, has been basically held hostage by all these conservatives, lobbyists who just sold literally our future to the best bidder, and in key sectors, like pharmaceutical, energy, agriculture, and obviously defense. So now, we need really to have a new class of political actors who are not focused on career and money, because we need to reclaim back accountability. It's the first step if we want to build a solid future. Thank you. So, going over to Johannes, I want to go, of course, European election is about Europe, but it's also, of course, about Germany. And I want to speak a bit about the role of Germany. Now, the left in the 70s and 80s in Germany has always warned that Germany could become, again, a dangerous central power. Since the invasion of Russia, of Ukraine, it seems that Germany, not just in Europe, but also from the international community, gets even encouraged to become such a central power. What do you believe? Where are we headed in Germany? What does that mean for future generations, like for younger people, but also for, for example, my children? Thank you. Before I go into that, I first wanted to say that it's really great to see so many people here, and it has been an incredible journey now the last days when we have been in Berlin, Munich yesterday protesting against the NATO conference there and joining the peace conference. And now here tonight, it's really, really wonderful. And also to see Karin here next to me, who is just a person that I, as I joined a bigger while ago in the Berlin group of DM and Meta 25, and I asked her last summer, what do you think about maybe applying as a candidate? And here you speak now. It's really impressive. And thank you for doing this. And by the way, that's also for everyone here. It's really easy to become engaged and get involved with our organization. And it's fun. It's also a bit exhausting, but, and we hope it will be a hell of a ride until June. Speaking about Germany, I think in DM 25, as the European movement, as it was founded 2016, it was founded because we cannot solve anything by just changing things in one country. We cannot solve anything by changing things in Germany, in Greece, in France, in any other country. That's why DM 25 and Meta 25, the parties of DM as part of this movement, do exactly that. We work transnationally. We had Janis here from Greece for this journey that I just described. And we have that as the core of our organization to tackle the problems of war, of genocide, of climate change, of all the problems that we have, unitedly. But in Germany, we have an important role. And this country has a central role in Europe. You're right that in the 70s and 80s, as I read because I'm born in 87, the students on the street fought to prevent reunification of a state that is going to be a central force for military power in Europe. And now as the government here decided, and this was a really frightening moment for me to see the speech of Olaf Scholz when he announced, and he had a list of fighter jets, tanks, and the stuff he wanted to buy to rearm this country in a way that it hasn't been armed since the Second World War for a very good reason. So we are about funding all these resources and all this labor that unfortunately is going into this at the moment into the things that we need, into public housing, housing owned by the society, into really fighting climate change, into having a job guarantee, into having all those things that we could have if we just would not have the people in power that we have right now. And that's why we are trying this. And yeah, I'm really, really happy that we are here tonight. And hopefully we can go much further. Thank you. Thank you, Johannes. Vincent, speaking of Germany and shifting its focus to military spending, 100 billions for military, we all know, and we heard it also today in the first part, that there are many good ways to spend money, and on what is spent the best. But we have a mechanism in Germany, which is one topic that you're kind of an expert on, and you were the driving force for this campaign a year ago already, is to stop the debt break. This is a specialty of Germany, and it's, I think they don't even know this mechanism in many other countries. Explain to us what is the problem with the debt break with a so-called Schwarzenau, that also Christian and another finance minister is a huge fan of. And what would change if this debt break would be abolished? Yeah, so in some terms, the debt break is a rule written in the German constitution that prohibits the German government in a usual fiscal year to have a deficit that is higher than 0.35% of GDP, of national income. So it puts a huge fiscal constraint, a constraint on public spending on the government, and it inhibits its possibilities and abilities to efficiently allocate money to important sectors, and social policies, economic and climate policy. So maybe to pick up on what John just said and connect it to the subject of debt break, what would proponents of the debt break have you believe why we need a rule like this? It's simply we have to prioritize and the debt break purportedly forces you to prioritize in spending, but actually we have it the exact wrong way. You have of course constraints, we have limits on what you can do as a state, as a society, but the monetary limits, the fiscal constraints, they are purely of a legal nature. Technically, they are not a law of nature, so the real constraints are in the resources that you have available, like labor, like knowledge and education, like workforce capacity and of course commodities.  So that's the problem with debt break, but it does not allow us to invest public money to spend in the sectors that we must spend in order to tackle the huge challenges of the present, which are of a transnational nature of course, like climate change, like pandemics, which we saw in the last couple of years, like the challenge of globalization and of course not the unwinding of globalization, which happens and there are huge implications in all of these questions, but we have to free our mind of the premise that money is somehow scarce. It's the opposite way around, but real resources are scarce but not money, so of course we have to abolish the debt break, not just in Germany, also the European fiscal rules, because next year austerity is going to return to all of Europe. The EU member states and the European Parliament just agreed on a revised framework for, it's called the disability and growth pact, you know, which also limits the abilities of government across the European Union and the Eurozone to spend money, so we as Merit25 are not compromising in any way, we are not inventing any rules like a golden rule for investment, but you can publicly spend money for certain areas, but other areas not known. It's really a matter of prioritization and I think the people, the society in whole should democratically decide via its elected representatives in the Parliament where to spend and how much to spend with artificial ceiling, so thank you for the modification. So what Johanna said was actually right, we should not invest in military equipment because that will actually then constrain our productive capacities in other sectors which are much more urgent right now, like the energy transition and social policy, so avoid with a debt break, abolish that stupid rule in the Constitution. Thank you very much. Since we have the political director of DiEM25 here, I think that people would be very much interested in hearing also something about DiEM25 as an organization. Now you have been in the movement since almost since the beginning Eric and I think it's fair to say that when the movement was created in 2016 until now eight years later the world has changed quite a lot, so I want to know like from that perspective how did the political climate change and how did it influence DiEM25 as an organization and maybe even influence how the path of the organization was. Thanks Juliana, hi everyone. To be honest it hasn't changed, the world has not changed and this is what changes everything and I'll explain what I mean by that. Look when we created DiEM in 2016 we said a number of things, we said Brexit in this European Union is an inevitability, we're saying that in 2016. We said climate catastrophe is a slow-motion train wreck just waiting to happen. We said that war is around the corner because at the same time the far right is on the rise and it's on the rise because of our own political failures, us as the left, the social democrats who dominated the disastrous political rhetoric of the center right, which isn't that center right anymore, shifted to the far right at this stage conservatives who have been presenting themselves as the saviors of Europe from the fascists. So you either vote for us or you're going to get fascism. We were talking about that in 2016, I mean did I just describe 2024 or didn't I? When we say that the world's changed, no it has not. We were on that path and we are still on that path. If anything we were a bit, it's terrifying how accurate we were about it and this is what changes everything because the fact that when we started DiEM basically a decade ago we said that if Europe isn't democratized in the next 10 years basically now we're in deep trouble. So the fact that we've made it to 2024 and this path has not been averted this is what changes everything. So the fact that nothing's changed is what makes everything different and what do I mean by that? I'm basically a kid of the Indignados movement, Occupy, Occupy the squares, Aranaktismeni in Greece and I remember those movements from back then. I remember the energy and the passion with which we took to the streets and the incredible feats in the short period of time that were achieved in terms of political symbolism and how much passion was created out of those movements. However, I also keenly remember, well now with hindsight, I'm not going to pretend I knew it back then, that we were incapable of organizing for the day after. We were so stuck at organizing the movement, at making the movement relevant and powerful in that moment that we never thought about the next day and what happens when you don't organize for power is that somebody else is organizing for you so that power vacuum that you created somebody else is going to eat it up and that is what happened to us, right? It's what happened in Greece with Syriza, they ate up that power vacuum completely undermining us and also, and this is what really frustrates me, it's still happening in 2024 when you go to a Fridays for Future march or you go to an Extinction Rebellion event, people that I am so proud of and I feel so deeply connected to politically because of the radicalism which we in many ways did not have, they're more radical especially Fridays for Future, however, listen to what they're saying in terms of political coherence. Politicians for decades have been betraying us, they have not been honest, they are corrupt, they're in the pockets of big companies, etc. etc. So what we're going to do about it? We need to make the politicians listen to, why are you talking about? They're the ones that did it in the first place and your solution is to talk to them and make them to see the light? It's, you know, we're still making the same mistakes and this is what's important about Diem, Diem was created not to make that mistake and that's why I'm still in it because I consider this to be such a key element that you don't stop at demonstrating, you need to take that step that you guys are taking here in Germany with meta, that we are taking in Greece with our meta, it's not enough to demonstrate because you might win a short victory but the moment you're tired which inevitably will happen if you're in a movement, they're going to do it all over again because it's the same people and they're in the pockets of the same power structures, if you don't infiltrate those power structures nothing's going to change. Sorry, yeah now one thing and I'm sorry if I'm speaking a bit over time, very quickly the one thing that has changed is war, we didn't have a war in 2016 not in the same way and this is a new reality which is why I think it's so important that our campaign as Diem 25 puts as number one policy non-alignment for Europe and this is a critical shift in our position because until Europe is politically independent from the geopolitical interests of not only the US who's, as Jan is very well put it yesterday, whose vessels we've essentially have become because of the inability of our politicians to stand for our interests and their inability to create a European Union that is capable, inefficient, ineffective to do the things that it needs to do, we're essentially vassalized to the US and their geopolitical interests until that changes, until we reinvestigate a relationship with NATO, until we basically create our own foundation on which to stand by our own principles, we will never see a moral position on the war in Ukraine and we will never see a moral position in Gaza, this is what needs to happen and that is something that is different and I'm really glad that we have all agreed as met as Diem to make that one of our priorities. Thank you Eric, of course you took two questions out of my mouth, no but I think it's important that and I believe that people understood very much how the Meta 25s came to be because you talked about that unwillingness of the established political landscape to change anything so of course if you come to the point where you're like okay let's do it yourself you know but I think I want to ask like each of you can answer this question as you wish, I think it's interesting for the audience to know you mentioned independence as one core topic for the European election but what are the points, what are the main points for the European election, like if you vote Meta 25 in June, what are you voting for? I will try to be very brief because this is an important question, so for me our party stands for solidarity, peace and respect, these are for me the basic values, other than this one great quality is internationalism which means and we have it in our DNA because we were born as a pan-European movement with Diem 25, we work collectively building programs, electing candidates and this is necessary because if we want to fight against big corporations, lobbyists who are already internationalists and they do it much better than all the other parties then we this is the only way we can do it so this is one reason more and I will leave the others to the other. Thank you, I think I will we actually already talked so much about the program and our topics tonight so I want to bring a bit what the fun part and the real practice social part will be in the campaign after we make it to the signature collection and we'll ask you later for your help also and that's going to be and that's what also the movement part in our organization is about to bring people together, bring people together from different countries, from different religions, from different also some different leftist beliefs hopefully that we can unite and bring together as a strong organization to bring about change and the fun part will be if we're going to put up our posters about peace, about the green transition paid by the rich, about university living income in the European elections that's hopefully and that will be my biggest joy make some people in the banks, in the media, a little bit angry in front of their laptop that's my personal goal for our campaign that we are at the moment preparing thank you. So it's about constructive disobedience that's more of the theory of change here within DiEM25 since it's founding already and we cannot credibly say what we are going to change the whole of Europe within a couple of days after perhaps hopefully being elected to the European Parliament because the center of power lies of course elsewhere in the European Union it lies within the national states, the governments and in a lot of cases the special interests like lobbies like huge companies and corporate oligarchs that control parts of the policies of the respective governments so Europe is dysfunctional so what would be a policy priority for me personally and perhaps sounds a bit far-fetched but I think you've got to have a vision for a economically sustainable and socially just progressive future of Europe and that is a political union and think about it we have a monetary union we have a customs union and we have several other kind of legal frameworks that bind Europe together but still to this day we do not have a fiscal urine no common taxation no at least not in a very large amount common spending on the EU level there are these things called cohesion funds in the European Union which intend to accelerate the progress towards equitable social outcomes purchasing power parity in the various countries member states of the European Union but they fail in achieving that goal and there is no grand vision of a common future of Europe so we are federalists by heart we are of course European internationalists we went in the long term establish a united democratic secular federation a European republic so that's one thing that was very important for me and going in that direction would also allow us to finally get serious about tackling all the very important global challenges that we are facing today which we mentioned before and also get serious about tackling the cost of living crisis which has plagued us for the last couple of years which was induced by exogenous shocks and the supply chain and the war in Ukraine and the covid pandemic and all these things are problems crises which are which go beyond one single nation state where we have a cross border crisis cross border problems that implicates all of Europe and in many ways also the rest of the world and disproportionately the global south even more so we have to view things from international perspective that is the i think ideological core of merit 25 and into the five that's why we're doing this okay um thank you all now that's enough questions for me now it's the turn of the audience to ask questions i would like to ask Helge and Janis back on stage okay until the chairs will be coming back and Helge and Janis please come to the stage my name is Alexander i'm here from Frankfurt so there seems to be a contradiction between social and ecological necessities and this is the question involved um so first we're living in in a financialized capitalist system where the bankers are predatory to industrial capital and to workers income so the primary task of the financial is financialized capitalism is is rent seeking and not production and is by that means deindustrialization and we have a monetary union whose primary is an off-existent is to impose austerity on the people of Europe and the process of deindustrialization is accelerated by the EU and European governments imposing trade wars in China and Russia like with a cutoff of the russian gas supplies for example um so imposing the burden uh excuse so um so we're imposing those burdens of the industrialization on on the population on small businesses by means of austerity and now Helge Poikert decided there's a necessity of degrowth uh degrowth of energy and material throughput to the uh economy to prevent the imminent ecological collapse and with it the the possible collapse of organized human society uh so how do we get to a point of ecological sustainability without putting the burden of the deindustrialization on the poor of Europe you are as well um if we abolish private cars and we increase public mobility then people can save a lot a lot of money and um poorer people uh usually live uh near the highways for example and there it's very noisy uh they get ill uh more quickly etc etc so this deindustrialization uh can be very helpful and uh it should not not primarily be done via uh uh prior the price mechanism so to increase the prices for flights etc because then poorer people are disadvantaged and uh the richer people can say well that's wonderful this policy uh because because now we get rid of the multitude uh on the highway and in the airplanes so that's not the way we should do it we need three things by the way your question was not just a question it was a statement you know a mini program and i agree with you right but i'll just add to your program three things first and i think you alluded to it before uh money's not the problem dm25 we stood in the european parliament election 2019 five years ago with a very clear solution to the question of where does the money come for the green fund by which to pay for the green transition in the end the solution we had was which is by the way utterly consistent with both the european union treaties and with german law and what the constitutional court would say was really very simple the european investment bank which is owned by all your eu countries should issue we said back then half a trillion worth of bonds every year and in the press conference that that will be announced the head of the central bank will be sitting next to verner heuer who was then the the head of the aib and the head of the central bank would announce that if need be if need be the ecb would buy those bonds in the secondary markets to make sure that the interest rates were very close to zero then we would have had if that had happened we would have a two and a half trillion euros being spent on green on the green transition without taxation so that's just one thing of one kind of thing we need to do the second thing we need to do is you need to destroy electricity markets and they can be there is no need to have electricity markets that we don't have electricity markets we have a cartel of electricity that is owned by private companies that create have huge profit margins and which always go for the fuel and the means of production electricity that maximizes their ends not the ones that are in the interest of society and of nature there is one wire coming out of the wall in your home there is that's not a market that's a monopoly right then you have a the thatcherite model it started in britain and the center of creating a so-called auction market but that is not a market if you have an auction of five people of five companies that's a cartel so like that's like we know we hand it over our electricity to a cartel we need to end that cartel and we need to decentralize production and distribution and exploitation of electricity along the lines of neighborhood owned networks connected with one another public ownership but owned by the local communities and the third thing we need and that's where we agree we need limits to physical growth to physical growth we need to say that you know what forget the emissions trading schemes and all that quasi neoliberal idiotic market idea it doesn't work we know it doesn't work so this is you know the maximum amount of um pollution is going to be this the amount maximum amount of cement we're going to be using society will be this we're not going to use more do what we can do with this amount of cement so limits to physical growth not limits to development okay and that and more generally i think it is essential to overthrow to do away with an assumption which is in the mind of people out there the assumption that going green is a sacrifice that we need to sacrifice our well being to go green we have to change the context to have prosperity we need to go green very briefly to add to Yanis everything which obviously i agree with i think politically there is also one more thing that needs to be done and that is that we need to end a mass delusion that we have in society right now and that is the delusion that the green movement the green transition all the policies that are necessary are being represented by the green party that is a joke especially in this country there is sorry there is no party that has done more to undermine the green movement than the green party of germany it is horrendous what has been done at a time when finally society is realizing that we can't do without the green transition and the people to whom we entrusted this huge project to was the green party that is already in the pocket of bloody Voxwagen it's a joke we need to reclaim green politics for real progressives not the green party and i will i will take the liberty to and i asked the moderation if that's okay to also introduce someone that i'm very happy does in the in the audience tonight which is willand hoban from the jewish voice to say a few words thank you very much for coming and this is completely on me apologies for taking one question time away thanks johannes it was nice to hear janice mention eris hefferts earlier she's one of my closest comrades in our organization and of course she went viral with her little one woman protest and it highlighted the absurdity of course of the general german response to the issue of palestine and the way that it soils this issue with that of of anti-semitism and of course you spoke of gaza earlier and we really need to talk about gaza and i don't just mean here where many of us agree on that subject but everywhere and i don't just mean on the street either of course in the movement we're all hitting the streets every week but i also mean speaking about it to people around us you know maybe a friend maybe a colleague in many situations it can be dangerous to do this people have lost their jobs people have been stigmatized in culture and academia in politics so a lot of people are very careful about opening their mouths but where it's possible we have to do it because the consensus that it's somehow acceptable to stifle this position which is really just a position of human rights and basic morality this consensus has to be destroyed and it can't be destroyed just by demonstrating and it can't be destroyed just by lobbying politicians it has to be destroyed through society because apparently 61 percent of Germans do not agree with what's happening in gaza so the polls claimed but many of those are not going to say it because they don't want to be called anti-semitic they want they want to believe that the correct response to the holocaust is not to say it and we have to convince them that actually the only response to the holocaust is to say it because if you are against genocide then you are against all genocide and the Nazi holocaust was one genocide and this is another and with all the differences between every genocide we cannot say that we have learned from that and that we stand for some kind of motto of never again if we are accepting this and Germany in particular committed two genocides in the 20th century in Namibia and in the holocaust and now and now we see it not only defending politically the genocide in Gaza but also saying that it will support Israel in court that it will be an active legal defender of genocide and of course the whole time it is arming Israel since since last year arms sales have increased tenfold to Israel this is more than acceptance this is complicity Germany should be in the Hague as well and so we have to make this clear that there is no that we will not accept any different standard of morals and human rights within Germany because of what Germany has done before on the contrary if anything Germans should feel more obliged than anyone else to make sure that there is really never again for anyone who's next very very good idea I'm not allowed to run in front of the camera though thank you very much good evening everybody my question is to Yanis my name is Arwa I was originally I was born and brought up in London and I've been living and working in Germany for the last 25 years now first of all I'd like to say a big thank you to Yanis who I've only actually just in the last year become aware of for speaking out so fearlessly and unapologetically about these issues that so many people care about but which very few people in the public domain have the spine to say so clearly so first of all thank you not just from me but a lot of people I talk to friends colleagues that's the first thing my question I would actually like to ask is about media and you had briefly referred to you made a comment which I thought was very significant about these algorithms that are controlled so that people turn people against each other in social media discourse and and so on and I think who controls the media has so much power and we see today we don't really have free media and I mean I I could listen to media in several languages but not everybody can do that and I even if I just compare how for example the BBC reporting on the Palestine Israel crisis and how German state media is reporting on the BBC on the Palestine Israel crisis there's a big difference and it makes it very difficult when I have conversations with my German friends and colleagues who are actually not getting the full picture and are only seeing you know that what can we do about that this is a real challenge because people can only make decisions based on the information that they have and not everybody is bilingual or multilingual and I think these awards that we've had also Ukraine has also shown how critical things that are happening are not really being reported I mean for example Boris Johnson when Zelensky was ready to sign the peace deal and Boris Johnson went to Ukraine to stop Zelensky from signing the peace agreement yes we who are thinking and reading and knowing and know that there is a vested interest the US have vested interest in this war continuing and that peace is not in the interest of the United States and so on and so on but these are quite complex multi-layered things that not everybody is able to see through and so what I don't know I mean I'm just putting it out there as a question but what can one do long-term to you know to sort of put media back in the hands of more people we saw it in the UK in the UK back in the 80s 90s the Rupert Murdoch's you know conglomerate and so on I think it's a big issue I'd like to hear what you have to say about it thank you well thank you so much Rupert Murdoch is still with us determining the agenda hasn't gone anywhere there is the mainstream media and then there is social media mainstream media are biased and they produce fake news long before Donald Trump came around in two ways one is actively actively you mentioned Rupert Murdoch Rupert Murdoch decides to assassinate the character of politicians of civil society figures that are against his interests so he goes out of his way of his way to destroy them okay and there are journalists who are paid hired guns doing that but that's not the worst part the worst kind of media tyranny is a system where no one really is responsible it's almost spontaneous I experienced that when I was minister and I was coming here to Frankfurt and I was going to Brussels and Berlin and so on the system I noticed I this is my personal experience of it what was happening was this take Brussels or Berlin doesn't matter but Brussels is a good example because you know there are 10,000 journalists and each one of them has a boss back home who wants this journalist to produce something new and of course it's impossible to produce something new because there are 10,000 journalists that are competing with one another on what to write so each one of those journalists is dying to get the telephone number of some person inside the buildings of the European Union similar in Berlin with the federal government or in Paris with the French government to have a contact that maybe will give them an exclusive so they work their you know the answers off to cultivate this connection and they cultivated the good ones how many good ones are there I mean successful ones after the 10,000 there are a hundred and out of the hundred there are 10 who really have access to Ursula von der Leyen or to you know back in my day Juncker whoever happened to be at the head of the commission right and once they get this they have their personal telephone number they can text them that that is gold to them that direct access right so what happens is this if you are in a position of power like I was not I was in position power but I was engaged with people who were we would be in meetings in the Eurogroup and when they wanted to create fake news about what I had said or what they had said to me all they had to do is send the text message to one of those journalists that journalist immediately immediately sent it to their folks back home to the Le Monde to you know Le Soir to Frank Wilker Algemahine right and and that would be published as inside the information right and they wouldn't care whether it was true or not so and then what would happen is that the rest of the other 10,000 would immediately reproduce it and before you knew it that was what was you know that fake leak was a fact was a fact it was impossible to go against it you know everybody considered it to be the truth how can you possibly deny the truth and then if you in that case me issued a statement contradicting it ah he's denying it which means it's true okay so that's the mainstream media so you've got the Rupert Murdoch's representing big capitalist interests and you have the politicians that have 10,000 journalists who have no brains no analysis no interest in having brains or analysis reproducing the fake news or whatever it is that you they want you to know as the truth right but then you have social media and social media in the beginning was a great hope that we would be each one of us would have a voice and it would be a kind of democratic public square where there would be a contest of ideas and the best ideas and the most true ideas would prevail for a little while it happened it even occasioned the Arab Spring until that the Arab Spring was crucial because it toppled governments and immediately the regimes around the world you know dictatorial regimes democratic regimes understood the power of the social media and then took them over and it's very easy to take them over in a country like Greece for instance we experienced that as mera 25 what how much money do we had a budget of 20,000 30,000 to spend on social media for the whole election campaign the the government party had 10 million if you have 10 million you buy the whole of youtube the whole of youtube it's not that you can't put your things up on youtube you can but if you even if you spend all the 40,000 we had in terms of the algorithms pushing for the videos we put out it would never push it out when it's already been paid three million by the opposition by the government right so you have the poisoning of the social media so that doesn't mean we should stop using the social media but what it does mean is we need to develop and to help independent electronic media I wish we had like independent newspapers paper papers but this is just too expensive but there are independent media and we should support them and we should work collectively in order to subvert the algorithms so that the algorithm push for these independent media the british are very good british progressive independent media like novara like double down news and so on are doing an immensely good job we have to emulate them there are really few of those here in in germany they're not as strong you need to support them so we have run a bit over time so to have as many questions as possible please try to be fast okay so hello everyone my name is latimer not as putin but as lenin as jenis told me anyway what are you what you are currently doing is essentially preaching to acquire right i paid five year to be there i would never pay five year to attend a meeting of like afd of spd or any other party in general but in order to like win the elections you have to like convince the average joe the like frau muller to vote for you but the problem as i see it is like the general trend in the european politics is that frau muller tends to vote for afd and uh to switch to vote into afd like this is the party that's gaining popularity and that's the signal i tend to recognize us i don't know what to do with my life but i'm also very scared so i'm going to like put my hand but put my hand into the scent and like outsource the crisis somehow so the question is uh like frau muller doesn't want to listen about like germany being complicit into genocides in the second century so in this 20th century uh do you actually have anything to say to like the general frau muller that's going to like make sure aha so i'm not going to vote for afd or whatever party in european election i'm going to vote for these guys thank you sorry it was long in the end thank you who wants to answer how frau muller can be convinced i have met frau mullers on the street because as as i said before we are signature collecting at the moment and it's really you being on the street talking to a lot of strangers and of course we do it in spaces like university where people are more open to us but we also do it in on the streets really and frau muller can come along and my experience is that of course a lot of people shut up i'm not involved in politics or i'm not interested i don't have time and so on that happens but to in my experience there are so many people out there that have a positive reaction and that are so fed up like you are you paid five euros to be here thank you um so there is this potential the question will just be how we reach these people and um this is going to have to do with social media it's going to do with us putting posters on the streets and this is going to have to do to collect a bit of money we will not have that much so we cannot rely on that but to have as much people as we can on the ground this will be the key from my point of view um if i can head one small thing i uh studied in marketing that the word of mouth is the most powerful tool there is in marketing you can spend so much money you want but nobody will convince you as much as your friend or your relative so it's very important that all of you who really believe in us and in our days go out and speak to the other people because this is the base of change basically thank you yeah that's a good like if you guys are a choir then sing you know uh it's incredibly important it's very powerful and don't take it for granted that just because people pay to be here they agree i would be very surprised if because today you were 200 uh which is a substantial number for a political event far away from elections telling speaking from experience now right so don't take this for granted this is substantial what happened here today and keep it with you and let's use it that's one thing now i'll just say one two things one is if we don't get elected because we spoke about genocide then i think i speak on behalf of all of us that we rather not get elected okay we will speak about genocide because that is what is happening and in general that is one of the powerful things i think about our political project let's call it whether it's the movement or the party if we wanted positions of power including this guy especially this guy he could have found a much easier way than this one okay you don't get to power in germany by speaking in favor of palestine right there are a lot of things that we've done wrong if what we cared about was power what we do care about is that if we do manage to get to power we haven't sacrificed so much of ourselves to get there that we are impotent once we got there which is essentially what has been happening in politics for the past decades so even if fran muller disagrees with us or rather might not agree with everything she has an opportunity to vote for a party that won't just go to Brussels and become one with the establishment because if that's what we wanted there were a million other ways for us to do it not this one this is the hard way we're going there because we want to make trouble and i think fran muller agrees with that at least there we have uh it's ah yeah we lost the question okay we have a collective question here hello i'm lucía yeah okay so two things that have caught our attention it was said that we need more education and that research innovation should be reinforced um i speak from the we speak from the perspective of neuro of a neuroscientist engaged in basic research so in academia the race for money and the intrusion by capitalism have done two things uh first it has taken the fun out of it which is awful and two it created an individualistic success story around academic um success and innovation i know democracy in science is needed but we're struggling to imagine this uh so how would a democratic academic system would look like in your opinion thank you it's only three middle discussion yes sure sure sure the the universities are under capitalized and and therefore most scientists unfortunately they are very opportunist very unfortunate they they try to get third funding and so so they are dependent on on this money even for their success at university when you try to be to be hired and i'm one of the great exceptions in Germany it's a very close system and you need uh almost like a lottery win a little bit less to not not to to be uh thrown out of the system so there is a very high degree of bad consensus and when when you apply for such a project funded by third parties you always you already have limited the question you want to research because how to transcend capitalism will not be funded by pharmaceutical companies or by by governmental agencies and this depends is really a real problem and also the the professors not only in Germany they are very very mainstream i have to say and when people are hired these professors decide if they want to to hire a person with a different opinion usually they don't do it so when you ask five frogs if a red frog would like to jump into the water they would prefer a frog of their own color you know and in so far you have a very very bad selection mechanism here and that's why i once proposed and people said yeah okay you do this you know the people who have been hired that we should introduce an arbitrary mechanism that when 10 or 20 people apply you throw the dice and then you see so so there must be competent and and and so you have the it's comparable to a mutation in nature you know without mutations we wouldn't be here and and so we need mutations in the sense that people can apply and and then maybe the faculty is against this person but then for example Janis or I we show up and say hello friends you have to deal with us so so that's a real problem there must must be a different funding and also the private universities have a strong influence not only that they get state money like Wittenherdecke 50 percent we have free university blah blah blah you know it's for the corporates more or less and 50 percent is paid by the state they also influence the hiring process at the public universities because they push up their their forks and and then they will be hired at at the public universities and one last point to to be able to get third party funding it's always an advantage when you when you apply when you have worked before for a private company and then the argument is well this is an expert he or she knows the the respective field from inside so it's it's a scientist he knows the theory or she knows the theory and the practice and that's wonderful so these are two points instead of one and then you get the people who have been socialized in the private companies sorry a long answer along with you add just one thing to the subject I think what we also have to talk about in the context of academic research is intellectual property so you have a situation where much of the knowledge which is gained from basic research funded by the state funded by public institutions is then kind of commodified and privatized for profit right exactly for example the big pharma companies who developed the vaccines but also when we talk about digital digital innovation and so on and I think we have to stick to a very clear formula which is simply a public funding for public research for the public domain no privatization no profit of public research thank you very much for all of this my name is Allah and I would like to discuss all the topics but I'll try to bring you back to the topic of the European Union and I think that was the major point of the event tonight I didn't get it correctly sorry if I may put it this way at the end of two hours and a half or three hours discussion so what's your aim in the European Union I heard infiltrate the structure I heard deepening the European integration into a federal state fiscal program social integration social standards and if that's not happening because the structure from the very first beginning of the European community has been based on the interests of the economy of the iron and coal industries as we could know and has developed within all these agreements into a kind of economic political structure that's serving the big companies the lobbyists a kind of hegemonial project within the globe would be the solution to re-establish something new a possibility for example would you consider that Germany to go out Greece to go out Italy to go out multiple prexsets and to build something new do we have to stack to the structures what we're having who's serving somebody else thank you well thank you so much for your question allow me to speak to you from the bottom of my heart we've changed our minds because when reality changes you have to change your views if you were asking that question five years ago before the european parliament election of 2019 we would have all come out with a very optimistic very specific and very practical answer we would say yes we are in the business of democratizing the european union of creating the political and solidarity union that we don't have we had a 150 page 150 page program which we call the green new deal for europe which included things we discussed already you know the european investment bank issuing the bonds at european central bank we had policies about how to fund the basic income we had policies about the banking system 25 pages on financial sector reforms on citizens assemblies to start creating the circumstances the dynamic for writing a proper democratic federal federalist constitution that by which to replace all these bloody treaties especially the Treaty of Lisbon which is like this brick that was designed to kill the soul of any human being we had these aspirations and then of course we we we got about one and a half million votes across europe which is not insignificant but certainly not a victory right we didn't elect a single MEP we came very close to one one was stolen from us in Greece um through electoral fraud but that's another much just one since then every single idea we had was taken up by the european union to be destroyed so the idea of a common fund with bonds that will be issued collectively we were proposing the european investment bank that was the recovery fund the next generation EU but it was done in exactly the wrong way instead of being the beginning of an aggregate investment program this was during the pandemic if you recall it was created as an oligarchic project a project for creating common debt for the wrong reasons common debt so that the european commission would then give the money as a result of a deal between corrupt politicians to the oligarchs of Greece to the oligarchs of Italy so the german proletariat was paying for the greek oligarchs to put it briefly yeah that was what the next year that's what that's what the recovery fund was so they took some basic elements of our ideas and applied them in a way that effectively i don't want them to be implemented i don't want i you know the world was a better place before they were implemented so they did yeah we were talking about money printing for good social and green purposes through the the european central bank well the european central bank printed trillions and they gave it to the financiers and now we have inflation because of the way in which the printing presses of the european central bank was misappropriated the idea of a constitutional assembly was effectively violated by emmanuel macron who used it in the town hall meetings very cleverly in order to end the gilet jaune protests so everything we we had promoted and and proposed was infected it was poisoned and was turned against europeans and then the war in ukraine begins and effectively the european union becomes a vassal of NATO cease to exist now it's stoltenberg and biden that decide everything and ursula for the lion who really wanted to be the head of nato but she was not allowed to be because she's not particularly smart so yeah and here with here where we are now in 2019 i didn't mind having a flag of dm next to a flag of the european union now if i see a flag of the european union i am going to throw up and i'm not going to wave it believe you me that doesn't mean that we are proposing exit we saw that brexit was a great gift to the fascists because any attempt to start a campaign to get out of the european union will in the end even if it's done for good left-wing reasons is going to result in the strengthening of the xenophobes and the races and the fascists so we're not going to do that what we're doing instead is asking for your help to go in there to clash with the establishment within the establishment's institutions and to use that podium of the european parliament in order to put out there the things you and i and us are discussing in here it's really very modest um so but you want to add something look tiny tiny tiny i promise i promise it's very closely collected to have answered and i i need to speak to this because i have had the dubious pleasure of having lived in brussels for a decade actually it's not a pleasure it's it's been a horrific decade and anybody who tells you that they want to get elected to go to brussels to do well however that sentence ends is lying to you because they cannot the european parliament is designed to disarm you you can't do anything in the european that's not where the power is so we are not going to give you that lie it's a mistake to say that to people the fact that people are disappointed disillusioned angry with the european union is because people have been telling them that lie for decades now and then whatever they've promised they have been unable to give because of how brussels is structured so that is i think the power of what yanis said we're not going to tell you that lie we're going to go to brussels because brexit which yanis mentioned was where was brexit created in brussels was natural for raj from the european parliament the power that the european parliament has and this is the only power it has is to give you if you use it well a platform it's a microphone it is powerful if you use it smart if you don't spend all your time running around in circles in tiny little subcommittees that achieve nothing that is the power of the european parliament that's how we were going to use it in order to create a pan european movement that can turn to the european parliament into what it needs to be that is the that is meadow that's what we're offering thank you eric i'm actually glad that you added this we ran really really over time if you have still questions you can just walk towards us and ask them i think before i give an hour the last word to our spitz and kandidatin karen derigo i want to thank you all for being here i hope it was an inspiring evening for you and now please karen yes in the name of the whole team of merit 25 we really thank you for being here tonight for sharing this sunday evening and this means that we are all together in this fight that we want to change thing and for this i really encouraged you to go on and to help us further also on your seats you have a form that you can sign to support us to send us in the parliament in europe as eric said to try to make a big mess okay thank you very much