Greek Presidency of the EU: Anti-people priorities and disorientation

The Greek government with a great deal of fanfare is seeking to utilize the Greek Presidency of the EU, which began on the 1^st of January 2014. All the content of the discussion, which is being promoted by the bourgeois media and the parties of bourgeois management about the Greek Presidency of the EU, confirms that its undertaking will be utilized in the effort to trap the people’s consciousness and to disorient them in relation to the nature of the problems and the real way out. A plethora of articles are being reproduced about whether “Greece will succeed in the presidency of the EU”, while the government is stating that “our voice will be heard due to the sacrifices that have been made by the Greek people.”

The “left” official opposition, SYRIZA, is also closely involved in this, contributing to the disorientation and expressing its worry about whether the government is utilizing the Presidency “to table the major problems that concern the peoples” and which “concern the existence of the EU itself”. SYRIZA, also with the assistance of the so-called “European Left Party” is trying to persuade the Greek people that the EU can be ‘transformed” from a harmful “caterpillar” into a harmless “butterfly”, from a “wolf” into a “lamb”, as long as a “left” leader is elected to the position of President of the Commission.

Life itself has demonstrated that the EU, as an inter-state capitalist union can not be changed into something “pro-people”, not from the “top”, nor ‘from within”. And so reality proves that the priorities of the Greek Presidency are not related to the working class-people’s needs, because these can not coexist with the aim served by the EU, i.e. the defense of the interests of the European monopolies. These are the anti-people goals of the predatory alliance, which on the 1/1/2014 began the permanent supervision of its countries, with permanent anti-people measures at the expense of the peoples.

The “growth”, which the coalition government as well as SYRIZA place as the EU’s top priority, in all its versions, is capitalist growth, which will be based on the ruins of the workers’ rights. The so-called deepening of the EMU means the even more suffocating control of the implementation of all the anti-people agreements of the EU. In its framework, the Greek presidency will promote the negotiations for the banking union, which will reinforce the concentration and centralization of financial capital, of the monopolies as a whole, accompanied by new anti-people measures and offensive against the people’s bank deposits.

The intensification of the repression against the immigrants is also included amongst the priorities of the Greek Presidency, in combination with the “promotion of legal immigration and mobility”, i.e. the safeguarding of cheap labour power, where and when the EU monopolies need it. The goal for the “Marine Policy of the EU’ to be promoted in the first 6 months of 2014 in sectors which include energy and transport, and reflects the aims of the Greek bourgeois class, for its own interests, to elevate Greece as an energy and transport hub, as the same time when “slave galleys” like COSCO will be generalized for the workers.

At the same time as all of the above, the 6 months of the Greek Presidency will coincide with the management of the relations of the EU with other imperialist centres (e.g. negotiations for an EU-USA “free trade” agreement), in conditions of the sharpening of the crisis and intensification of the inter-imperialist competition, inside and outside of the EU, as was clearly apparent from the interventions of the USA in the “North-South” contradictions inside the EU, as well as the Russia-EU controversy in the instance of the Ukraine. A fact which means a deeper and dangerous involvement of Greece in the imperialist plans.

The developments confirm that the EU can only become worse, not better. It increasingly highlights the necessity of the country’s disengagement from the EU, the need for the People’s Alliance to be reinforced, with a strong KKE, in order to impede the worse measures which are in the pipeline and for the people to be finally free from the bonds of the EU and the power of the monopolies.

International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE