No to the Torture of Women rallies in Warsaw and other cities against the Roman Catholic church campaign for a total ban on abortion in Poland. Alik Keplicz/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Enrico Tortolano presents a very good case against the EU. I accept everything he says about it and could add further accusations to his charge sheet: we are not only confronted by extreme neoliberal strategies but by the attempt to perpetuate these strategies and to give them quasi-constitutional status through a complex of treaties, directives and policies imposed by creditors on crisis-struck debtor countries. If these violations of democracy are not reversed then the electoral process and the alternation of parties in office will lose a great deal of their meaning.
Where Enrico’s position is more questionable is in his assessment of the politics of departure from the EU in general, and of Brexit in particular. Dismantling the EU, or radically reducing its powers in favour of those of member states, is an objective of a few left-wing groupings and a small minority of trade unions across Europe.
It is also the objective of right-wing forces, xenophobic or even fascist, across the continent: Fidesz and Jobbik in Hungary, the Kaczynski regime in Poland, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Front National in France, Alternativ für Deutschland which recently made big advances in Germany, right-wing “populists” in Scandinavia, Austria and elsewhere.
