Speeches

Mr President, it is 10 November and, since the beginning of the month, two workers have already lost their lives, one in the port of Cosco in Piraeus, the other, a distributor, in Thessaloniki. Every three days, a worker loses his life. These are not accidents, these are predetermined employer crimes, with the coverage of the anti-labour laws of the EU strategy, such as the Hatzidakis law, the New Democracy law, or the Achtsioglou law, of SYRIZA, which force workers to work, without protection measures, intensifying work that reaches up to 13 hours a day, without time off, until deep old age, abolishing even the deforested bodies of labour inspectors. In this difficult situation, Cosco workers, with a seven-day strike, rallied to their union, ragged labor laws and extracted from employers additional security measures. The employees of e-food, with their collective organized struggle, against the blackmail of the employers "freelancer or dismissal", won a collective labor agreement of indefinite duration. These achievements are the victories of all workers. They prove that monopolies and governments are powerless in the face of the determined organized working class fighting for its modern needs.

Mr President, the priorities of the report are clear, an education-commodity to strengthen groups against competitors from the US and Britain, a student-client who buys as much as his pocket can, a blackmailed teacher to implement the anti-educational design. School, university, all fields of business activity, selling ephemeral training and chasing sponsorships, and families paying from their looted income to compensate for state underfunding. "Education" that is, creating cheap, flexible, rights-free workers, adapted to the needs of the profitability of the groups, nurtured with the supposedly "European values", with the unacceptable theory of the two extremes, i.e. anti-communism, things for which millions are being spent, in an effort to establish, throughout the century, capitalism and hide, in vain, the prospect of the organized struggle for the overthrow of capitalist exploitation. Contrary to the reactionary EU-cutting plans implemented by both current and previous governments, with mergers into 27-segment schools, without hiring teachers, inappropriate classrooms, the struggle for modern, exclusively public and free education for all must be intensified, we must teach young people how to interpret the world and fight to change it, putting their own contemporary needs at the centre.

Mr President, developments in the Western Balkans are dangerous. Despite the competition within the European Union, the penetration of the region for trade corridors and energy transport routes is escalating, the US-NATO bases are being strengthened and competition is intensifying with Russia, which promotes the interests of its own monopolies and has a military presence, but also with China, which penetrates with strong economic groups in the context of the accession of the Balkans to the Silk Road. The bourgeoisie of Greece plays a central role in these plans. As part of its geostrategic upgrade, after the "NATO Cutting" agreement of Prespa, it undertook air surveillance in North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro. It provides infrastructure, such as the port of Alexandroupolis, for war rehearsals with Russia, targeting our people. It participates in dangerous imperialist plans that promote border changes and can lead to a new war ignition. The sharpening of the confrontations of groups and imperialist centers in the Western Balkans portends other sufferings for the peoples, who need today to escalate their common struggle against the imperialist plans to close the foreign bases and to disengage from NATO and the European Union.

Mr President, the debate ahead of COP26 is using environmental degradation as a pretext to promote the 'green' transition adopted by the EU, the US and China, despite their opposition to who will get a bigger slice of the pie. The green release of energy, the delignification and closure of hydroelectric projects, the monoculture of RES with the sole criterion of the profits of the groups, culminate in accuracy, energy poverty and lead to expensive and inaccessible "green" folk houses. With the EU strategy, all Greek governments, the current and previous ones, opened the door to "green monopolies", leaving forests, people and their lives unprotected from fires, floods and earthquakes. These, as well as the consequences of the imperialist interventions of the EU, the US and NATO, the loss of thousands of lives and the destruction of the environment are taken for granted. So people have nothing to expect from COP26. Their struggle for the abolition of green landmasses and taxes on energy, the demand for fire, flood, earthquake and forest protection measures, as well as the struggle for the right of peoples to live in a safe and healthy environment can provide a way out.

Mr President, a few months after the adoption of the "Greece 2.0" plan, workers have already gained bitter experience from the anti-people projections of the new Memorandum of Understanding of the European Union Recovery Fund. The Fund, voted for by New Democracy, SYRIZA, the other bourgeois parties of our country, distributes people's money as mammoth subsidies to the groups of green and digital development to guarantee their profitability, loading the people with barbaric prerequisites, such as the EU-cutting law-abortion, which abolishes the eight-hour day and trade union rights, the dismantling of social security, new taxes, expensive current and types of popular consumption. Economic policy, whether expansionary or restrictive, in crisis and recovery, serves the demands of capital for its profitability, not the needs of the people. A real way out is the organization of the workers' popular struggle for increases in wages, pensions, the overthrow of anti-worker laws, the strengthening of the public health system, primary health care, the recruitment of staff and measures in schools, where conditions of over-transmission of coronavirus are formed. It is the struggle against the interests of the monopolies and their governments, to make the people truly the owner of the wealth they produce.

Mr President, the report reflects the fierce struggle between the United States and China for capitalist primacy, with the European Union seeking cooperation and limiting China's influence, the encirclement of Russia. It highlights the European Union-US competition for a greater share of the pie focused on green and digital growth, where the European Union aims to further boost the profitability of European groups. It promotes the aggressive autonomy of the European Union, the partnership with NATO with gigantic military exercises, bases, a new arms race. It is linked to the dangerous for the people military agreements between Greece-USA and Greece-France, which appear, supposedly, as guarantees of security and stability. The government of New Democracy, with the support of the bourgeois parties, is turning our country into an imperialist base. The people are being targeted, they are sending Patriot missiles, an army to Saudi Arabia, they are preparing for Mali. Therefore, the defense of territorial integrity acquires real meaning for the people, when it goes hand in hand with the struggle against the imperialist plans, to close the foreign bases, to abolish these dangerous agreements, to disengage Greece from the European Union and NATO, with the people in power and owner of the wealth it produces.

Madam President, once again, the European Union is issuing a provocative resolution against the people of Cuba, the Government and the Communist Party. The EU, to serve its own interests at the expense of the Cuban people, uses the intervention plan of the United States, the anti-Cuban mafia, and very few forces inside, which are magnified by a well-paid propaganda mechanism (media, social networks, NGOs in close connection with agencies of all kinds). Their selective sensitivities about human rights are a deceptive tool of interference. The criminal blockade and the 245 sanctions maintained by the Biden Administration are immense crimes that deprive the people of Cuba of their rights, goods and services. The EU, which leaves people exposed, is annoyed by Cuba’s internationalist contribution to combating the pandemic, which guarantees free health for its people, who under conditions of harsh sanctions develop five vaccines in the battle against COVID-19 with their own forces. Cuba is not alone. Interference plans will not pass. The peoples of the whole world express their solidarity with the struggle of Cuba and its people to defend the conquests of its Revolution.

Madam President, the crocodile tears about the situation of the Afghan people and especially of women, after the Taliban takeover, are not enough to extinguish the historical responsibilities of the European Union, NATO, the United States of America. In the 1980s, the then EEC and its member states supported and financed the ancestors of the obscurantist Taliban to overthrow the people's government that practiced equal rights and freedoms for men and women. Under various pretexts, the European Union justified the imperialist intervention and the occupation army in 2001, resulting in thousands of dead, uprooted, poverty and misery for the Afghan people. Today, the issue of creating a military force of the European Union for new similar interventions around the world is provocatively resurfaced. At the same time, the European Union considers the Taliban, the ones the United States endowed with tens of billions of dollars of equipment, potential partners in order to advance the plans of European monopolies in a country of key geopolitical importance, in the context of the confrontation with the US, China and Russia. It is necessary to strengthen today the struggle for the rights of Afghan refugees for asylum, international protection, health, housing, work in their countries of final destination, against the interests of business groups and in rupture with the capitalist system that creates wars, interventions, poverty and refugees!

Mr President, in Greece the people have faced major fires and floods that have caused loss of human lives and destroyed homes, small-scale farming and livestock infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land. It is appropriate to try to disorientate under the pretext of climate change in order to "oil out" the EU cost-benefit strategy implemented by all governments, as well as the current New Democracy strategy, a strategy that strips and commercializes civil protection services, that considers the necessary protection projects ineligible and that delivers forests for exploitation to monopoly groups. The much-advertised Rescue EU, which recycles shortages of resources from country to country and usually arrives after a tragedy, proved that the critical 24 hours on the battlefield are the people who self-sacrifice defend their lives and livelihoods, while the understaffed state services are unable to respond. As for the Solidarity Fund, this demonstrably does not compensate the affected popular households. The people, organized, must fight for immediate, 100% compensation to the affected, for covering the huge shortages in personnel, means and infrastructure, but also for the necessary fire and flood protection projects, under the responsibility of the state.

Madam President, this report shows that you are not concerned about the tragic working conditions on platforms but about the fact that the United States, America and China groups are taking the lion's share of the profits in the digital economy. This is why you are promoting the shame of so-called flexible working, with the aim of boosting the profitability of European groups. What needs to be guaranteed is full employment and insurance rights, seven hours – five days – thirty-five hours, with an increase in remuneration. Freedom of trade union action, collective labour agreements, the right to strike, specific health and safety measures depending on the nature of the work, everything that the European Union systematically dismantles, with its "best practices" reflected in legislative abortions, such as the Hatzidakis Law of the ND Government. In the face of the demands of the groups, with a weapon and teleworking, for exhausting work, without rights, which all the bourgeois parties implement, the workers must organize their struggle by bringing to the fore their modern needs, in order for the anti-workers' abortions to remain on paper, in order to put obstacles in the working middle ages that you are preparing!

Madam President, the evolution of the pandemic, the prevalence of mutations with possible consequences on the effectiveness of vaccines, combined with the low vaccination rate, the sanitary rubber protocols, which expose people to new risks in the interests of tourism and transport groups, confirm that the fight against COVID-19 is not only tackled with the necessary vaccination. The anti-people policy of contradictions and backlashes fuels fear, hesitation, irrationality, undermining vaccination, while the debate on patents in an environment of vaccine and drug control by monopoly groups marks a new round of profitability and competition. The protection of the health of the people is not done with individual responsibility, as you constantly project. We need to strengthen the popular struggle for effective measures, decisive shielding of the public health system and primary care, measures in workplaces and schools, utilization of all safe and effective vaccines. The experience of the peoples highlights the need for vaccine medicines, not a commodity for business groups to treasure, but a right in the context of a socialized pharmaceutical industry, overturning the barriers imposed by capitalist profitability and the commercialization of health, to which the bourgeois political forces and the European Union are bowing.