[5 min. video:] The good news and the bad news from Trump's defeat

Balanced and clear-headed comments from Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, a pan-European, progressive movement that aims to democratise the EU before it disintegrates.

 

 

"Resisting the right: the woman who is a beacon of hope in Salvini's Italy"

"Antonella Bundu is the lead candidate in a coalition of anti-fascist radical-left parties...

On a peaceful Monday morning in March 2018, a Senegalese street vendor named Idy Diene was murdered on the Vespucci bridge in Florence. 

The man who fired the six fatal shots was an Italian pensioner who told the police he had shot randomly at the first person he encountered. He had previously attempted to take his own life.

Antonella Bundu, 49, was one of the first people to arrive at the scene. She burst into tears when she was told that under the blood-stained sheet lay Diene. She had come to know him well, watching him set up and take down his makeshift table of cigarette lighters, tissues and umbrellas.

That afternoon she took part in the protests led by the Senegalese community in Florence. Diene had become the most recent victim of a series of attacks against Africans in Italy as anti-immigrant propaganda, spread in part by the far-right leader Matteo Salvini, continued to circulated in mass media.

Since that day, the number of racially motivated attacks against migrants has risen sharply in Italy, tripling between 2017 and 2018, and Salvini has become interior minister. One year after Diene’s death, spurred on by the climate of intolerance and racism that has spread throughout the country, Bundu has decided to run for mayor of Florence. The daughter of a Florentine mother and a Sierra Leonean father, she has become the first black female candidate for mayor of a large Italian city.

She is the lead candidate in a coalition of radical-left parties including Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) and Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation). The vote will be held at the same time as the European elections on 23-26 May.

“Until a few months ago I never imagined I could take on such a role,” Bundu told the Guardian. “Then a movement tied to the left invited me to speak at the Alfieri Theatre in Florence. I was given one word on which to improvise a seven-minute speech. The word was ‘black’. Without hesitation I poured out about what was happening in Italy. I spoke about myself, my story. They must have liked my monologue, because they immediately asked me if I’d be interested in running for mayor’s office.”

Read more about her story at source here.

"These Turks would rather leave their country than continue living under Erdoğan"

[People walk past an election poster for Turkey's President Erdogan in Istanbul, June 14, 2018.  Credit: 

Huseyin Aldemir/Reuters]

'Bilal Dündarlioğlu, a 34-year-old information technology engineer from Niğde, in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region, says he loves his country.

And in the next breath, he explains why he wants to leave.

“Human and political conditions are not good," he said. "I am not quite happy with the [situation] here — there is no justice."

"I am not happy with the economy either," he added. "Taxes are too high and salaries too low.”

Dündarlioğlu is not alone. In Istanbul, most young people interviewed by PRI say they either know someone who has left Turkey or wants to. Many say they’re thinking about it themselves. In cities from Barcelona and Madrid to Stockholm, Berlin and Athens, researchers say Turkish diaspora communities are growing. And for the first time in modern Turkey's history, it seems the exodus isn’t mainly due to a search for economic opportunity.

There are no official figures on emigration compiled by the Turkish government that break down the motives behind people's departure. But recent emigres and would-be emigres told PRI their decision was about safety from persecution, having a voice in society and, even more crucially, an uncertain future in the so-called “new” Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They say that Turkey went from being a haven of a stability and economic growth in the region to a country with increasing societal divisions, rising violence and a government that continues to become increasingly authoritarian.

Many people — particularly young, secular and educated Turks — say they have had enough.

"Here, unfortunately, a human being has no value and cannot express oneself," said Dündarlioğlu, adding that his final decision to leave will depend on what happens in the June 24 election, which could give Erdoğan even more power. "If you support the government, maybe you will be valued."

Over the 15 years Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party have been in power, they have eroded freedom of the press, free speech, expanded the role of conservative Islam in the officially secular republic and presided over an increasingly fragile economy, analysts and emigres say.

Related: Turkey jails more journalists than any other nation. Those in detention are all terrorists, Erdogan says.

After an unsuccessful coup attempt in July 2016, Erdoğan and his allies stepped up those efforts to clamp down, instituting a state of emergency that further grants them powers to detain and imprison alleged coup conspirators and sympathizers as well as anyone else who supposedly supports Fethullah Gülen, the Muslim cleric living in exile in the US whom Erdoğan has blamed for organizing the coup.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers, lawyers, intellectuals and artists as well as members of the civil service, the judiciary and the military have been jailed or have lost their jobs.

Then last year, voters approved changes to Turkey’s constitution to abolish the office of the prime minister and transform the country’s now-ceremonial presidency into a full-fledged chief executive. Supporters of the change said it would make the government run more efficiently. Opponents said it was move to give an increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan even more power.

If Erdoğan wins Sunday's election, he could wield near-absolute authority and cement his status as the most important Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk founded the country in 1923.

Erdoğan is leading in most polls. But his power grab has also galvanized his opponents: He’s forecast to come close to or only slightly top the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff election. 

Still, many of these Turks say nothing will change.

"I learned not to be hopeful about the elections because it's the same guys who always win," said a 26-year-old woman studying in Malmö, Sweden, who left Turkey in 2015, saying she couldn't take the oppressive environment any longer.

“I wasn't happy in Turkey as a woman, as a non-Muslim, single woman,” said the student, who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal against her or her loved ones at home. “Harassment became a part of your everyday life. You just hoped that you'd be one of the lucky ones, so no psycho will kick you in the face in the bus because you were wearing shorts that day.” 

"Those who remain in Turkey face an uphill battle against the changes that have occurred in the country in recent years, especially if Erdoğan wins," she added, explain that she visited Turkey after the coup attempt and found it "scary." 

"I remember thinking, 'Where am I?'" she recalled, after seeing pro-government propaganda in the subways and experiencing the tense feeling. "I felt like the Turkey I knew, the Turkey I left, died on [July 15, 2016]." 

She says she knows at least six people who have left Turkey. "But every time I go back and see my friends, they are all talking about leaving," she said.'

Read more from source at PRI's GlobalPost here.

VIDEO: "Meet DiEM25"

"Almost two years ago, we got together under DiEM25’s broad umbrella [Democracy in Europe Movement] to challenge old-style politics, to shatter TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) at the pan-European level, to turn Europe’s democratisation into a radical, realistic, uniting project.

2017 was an awful year for European democracy. But it was an amazing year for DiEM25. We:

• Rallied tens of thousands of people in cities including Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, Belfast, Hamburg, and London, and toured the breadth and length of Greece & Italy, demonstrating that There is An Alternative; that Another Europe Is Already Here!
• Nurtured our activists. There are now 70,000 DiEMers in almost every country on the planet!
• Launched and pushed specific campaigns to expose the Establishment’s worst abuses – and we just filed a lawsuit against the European Central Bank to force them to release #TheGreekFiles
• Launched our European New Deal, our concrete social and economic Policy Agenda, crowd-sourced from DiEM25ers and experts across the world

• Influenced elections with our interventions, like in Germany, France and the UK, and supported/partnered with candidates or parties that embraced them, like in Catalonia, Zagreb, Denmark and Poland
• Welcomed progressive leaders to our movement, like Naomi Klein and Richard Sennett

• Kickstarted the process for taking the European New Deal to a polling station near every European – at the Volksbuehne Theatre, in Berlin
• Began electing our Coordinating Collective
• Presented the Real State of the Union in Brussels, at the Bozar Theatre
• Set in motion the ‘Not Just Another Political Party’ endeavour
• Elected our first National Collectives (NCs), taking to new levels our ambitious experiment in grassroots transnational democracy – with all members (despite nationality) voting for different national collectives..."

Read more about DiEM25 here.

VIDEO: "To be a progressive..." (6 months after the British election)

"It’s exactly six months today, since [Britain] went to the polls. 

As the clock struck ten and we held our breath for the exit poll, few guessed the extraordinary result that was to come. Against all the odds, a Tory landslide had been stopped in its tracks – and a big part of that was down to the Progressive Alliance...

The impact of this is already being felt. We believe we are starting to see the end of austerity, and the beginning of a restoration of our public services, with the lifting of the cap on pay rises for parts of the public sector.

It wasn’t just that the Progressive Alliance got us more progressive MPs – it introduced a different kind of politics that was non-tribal and about something bigger than any single party. Through the Progressive Alliance we found out what we all have in common...

During the election campaign, we at Compass were often asked what it means to be a ‘progressive’, which is why we made a video. 

Watching it takes us back to that time, and revives the feelings of pride and gratitude (and relief!) that we hope you share.

Some days the news can make us angry or sad, even fill us with desperation. 

On these moments, it can be helpful to remind ourselves why we are doing what we are doing, and why it matters to continue to believe in, and fight for, a better world. 

Whether you’ve seen it before or not – this five-minute story will give your progressive spirit a boost:

Watch it here (YouTube Link) 
Or here (Facebook link) "