25 days of May

Bewilderment, sadness, rage. These are some of the moods that invade us and with which we are going to face this first of May. Bewilderment at a crisis that they have not yet finished explaining to us how and why it starts in the banks and ends in the people. Sadness for the lost rights, for the broken vital projects. Rage at the inability of our rulers to put people first and then macroeconomic indicators.

I make those feelings my own, I fully share them. When I hear the unemployment figure, I am able to put faces to those impersonal numbers, among them there are family members, friends and acquaintances. And in my family, among my friends and my acquaintances, there are young people with whom I share their fear of a future that seems more uncertain every day. My elders do not quite understand what has gone wrong, what has happened so that they have to live their last years sharing a meager pension with children and grandchildren who, in a normal situation, should be helping them.

I share those feelings but, at the same time, I try to convince them that there is hope. It is difficult, very difficult. Talking about hope, talking about the future from the present that we are suffering is difficult because it may sound like niceness, like unconscious optimism, but no, it is real.

There is hope because the situation we are experiencing is due to political decisions and can be corrected with political decisions. What we are suffering is not a meteorological phenomenon, it is the result of a financial crisis and the political management that has been made of it. It is the result of a savage austerity, the consequence of an insane bet by the European right to redraw a new order in which justice and solidarity are left out, sacrificed to the logic of macroeconomic figures.

This situation can be reversed. From indignation, justified, but above all from politics. It will be the new European Parliament, the one that emerges from the elections of May 25, that has the real possibility of changing the scenario. The one that legislates in contraposition to the decisions of the right-wing governments that today usurp our right to govern Europe in favor of its citizens.

We cannot be indifferent to the majorities that arise on May 25. A European Parliament dominated by the right will mean more of the same: the sacralization of zero deficit and adjustments for the weakest. A European Parliament in which progressive forces are in the majority represents an opportunity for hope, a fair distribution of efforts and benefits.

It is not going to be easy precisely because of the bewilderment, sadness and rage that also invade progressive and left-wing militants. Precisely for this reason it is essential that left-wing parties and unions are able to load ourselves with reasons and go out into the street to fight door to door against resignation and despair. Change begins in Europe and it is in our hands to achieve it.

We have 25 days to do it. Let's start this first of May.

María Dolores Corujo Berriel, Island Secretary of the PSOE of Lanzarote

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