This elections year, it is hard to imagine that European citizens will be satisfied with shallow political promises: they are furiously standing up against business as usual.
All over Europe, youth climate strikers are hitting the streets of cities and pushing to exit our brown, fossil fuel-based economy, which is supported by financial investors because it is (still) more profitable. In France, ordinary working people put on their yellow jackets and staged roadblocks for the whole of winter to protest against the government’s pro-finance, pro-business economic programme. In Greece, pensioners have held countless demonstrations against austerity policies, which led to cuts in their pensions, medicines, health insurance and to social exclusion in order to repay large amounts of borrowed money that mainly bailed-out German and French banks.