IV484 - May 2015

IVP 484 May 2015 PDF magazine

More than 800 migrants died on April 19 this year when their overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. The tragedy sent soaring this year’s Mediterranean death toll which was by then around 1,500—10 times the deaths during the same period last year. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between 23,000 and 24,000 migrants had tried to cross over to Italy since the beginning of the year, while just under 21,000 migrants made the journey in the same period in 2014. While the overall number of migrants rose somewhat, migrant deaths at sea skyrocketed.

The 22nd of May was a truly historic day. The population of the Irish state, long seen as a bastion of Catholic conservatism, vote in an overwhelming majority to amend the constitution to support LBGT marriage.

For some time now, Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s former Prime Minister and current President, has been promoting the dream of turning Turkey into the “China of Europe.” Last April, when Economy Minister Zafer Ça?layan met with foreign investors in London he declared with pride that “labor costs in Turkey are even lower than in China.” At a meeting with the Turkish business comunity in 2010, Eric Schweitzer, head of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, noted that “exports from Turkey to Germany have tripled in last 20 years and Turkey can become the China of Europe.”

Jeeban Puri from Sindhupalchowk district in Nepal, while working as a driver in Damam, Saudi Arabia, wanted to get back home desperately after the recent 7.8-magnitude earthquake which struck Nepal. Reaching his place, he discovered that his three-year-old son had died and his house was totally destroyed.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is about expanding US hegemony in East Asia. After five years of intense negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may come to fruition by the end of this year. Much has been written (and rightly so) about the negative consequences of the TPP for American labor. But what are the international implications of the TPP, and in a world awash with bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties (there are over 3,200 international investment treaties alone), how is this one different?

Syriza’s Central Committee on 23/24 May, 44% in favour of of the text of the Left Platform calling for a rupture in the negotiations and for an alternative plan.

For Syriza, embracing an “honorable compromise” means abandoning the platform that brought them to power. References, with positive or negative connotations, to the idea of an “honorable compromise” are very much in vogue in Greece. In the media discourse, and, more worryingly, of the government itself, “reaching an honorable compromise” with the so-called “institutions,” as the troika has been renamed, has become the strategic goal of the period.

On Sunday, May 24, 2015 elections were held in 9,000 municipalities of the Spanish state and in 13 autonomous regions (with the exception of Andalusia, Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country), for the councils of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa (Basque Country), the provincial councils in the Canary Islands and the councils of the three Balearic islands.

This “yes we can” that has for months rumbled in the squares and streets after the indignant spring of 2011 has now come as an earthquake to the institutions, something unimaginable then. The victory of Comú in Barcelona, with Ada Colau at the forefront, has overturned the political chessboard.