Problems in Europe

In Deutsche Welle:

Thousands rallied across Europe Thursday, May 1, in traditional May Day protests on issues ranging from pension reforms to living standards. However, violence flared in German cities and others across the continent.

Leftist radicals fought Thursday in two German cities with riot police who were thwarting attempts to disrupt May Day parades by the far-right National Democratic Party [NPD].

In Hamburg, police said at least six cars were set on fire as the violence spread. Police used water jets mounted on heavy trucks to open a route for 700 far-rightists. Leftist organizers said they had 10,000 supporters at the scene determined to halt the parade.

 

The anti-immigrant NPD, which has sought to present itself as a voice of the poor, staged labour-day parades through an old-time working-class district of Hamburg and through inner-city Nuremberg, the city adopted by dictator Adolf Hitler as the home of his Nazi Party.

Violence marred May Day demonstrations in other parts of Europe where labor issues dominated the protests.

Turkish riot police clashed with demonstrators attempting to take part in in Istanbul on with some 467 protesters taken into custody and dozens of people treated at hospitals for the effects of tear gas.

In Russia, 10,000 people took part in May Day demonstrations against the rising cost of living and demanded wage increases.

In the western Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, union leaders criticized the fact that wages were rising too slowly despite strong economic growth.

According to police, some 7,000 people took part in a rally in the Revolution Square in Chelyabinsk, where speakers at the rally stressed that, despite economic growth; the incomes of a major part of the population were growing too slowly.

Prices of essentials, tariffs, the value of services in the housing and communal economy, as well as transport fees, continue to grow, leading to a growth in social tension, the speakers said.

Meanwhile in France thousands of demonstrators took part in May Day protests against the reforms of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In Paris, the two large French trade unions, CGT and CFDT, held a joint protest for the first time in four years. Several thousand took part in a march which arrived at the Place de La Republique in central Paris in the afternoon.

The protests were directed against the planned pensions reform and the cost of living.

In the Serbian capital Belgrade some 10,000 people marched in a call for better living standards in the economically struggling Balkan nation.

Representatives of the Workers’ Union pointed to the “long, painful transition and privatization in Serbia” and said workers’ rights had never been more under threat.

In Greece public transport services, and ships and flights by the state carrier Olympic Airlines were paralyzed across the country as unions planned demonstrations in the capital Athens to coincide with Labor Day.

The Europeans are struggling with stagnant wages and high inflation. So are the Americans, incidentally, but at least the Europeans are willing to engage in collective action. In the NYT:

When their local bakery in this town south of Paris raised the price of a baguette for the third time in six months, Anne-Laure Renard and Guy Talpot bought a bread maker. When gasoline became their biggest single expense, they sold one of their two cars.

Their combined annual income of 40,000 euros, about $62,500, lands Ms. Renard, a teacher, and Mr. Talpot, a postal worker, smack in the middle of France’s middle class. And over the last year, prices in France have risen four times as fast as their salaries.

“In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble,” Ms. Renard said one recent evening in her kitchen, as her partner measured powdered milk for their 13-month-old son, Vincent. “The French Revolution started with bread riots.”

… But today, Mr. Marceau said, a new class of bankers, executives and other high earners has taken over. “I feel like we’ve been in a slow process of losing to the people up top,” he said.

That simmering concern turned into anger last week in Britain. Striking teachers closed schools for the first time in two decades, protesting pay packages that did not keep pace with the soaring cost of living. Proposed raises were about 2.5 percent, while food has risen 7 percent and oil costs have surged 20 percent in Britain since this time last year.

The teachers’ rallying cry was just the latest to echo across the Continent.

German workers from several industries waged a series of strikes last month demanding a greater piece of the economic pie after years of being asked to make salary concessions — flexibility that, some economists argue, has helped a leaner, meaner Europe stave off recession so far.

In France, where purchasing power has replaced unemployment as Public Enemy No. 1, unions representing workers from teachers to factory workers have taken to the streets in protest.

In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the decline in purchasing power began in 2000, when employers started wresting wage concessions from unions, or simply shifting jobs to Eastern Europe and China.

Inflation-adjusted incomes rose from 1 percent to 2 percent in the late 1990s, but more than one million Germans lost full-time jobs during and after a recession in 2000 and 2001. Subsequently, workweeks got longer without extra pay, and from 2004 through 2007, inflation outpaced income increases for the average family.

“When I started working at 23, I earned almost the same wage that I earn now,” said María Salgado, a 37-year-old director of television documentaries living in Madrid. Fourteen years ago, her monthly salary of about 1,200 euros ($1,873), bankrolled a full social life.

No longer. “The well-to-do middle class has become the tight middle class,” she said. “I’m surprised we haven’t started a revolution.”

The shades of Weimar and the early 1930s. The postwar consensus is in utter shambles; an increasing number of people are protesting at neoliberal business-as-usual; wages are stagnant or falling; prices are increasing; and bourgoisie politics is seen as a cover-up or utterly irrelevant.