Alexis Tsipras’ speech at the founding congress of the “United Left” in Slovenia

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This cannot go on.

Enforcing «bail-out» and «bail-in» solutions, or a combination of both, is a recipe for crisis contagion and overall destabilization.

And Greece, which is systemically important to the Eurozone, cannot be the testing ground for a combination of this kind.

Nor could Slovenia be that.

Looking at Slovenia as Greek, I’m afraid that I’m watching a film whose ending I know.

And the ending is the troika and a Memorandum.

Slovenia is on the slippery downhill of Greece.

And privatizing fifteen key enterprises will only deprive the country from future income.

It won’t end the banking crisis.

Which, slowly but steadily, will evolve into a public-debt problem.

And unless Europe takes a decisive turn in May.

Unless people vote Left.

And the United left and the European Left come out of the election as strong as never before.

The troika will step in.

But this is not the story of Greece and Slovenia alone.

This is the story of the entire European periphery.

And if we don’t work together.

If we don’t establish networks of cooperation.

If each of us acts alone.

We will all lose.

Ms Merkel will win.

The neoliberal hegemony will endure.

But peoples of Europe will lose.

The Združena Levica (United Left), SYRIZA, the Party of the European Left,

All the democratic and progressive social and political forces,

We all have a common task:

To pull Europe out of the deep darkness of neoliberalism.

Never before since the end of the Cold War had Europe been so divided and undemocratic.

Never before since the end of the Cold War had Europeans been so suspicious of each other.

Never before since the end of the Cold War had Europeans been so Eurosceptic.

This is exactly what motivated my candidacy for the Presidency of the European Commission on behalf of the European Left:

To end austerity to regain Democracy.
To hold back the social processes that revive nationalist tendencies and xenophobia, and inflame right-wing populism and extremism.
To reunite peoples and countries that neoliberalism divides.
To forge the widest possible social and political alliance against austerity.
To put forward the solidarity of young women and men, of the working people, of the pensioners and the unemployed in a Europe against the solidarity of the capital.

It is the only solidarity that could break through the dichotomy North-South; that could demolish the new «wall of money» between creditors and debtors that further divides Europe.