Turkey to hold elections in May amid deepening political, social crisis

Barış Demir & Ulaş Ateşçi

Turkish President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that presidential and parliamentary elections, legally scheduled for June 18, will be held on May 14. This has sparked a political crisis.

On Saturday, Erdoğan sought to legitimise his candidacy, stating: “The constitutional amendment adopted in 2017 is so clear that there is no room for the slightest debate. Turkey switched to a new system of rule with the 2018 [presidential] elections, so in this respect, the timer has reset.” He added, “The president elected in 2018 is the first president of the new system.”

According to the constitution, parliament can decide to renew the elections with a three-fifths majority. The president also has the power to renew elections. However, the constitution stipulates that for Erdoğan, who was elected president in 2014 and 2018, to run again, parliament must decide to hold elections, otherwise it would be unconstitutional. It states: “In the event that the Parliament decides to renew the elections during the second term of the President, the President may run for another term.”

The response of the bourgeois opposition, led by the Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP), to this unconstitutional attempt reveals its political bankruptcy. In Turkey, as in the rest of the world, there is no faction of the ruling class that defends democratic rights.

After Erdoğan's announcement, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu argued that it was impossible to oppose Erdoğan on this issue. He said: “Let’s say we object to it, where will it go? To the Supreme Election Board [YSK]. Who appointed those members? Erdoğan. Who will object to its decision? There is nowhere to appeal. Even the Constitutional Court.” He added: “Therefore, we do not consider to focus on whether Erdoğan should be a candidate or not.”

The Nation Alliance (“Table of Six”), led by the CHP, issued a statement after it met on Thursday, admitting that Erdoğan’s candidacy would be unconstitutional. They said: “Turkey is ruled by a government that acts with lawlessness. In this context, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution and the law, which are so clear that they leave no room for doubt, it is not possible for Mr. Erdoğan to run again in the elections to be held on May 14, unless the Parliament decides to renew the elections.”

Nevertheless, the “Table of Six” legitimised the elections by impotently accepting them. They stated: “However, we are confident that in the 100th anniversary of our Republic, our nation will say ‘Enough’ to this unlawful order and we would like to state that we are ready for the elections that Mr. Erdoğan plans to hold on May 14th with the support of our people, our belief in ourselves and our love for our country.”

This right-wing bourgeois alliance, to which various pseudo-left tendencies have declared their support against Erdoğan, is not an alternative to the People’s Alliance of AKP and its fascistic ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Rather, it is a rival that is at least as pro-imperialist and hostile to the working class and to democratic rights. Its position on the elections is also a sign of what the bourgeois opposition will do if Erdoğan decides to reject the legitimacy of the election results.

The Nation Alliance includes the far-right Good Party, an MHP split-off; the Islamist Felicity Party, from which the AKP emerged; the Future Party of former AKP Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu; and the DEVA party of former AKP Economy and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan.

Turkey is going to the elections amid the escalating US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, as the cost of living and unbearable social conditions drive the working class everywhere increasingly into struggle and the turn of the ruling class to authoritarian forms of rule.

In the face of growing anger and opposition among working people, Erdoğan has sought to ban strikes, on the one hand, and taken populist measures on the other. These measures include a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage for 2023, and new regulations on contract work and pensions. However, this is unlikely to appease mounting discontent among the broad masses.

In Turkey, where official annual inflation is over 60 percent and nearly 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, class tensions are particularly acute. All factions of the ruling class are well aware of them. This is why the bourgeois opposition alliance is as determined as the Erdoğan government to prevent the masses from mobilising in defense of basic social and democratic rights.

Recently, the Erdoğan government pushed for an undemocratic ruling blocking one of its rivals, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB), from running for the presidency. In 2019, İmamoğlu won the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, which Erdoğan's AKP had ruled for 25 years, despite the government’s attempts to steal the election by re-running it.

In December, however, an Istanbul court sentenced İmamoğlu to two years, seven months and 15 days in prison and a political ban for allegedly “insulting” public officials. The final ruling has not yet been made. However, it can be finalized quickly if Erdoğan decides this is needed to halt İmamoğlu’s candidacy.

Currently, polls suggest that neither Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance nor the Nation Alliance will secure the necessary majority in the presidential and parliamentary elections. The Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), with over 10 percent, or around 6 million votes, may therefore play a critical role in the outcome.

The government is holding a suit before the Constitutional Court, threatening to close the HDP as a trump card before the elections. Last week, the court rejected the HDP’s request to postpone the case until after the elections. On January 5, it also blocked official election funding for the HDP from the treasury. However, as a pro-EU and pro-NATO party, the HDP has no progressive response to this reactionary and undemocratic state repression.

When the “peace process” between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed in 2015 amid the imperialist regime-change war in Syria, the HDP, which was part of the peace talks, came under mounting repression. The emergence of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) as the main US proxy in Syria and of a Kurdish enclave there, terrified the Turkish bourgeoisie. They feared a Kurdish enclave could form in Turkey, a country with over 20 million Kurds.

As violent clashes with the PKK erupted again, the Erdoğan government embarked on a relentless anti-democratic crackdown against the HDP. With CHP support, several HDP MPs were stripped of parliamentary immunity and some were imprisoned, including HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ.

The HDP has more and more openly oriented to the bourgeois CHP-led alliance, but it has not been officially included in this alliance, which has largely ignored its demands. Recognizing its key role in the elections, the HDP leadership announced in early January that it would nominate its own presidential candidate if it was still ignored. It will participate in the parliamentary elections with its own candidates in the Labor and Freedom Alliance it has formed with a coalition of pseudo-left and Stalinist parties.

In the run-up to the elections, there is a very real danger that the Erdoğan government will launch a new military offensive against the US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria, trying to quell the growing social anger by promoting nationalism and militarism.

Blinken in Israel: Planning for war with an ally in crisis

Patrick Martin

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials Monday, for talks on the mounting political crisis in Israel, and on joint US-Israeli military operations against Iran.

Netanyahu clearly wanted the main focus to be on the second of these topics, but in his public remarks as they met, Blinken made it clear that there is mounting anxiety in Washington over the explosive political conditions building up both in the occupied territories and within the Jewish state itself.

The Biden administration is clearly concerned that the events of the past month are destabilizing the Israeli regime and calling into question its ability to serve as the principal bastion of American imperialism in the Middle East.

Its level of concern is reflected in the extraordinary relay of top US officials through Jerusalem in the month of January: first National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, then CIA Director William Burns, and now Secretary of State Blinken.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023 in Jerusalem. [AP Photo/Ronaldo Schemidt/Pool]

Netanyahu has assembled a radical right-wing government, headed by his Likud Party, the traditional party of the Israeli right, but with the participation of fascistic parties based in settlers on the West Bank and ultra-religious parties which seek to suppress not only the Palestinians but the more secular sections of the Jewish population.

Partly in order to block his own continued prosecution on corruption charges—as well as similar charges against several key political allies—Netanyahu is pursuing a series of changes in the Israeli political structure that would remove the attorney general and abolish the independence of the judiciary.

Israel has no written constitution or guarantees of basic democratic rights, and the previous Netanyahu government formally declared Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” reducing Palestinians to a second-class, apartheid-like status.

The latest proposal to effectively neuter the judiciary, popularly considered the last independent line of defense for democratic rights, aroused mass opposition, with several huge demonstrations in Tel Aviv, with as many as 100,000 people, in a country of only 7 million.

Blinken made an explicit reference to these protests in his public remarks, an unusual breach of the traditional diplomatic posture that a country’s internal affairs are its own business. This was clearly not out of concern for democratic rights in general. The US envoy had just spent a day in Egypt schmoozing with the bloodstained military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

A further destabilizing factor, to which Blinken devoted most of his public comments, is the wave of violence on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, provoked by an Israeli raid Thursday in the West Bank city of Jenin, which left ten Palestinians dead.

This was followed by a suicide attack by a lone Palestinian on a Jerusalem synagogue Friday night, in which seven were killed. On Saturday, a 13-year-old Palestinian opened fire on an Israeli father and son, wounding both. On Sunday there were numerous settler attacks on Palestinians across the West Bank—some reports said as many as 150 violent incidents were recorded over the weekend.

On Monday, Israeli military forces in the occupied city of Hebron opened fire on a car which was supposedly driving suspiciously, killing the driver, 26-year-old Nassim Abu Fouda, who was shot in the head.

In his opening statement to Netanyahu and in subsequent public remarks, Blinken called for an end to the violence, by which he meant actions by Palestinians, and settlers, and other Jewish vigilantes. He made no reference to the Israeli massacre that touched off the current round of attacks, let alone voicing any criticism.

After his meetings with Netanyahu and other cabinet officials, Blinken is to travel Tuesday to the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is headquartered, for talks with the 87-year-old president Mahmoud Abbas. He is expected to bully the PA into restoring official cooperation with the Israeli security forces in actions to suppress the Palestinian population of the West Bank. This cooperation was suspended after the bloody assault in Jenin.

The closed-door talks between Blinken and Netanyahu are likely to have dispensed briefly with the internal crisis, and given much greater attention to the mounting military aggressiveness of both Israel and the United States against Iran.

There is no doubt active planning under way for further actions after Saturday’s attack on the Iranian city of Isfahan, where military targets were hit by small drone aircraft apparently launched within Iran by Israeli agents. There are conflicting reports on the nature of the targets and the extent of the damage, but the city is a center of Iranian air and space operations.

The Pentagon declared Sunday that the American military had no role in the strike, but as the conservative Jerusalem Post pointed out, “There are all sorts of ways to parse the Pentagon statement that the US had no military involvement in the drone strike. Might it have had intelligence or cyber involvement?”

Netanyahu has made war threats to forestall the supposed threat of a nuclear-armed Iran his political calling card. He adamantly opposed the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers, including the United States, and hailed the Trump administration for pulling out of the agreement and effectively wrecking it.

The Biden administration has moved closer to the Israeli position in the wake of the outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Russia has reportedly relied on Iranian-made drones as an effective weapon against Ukrainian targets, although Iran claims the drones were supplied before the war broke out last February.

An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky openly linked the Israeli drone attack on Isfahan and the use of Iranian drones in Ukraine. There has been considerable speculation in the US corporate media that the Biden administration is seeking means to disrupt Iranian drone production or otherwise retaliate against Tehran for its de facto alliance with Russia.

Earlier this month, the US and Israel carried out their largest-ever joint military exercises, involving 7,500 troops and encompassing air, sea and ground forces. In an interview with CNN Monday night, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declared that these exercises were directed primarily against Iran, which he called the principal security threat to US interests in the Middle East and to the state of Israel.

TV and radio workers strike against corruption and for secure jobs at German broadcaster RBB

Gustav Kemper

Hundreds of workers at broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) went on a day-long strike on January 27, giving expression to their anger over the unrestrained enrichment and corruption at board level. Their willingness to strike was great and had an impact on current programming, with numerous broadcasts either being cancelled or replaced by programmes from other stations.

Rally of striking RBB employees [Photo: WSWS]

While 250 journalists, technicians and members of other professions met in front of the television centre for the strike rally, others in the various operational departments downed tools, including in the television switching room, the technology department at the Berlin studio, the RBB Kultur programme, the ARD joint facility “ARD Digital” in Potsdam, which is managed by RBB, and elsewhere.

Not a single electronic reporting team went out that day. Many programmes were affected, including RBB’s Berlin regional programming, which broadcast an emergency program. The midday TV programs were cancelled and Radio 1 broadcast only music.

Patricia, Thomas and Daniel. The placard reads "Put the money into programming and not the deep pockets of the management, the lawyers, ex-directors" [Photo: WSWS]

Strikers spoke to WSWS reporters about their demands and their anger at the corruption on the RBB board. “The bureaucracy in the administration and the director’s office funnel outrageous salaries to themselves,” Daniel said. Like his colleagues Patricia and Thomas, Daniel works as a “freelancer” for the broadcaster. Although they do the same work as permanent employees, they receive noticeably less pay.

“We are mainly concerned with fair pay, that the work of freelancers and permanent employees is rewarded at the same level,” Thomas explained. Patricia added. “Freelancers don’t get sick pay, no health insurance subsidies, the child allowance is only 50 percent of what permanent employees get.”

Philipp, also a freelance journalist, vented his anger: “The help-yourself mentality at board level is intolerable. We need more money for good programmes, not the cuts that are now on the table.”

Asked if it was still possible to undertake critical journalism under such conditions, Franziska replied, “There are areas where it becomes difficult. I don’t think the conditions are good to do fearless journalism if you’re afraid for your job.”

In fact, major cost-cutting is imminent, which will affect the number of employees as well as pay cheques. Following the dismissal of the station’s former director, Patricia Schlesinger, her successor, Katrin Vernau, was expected to clean up the corruption. Several law firms were hired to investigate “undesirable structural developments” at the station. So far, €1.4 million in legal fees have been incurred, which are now to be recouped through cuts in programming and staff.

In addition, there are losses due to the cancellation of a Digital Media Building, whose construction had been planned by the former broadcast management, at an estimated cost of €184 million. The project has since been abandoned, but the €18 million costs incurred to date are to be saved at the expense of employees.

The previous collective agreement for permanent staff expired at the end of September 2022. The Verdi trade union had agreed to postpone negotiations on a follow-up contract for three months so that the new director would have enough time to get an overview.

When these negotiations were supposed to start on January 26, the surprise came. The RBB negotiating commission declared that it had no mandate to negotiate. The director had “not yet been able to get a complete overview of the station’s situation,” it said.

As a result, Verdi and the German Journalists’ Association (DJV) jointly called for a one-day warning strike. But RBB staff should be on their guard because Verdi is closely linked to the parties running the Berlin Senate (state executive) and represents their interests. There is a political complex linking the broadcaster’s administrative board, which is selected by the RBB Broadcasting Council, the ruling Senate parties and the union’s officials.

For example, the 29 members of the Broadcasting Council comprise representatives of churches, business associations, the DGB (German Federation of Trade Unions), Verdi, the Civil Servants’ Association, the Berlin and Brandenburg Chamber of Industry and Commerce, cultural associations, and a total of seven representatives of the parties in the state legislatures of Berlin and neighbouring Brandenburg.

These networks represent the political and economic interests of the ruling parties. This is evident in the content of television and radio programmes, in which critical positions are often suppressed. Savings in programming and job cuts are also the consequence of years of corruption.

The Berlin Senate (controlled by the Social Democrats [SPD], Left Party and Greens) supports military rearmament and the war expenditures agreed by the federal coalition government of the SPD, Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens. It is implementing drastic cuts in vital health and education provisions in the state budget. The response of the RBB board of directors to demands for wage increases and job protection is predictable. Instead of improvements for staff, further social cuts are being prepared.

In response to the horrendous demand for €1.4 million from the law firms and the extension of their brief by another three months, which has not yet been priced in, the chairman of the board of directors, Dorette König, a former staunch supporter of the Stalinist party of state in the former East Germany, gave the terse answer: “What would be the alternative?”

The RBB corruption affair is the visible expression of the right-wing developments in the media sector. It is not being cleaned up but hushed up. The few thousand euros that are now being saved on the salaries of board members will not drain the swamp but are purely window dressing.

This is also shown by the award of a lucrative consultancy contract to the former editor-in-chief, Christoph Singelnstein, who left the station at the end of March 2021. Together with his pension, and a consulting contract worth €6,300 a month, his monthly income amounts to €15,000.

RBB’s ailing situation reflects the rot of capitalist society. While the media degenerate into propaganda instruments for the war policy of the federal coalition, the livelihoods of working people are being shattered.

Erik and Tamara. The placard reads "For fair wages, digital first—but really!!! & no sudden format changes" [Photo: WSWS]

Many young employees are disappointed with the situation at RBB. Tamara and Erik told the WSWS, “We are against the way young people are treated, who are even worse off than the older ones. We will never make as much money as the older ones in this job.”

They reported that about 60 percent of employees at RBB were freelancers. “The people in digital get the lowest rate of pay. Yet digital is the future. For example, developing a YouTube format series or social media work. Television is still the best paid, followed by radio. That doesn’t reflect modern times.”

Asked what they think about the fact that hundreds of billions are spent on military rearmament and war, while at the same time drastic cuts are being made in all areas of public service, they replied, “By all means, we are against war. But the problems here existed before the war. Our struggle started long before, but now the situation is getting worse.”

Sweden discovers major rare earth deposits in Arctic region

Gabriel Black

Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB) mine in winter, photo was taken from the top of Loussavaara mountain, 7 October, 2018. [Photo by Witext / CC BY-SA 4.0]

A Swedish mining company reported earlier this month that it  has discovered a large deposit of rare earth minerals in the far north of the country.

Rare earths are a series of 17 minerals commonly found together that are used in most high-tech electronics, military systems and batteries. While widely distributed throughout the world, they are hard to find in sufficient concentrations to be economic to extract.

The deposit was found by Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), a state-owned mining company that operates two major iron mines in the far north of the country, just inside the Arctic Circle. The discovery was made at LKAB’s Kiruna mine, which is about 130 kilometers from the Finnish border and 300 kilometers from the Russian border.

Like many critical minerals, rare earths are found in relatively lower quantities, often near or interspersed with other, more common metals, like copper or iron. In this case, the minerals were found interspersed with phosphorous in an iron-oxide apatite deposit a few kilometers from the Kiruna mine.

The discovery was heralded in the mainstream press throughout Europe and the US as a significant geopolitical development that would wrestle control over the rare earth supply chain away from China.

NPR’s Paddy Hirsch described it as “a very big deal for the West.” He continued, “We have seen in the last 10 years that the U.S. in particular has been very, very worried about the fact that China has such a lock hold on the production of rare earths. … So this find in Sweden is a very big deal for the West and for Western nations and NATO…”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), about 60 percent of the world’s rare earths come from China. The vast majority of that—more than a third of the world’s total production—comes from a single location, the Bayan Odo deposit in the Inner Mongolia region of Northern China.

The United States is the second largest producer of rare earths, accounting for a little more than 10 percent of the supply.

The new deposits in Sweden—within a global context—are less impressive than the media fanfare suggests. LKAB says it found roughly 1 million tons of rare earth oxides. However, there are already some 120 million tons of reserves globally. Forty-four of those tons are located in China, with Vietnam, Brazil and Russia tied for second-place with about 20 million tons each.

Reserve estimates, however, can be deceptive. Not only are reserves educated guesses at a complex geologic formation buried beneath the earth, but they also do not account for how easy the reserves are to produce.

In a press conference announcing the find, LKAB CEO Jan Mostrom explained, “We don’t actually know how big it is. We don’t actually know how, in which way, we can utilize, develop this project. But what we can say today, with what we know today is that it’s by far the largest deposit of REE’s [Rare Earth Elements] in Europe.”

Currently there are no large-scale mines in the European Union (EU), and only one relatively small processor of rare earths located in Estonia. China, in contrast, controls almost 90 percent of the processing of rare earths globally.

The main importance of the LKAB find is that it may create the possibility for the EU to develop, within its own borders, a rare earth supply chain. This could both allow European manufacturers to challenge their global competitors in rapidly expanding markets, like electric vehicle production, and enable the continent’s major imperialist powers to supply modern weaponry to their militaries without relying on materials supplied by potential rivals.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained, Russia is also a major holder of rare earth minerals and critical minerals more broadly. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have launched major, multi-billion-dollar initiatives to develop these critical mineral resources under the control of the US and its allies.

While the geographic discrepancies in rare earth production and processing are partially the result of geology, it has more to do with the globalization of production and the transformation of China into the sweatshop of the world. 

China’s rise as a central hub of electronics and industrial manufacturing has made it relatively convenient from the standpoint of globally mobile corporations to locate mineral processing there. It has the cheap labor force and the land. China’s factories are also frequently the destination of these processed minerals. 

Additionally, mining and processing ores of rare earths and other critical minerals is a toxic process that leaves long lasting damage to the environment. The major international corporations have, until recently, been content with letting this dirty process happen elsewhere.

The actual development of the Swedish mine will take between 10 to 15 years before production can begin. 

LKAB has announced plans to become a significant processor, not only of rare earths, but all sorts of critical minerals. It recently purchased the Norwegian company REEtec, which specializes in more environmentally friendly forms of processing rare earths. 

As David Hognelid, LKAB’s chief strategy officer, told the New York Times, “We want to have the whole value chain.” LKAB is currently planning an industrial park that will develop these processing capabilities in the north of Sweden.

The location of significant quantities of rare earths, oil and natural gas in the Arctic region is one reason why the high north is increasingly the subject of intense conflicts between the major and regional powers. Eight countries, including the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden, have territorial claims in the Arctic, with some of them contested. As sea ice melts, the possibility of securing control over these key resources, as well as newly open sea lanes for trade routes, has encouraged an increase in military activity in the region.

LKAB’s rare earth discovery takes place during a massive escalation of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. This last week, the US announced it would be sending M1 Abrams tanks, widely considered the most advanced battle tanks in the world, to Ukrainian troops.

US imperialism and its European allies are intent on defeating and carving up Russia to seize control of the vast amounts of natural resources that lie beneath its landmass. These include rare earths and large quantities of oil and natural gas.

In this regard, the United States views the war as a stepping stone in a far deadlier conflict with China. US war strategists are actively preparing and plotting this war, largely behind the backs of the population. Securing supplies of critical minerals like rare earths is seen as an essential form of preparation, given their strategic significance and China’s domination of the global market.

German share prices soar, while incomes and jobs plummet

Marianne Arens

The social gulf in Germany, as elsewhere, is widening.

Since the beginning of the year, stock prices have been climbing while thousands of jobs are cut and real wages fall. The workload for staff in the public sector is being doubled and tripled because money is going into rearmament.

The more the German political establishment shifts to a war economy, the more pressure is put on the working class.

Frankfurt Stock Exchange [Photo by Pythagomath / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The willingness to resist is growing, as shown by the recent airport strikes in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Warning strikes, protest actions and even indefinite strikes are becoming more frequent.

In Göppingen, 230 metalworkers have been on strike for a week. They went on strike January 22 at two plants belonging to the Kern-Liebers Group, Saxonia Umformtechnik and Saxonia Textile Parts. Both plants produce metal parts: one for the automotive industry, the other for knitting machines and textile operations.

“Participation in the industrial action is overwhelming,” writes the local press. The strike had been approved by 96 percent in a strike ballot. The employees have been working overtime for years, but the Saxonia board refuses to pay the agreed-to wages. The same situation could arise at other plants in the Kern-Liebers company, where management is also complaining about “supply chain problems, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis.”

The top management of German companies warns of “the advantage of German locations being lost,” according to a letter from the country’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, employers’ president Rainer Dulger said he expected the number of people in work to shrink by 5 million by 2030. Since the government would receive less tax and contributions revenue, he said, it would have to “adjust the social welfare systems” (and raise the retirement age, for example). “We will not be able to maintain the prosperity to which we have become accustomed in Germany,” Dulger asserted.

When Dulger says “we” will have to do with less, the multimillionaire and president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA), is clearly not talking about himself and his peers. Nor is he considering higher tax rates for board members and shareholders of corporations like Porsche, Daimler, Siemens and Rheinmetall, for whom things are going really well right now. Share prices on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange have been rising since the beginning of the year.

The DAX index, which tracks the share prices of Germany’s 40 strongest companies, gained almost 9 percent in the first two weeks of 2023. According to an analysis by savings bank subsidiary Deka, DAX companies are expecting record-breaking dividends in spring 2023. A total amount of almost €55 billion ($US60 billion) in dividends is predicted. More than a third of this will go to the auto companies Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Audi and VW, which achieved record profits last year.

However, the same corporations are demanding concessions from the working class because of the “difficult situation.” To push this through, they are relying on the collaboration of the German Union Confederation (DGB) unions. The latter, including IG Metall, Verdi and the rest, have already proven to be important pillars of German corporate interests, prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic.

Shortly after the start of the Ukraine war, the unions joined forces with the government and business leaders in the “Concerted Action.“ Their goal is to pass on the enormous costs of military rearmament and the consequences of sanctions against Russia to working people while blocking resistance to the war. Since then, “restructuring” has involved more and more layoffs and the biggest wage losses since the 1930s.

A few days ago, Ford announced mass layoffs in Cologne and Aachen. The closure of the Ford Saarlouis plant by 2025 is a done deal. Previously, the Ford works council had secretly agreed to an 18 percent wages cut at all plants. Other European auto plants, such as Volvo in Ghent, Belgium and Stellantis at the Atessa plant in Italy, are putting further pressure on their workforces this week, bringing in short-time working.

The supplier companies are particularly affected by the transformation underway in the auto industry. “The supplier industry is dying a slow death,” writes Der Spiegel, in regard to small and medium-sized businesses. The authors point out the situation of many small foundries and steel producers that depend on coke, coal or gas, which have been hit hard by the energy crisis.

One example is the Vulcast iron foundry in the Eifel region, which has been in existence for over 330 years. Despite well-filled order books, it filed for bankruptcy and laid off 119 employees in January, citing the enormous rise in electricity and raw material prices.

The larger automotive supplier groups—Conti, Hella, ZF, Bosch and Mahle—have been cutting jobs for years in close collaboration with the IG Metall. At Bosch, thousands of jobs are again at risk. Since car production is being increasingly converted to e-mobility, Bosch has announced further drastic job cuts at plants that manufacture parts and components for combustion engines. At Mahle, the automotive parts manufacturer based in Stuttgart, entire factories are being shut down. Mahle in Gailsdorf (300 employees) is to close by the end of 2023. The Mahle filter plant in Öhringen (170 employees) was already shut down at the end of last year.

Almost every day, a new automotive supplier is affected. Here is a short list of announcements in the last few days:

• Auto supplier GKN Driveline is closing its plant in Zwickau, which previously employed 800. The production of drive shafts and other parts for VW, Audi, BMW and Mercedes will be relocated to Eastern Europe.
• Canadian-Austrian automotive supplier Magna plans to close a total of three plants, two of them in Baden-Württemberg (Bopfingen with 170 and Dürbheim/Tuttlingen with 110 employees). A third Magna plant in Bad Windsheim, Bavaria, is also to be closed.
• In Radolfzell on Lake Constance, auto parts manufacturer BCS, which employs more than 600, will close by the end of 2024.
• Ditter Plastic in Haslach in the Black Forest (Baden-Württemberg) has filed for insolvency. The company, which specialises in the precision development of technical plastic parts for the automotive industry, still has 400 employees.
• Mechatronics manufacturer Marquardt is cutting 87 jobs in Baden-Württemberg. Here, too, part of the production will be continued in Eastern Europe.

Other sectors are also affected by mass layoffs. These include Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof department stores, owned by multimillionaire speculator René Benko. Of the 131 stores still in operation, two-thirds will be closed or massively downsized, threatening several thousand jobs. In Switzerland, health food chain Müller closed all 37 stores in 17 cities on January 3; almost 300 sales assistants lost their jobs.

The list of mass layoffs and closures is lengthy. For example, printing company Prinovis in Ahrensburg (Schleswig-Holstein), which belongs to Bertelsmann, is also to cease operations at the end of January, affecting the jobs of 545. In the technology sector, Google with 12,000 layoffs is now being followed by SAP with 3,000 job cuts, 200 of them in Germany.

The number of bankruptcies had already risen by the end of last year, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Insolvencies rose in November by 1.2 percent and in December by 3.1 percent compared to the respective previous months. Year-on-year, almost 18 percent more insolvencies were reported in 2022 than in the previous year. Siemens Supervisory Board Chairman Joe Kaeser warned, “If the broad industrial base crumbles, it endangers prosperity and social peace in Germany.”

Top managers fear that resistance is stirring in the factories. It has been simmering for a long time because wages are also lagging far behind inflation. According to figures from the Hans Böckler Foundation, although collectively agreed wages have recently risen by an average of 2.7 percent, there has been an average loss in real wages of 4.7 percent in the face of persistent inflation.

More and more workers are no longer prepared to accept this. In strike ballots, overwhelming majorities are voting in favour of industrial action. It is only with increasing difficulty that the unions are able to isolate struggles and keep them under control.

In the aviation sector, Wednesday’s all-day strike at Berlin’s BER airport was followed Friday by another strike of 700 baggage handlers at Düsseldorf airport. The airport workers are defending themselves against mass layoffs associated with the takeover by new service providers, including the notorious WISAG Aviation. At the same time, air traffic controllers in Fuerteventura, pilots in Portugal and Ryanair flight attendants in Charleroi, Belgium are on strike.

At wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, technicians throughout Germany are on strike. Since November, they have been fighting for better pay, including regular pay increases, special payments and part-time work for older workers.

In the energy sector, French refinery workers also continued their strikes last week against the Macron government’s pension “reforms.” On Thursday, French port workers joined the strike. For the past week, dockworkers in Mulhouse, Alsace, a major crossroads in the Franco-German-Swiss triangle, have been on strike.

Industrial action is threatened on many fronts—at airports, among nursing staff, on the rail, at the post office, at Berlin’s city cleansing service and now throughout the public sector. This is not just about better wages and working conditions, but also about the increasing threat of war.

“We are fighting not only against the war, but also against the fact that workers have to foot the bill for it,” Endrik Bastian, a nurse and candidate of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) for the Berlin state election, said recently in a video. Commenting on the health care catastrophe, Bastian said, “Germany alone is short 200,000 nurses—200,000! And of those who are there, another 10 percent are missing because of illness and overwork ... To finance war and rearmament, there are mass cuts—in health care, and also in education.”

Labour disputes are also on the rise again in the nursing sector. At the Göttingen University Hospital, about 200 cleaning staff went on strike for three days on Wednesday, because the service and cleaning staff of the UMG (Unimedizin Göttingen) are paid significantly below the agreed rates. In Austrian private hospitals, about 10,000 employees are threatening a wage strike.

All these struggles need a perspective! They must no longer be left to the control of the trade unions, which are subordinated to the “social partnership”—in other words: to big business and the government’s war policies. The unions work closely with the coalition government and the top management of the DAX corporations.

They make a very good living from this, as the example of the VW works council Bernd Osterloh leaders shows. A criminal trial in Braunschweig brought to light the lavish salaries and bonuses collected by Osterloh, a former works council head, which in some years came to more than €700,000. The current head of the corporate works council, Daniela Cavallo, says she collects around €100,000 a year as a fixed salary, to which bonuses in the five-digit range are added.

No wonder high-ranking union officials and works council members also defend the bonuses and dividends paid to managers and shareholders. As DGB leader Yasmin Fahimi said at the end of December, “These are the normal mechanisms of the market economy. You may not like them. But now is not the time for fundamental debates critical of capitalism.”

Chinese health authorities declare COVID infection peak has passed

Benjamin Mateus

With holiday travels during the Lunar New Year celebration in China having reached 90 percent of their pre-pandemic levels and tourist locations packed with vacationing revelers, the corporate press is claiming that COVID is finally over.

Such distortions only promote a completely anti-public-health sentiment that places supposed personal liberties above the well-being of community, threatening the physical survival of those now “free” to move about and mix socially. This will have significant repercussions for populations of every country and entrench the oft-stated policy that the “cure can’t be worse than the disease.” The international default policy openly values the economy, i.e. profits, over the lives of people, in this and any future pandemic.

China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has reported there have been more than 300 million trips thus far during the holidays. The chief China economist at Nomura Holdings inc., Ting Lu, told Bloomberg News, “Pent-up demand is being released as many people rush to scenic spots, watch firework shows and crowd into restaurants and hotels. He added that government-released data “suggest the ‘exit wave’ is quickly coming to an end.”

Patients receive intravenous drips in an emergency ward in Beijing, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. China on Thursday accused "some Western media" of bias, smears and political manipulation in their coverage of China's abrupt ending of its strict "zero-COVID" policy, as it issued a vigorous defense of actions taken to prepare for the change of strategy. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]

The former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, Hu Xijin, wrote on social media, “The epidemic seemed to disappear from the vast majority of people suddenly. The Chinese Lunar New Year is very lively. The consumption has resumed rapidly.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) official figures for the week ending December 19, 2022, the world saw a single-week pandemic high of 45 million COVID cases, nearly twice that of the BA.1 Omicron wave that ran roughshod across the globe a year ago. This is the result of the demise of the Zero-COVID policy that had kept deaths to an enviably low figure in China of just over 5,000 in a country of 1.4 billion people. 

Since the surge in December throughout China, global COVID deaths jumped fourfold to over 40,000 for the week ending January 2, 2023, with “more than half of them from China,” as noted by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Official figures from Chinese health authorities have reported the following numbers of COVID-related deaths: 

·       December 8 to January 12:  59,938 deaths

·       January 13 to January 19: 12,658 deaths

·       January 20 to January 26: 6,364 deaths

·       Total: 78,960

China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has claimed that COVID-related deaths and severe cases at hospitals have declined by more than 70 percent since the peaks in early January. However, the WHO has indicated these figures grossly underrepresent the actual toll and has persistently called for China to be more transparent with their reporting.

As part of their policy to openly conceal the real estimates of the “exit surge,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has chosen to adhere to an extremely narrow definition of COVID deaths. People dying at home or from other than respiratory consequences of their COVID infection are not counted. Additionally, rules and procedures are in place at hospitals that prevent or delay annotating COVID-related mortalities on death certificates. 

Such a maneuver greatly lowers the real extent of fatalities and severe disease caused by the “Let it rip” policy that has characterized the ruling class response to the pandemic. The fabricated figures provide a cover for the fraudulent “Omicron is mild” farce. Every country that has lifted their mitigation strategies has experienced a far deadlier surge than what is being reported by Chinese authorities.

Epidemiologic models analyzed by the Economist utilize information such as estimates of the rate at “which people become infected, get sick, recover or die (known Aa a SEIR model [susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered]).” The magazine found that allowing the virus free rein across China would result in 1.5 million deaths. 

As for their assumptions in modeling their estimates, the Economist wrote, “Our model builds upon work by Jun Cai of Fudan University and others. We account for how people of different age groups are affected by COVID and how protected they are by Chinese vaccines. We looked at when the jabs were administered and assumed that they wane at the same rate as Western ones, though there is little evidence on this. We take China at its word when it comes to vaccination rates and intensive-care-unit (ICU) capacity because there are no alternative statistics.”

Another frequently cited British-based analytic company, Airfinity, has placed cumulative deaths since December 1, 2022, at 955,000. They forecast that deaths passed their peak as of January 26, during the Lunar New Year festivities. 

A recent report published by the National School of Development of Peking University estimates that as of January 11, around 900 million people in China had been infected. Chinese CDC’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, who used his social media post to calm fears during the New Year festivities, estimated that the peak of infections had passed. And with 80 percent of the country having already been infected, the resurgence of another wave was unlikely, he argued.

Although the source of his sentiments is clearly located in and emanates from the Chinese Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus, they provide context to the modeling estimates being provided by various analytic groups working on concretizing the impact of abandoning Zero-COVID on the country’s population.

Attempts by Western media to vilify and discredit the handling of COVID by Xi Jinping and the CCP are motivated ideologically by the hostility of imperialism to the Peoples Republic. First they malign Beijing for adhering to Zero-COVID, now they attack the regime for adopting the very same policies as all the other countries, expressed most crudely in then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s declaration that he would “let the bodies pile high.” 

To place the statistics into stark relief, though the official COVID deaths after three unrelenting years have reached 6.8 million, excess deaths, which are far closer to reality in capturing the social devastation caused by the pandemic, now exceed 21 million. And in the context of scientific breakthroughs and treatments at the world’s disposal, such a magnitude of death, seen only in periods of world wars, is deliberate.

As the World Socialist Web Site recently wrote, “While the CCP bears responsibility for this disaster, the mass infection policy was implemented under the demands of the US and the other imperialist powers … However, having adopted the mass infection policies demanded by global finance capital, the Chinese government is being further attacked and denounced by the US media. If President Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership thought their acquiescence would win them breathing space, they were wrong.”

The reopening of China will not halt the drive by US imperialism towards war with China. Indeed, the war with nuclear-armed Russia being waged in the Ukraine is only a prelude for the confrontation further east. A memo obtained by NBC News from General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, predicted a shooting war with China in 2025 in remarks to his subordinate command team.  

Considering these recent developments in China’s response to COVID, Morgan Stanley has raised their GDP forecast for 2023 to 5.7 percent. As they wrote, “The near-term pain of a fast reopening will likely be compensated by an earlier and stronger recovery. The market is under-appreciating the far-reaching ramifications of reopening.” However, these assurances are not unanimous and the current projections by financial institutions are for the most part guarded and pessimistic. 

Indeed, regardless of the state of the pandemic, there is a unanimous effort by the financial institutes to end any and all pandemic mitigation measures. Last month’s comments by German virologist Christian Drosten that the COVID pandemic is entering an endemic phase were revealing. “We are experiencing the first endemic wave with SARS-CoV-2 this winter; in my estimation the pandemic is over,” he told Tagesspiegel. Meanwhile, the country is experiencing a surge in excess deaths that remain unaccounted. 

Additionally, there are pressures placed on the international United Nation’s health agency to end the declaration of “public health emergency of international concern” regarding the COVID pandemic. However, WHO director Ghebreyesus has not indicated this proposal will be on the table when the WHO’s emergency committee meets on Monday, the 14th such meeting since the start of the pandemic.

Israeli drones, warplanes strike Iran and Syria

Patrick Martin

Israeli military and intelligence units carried out multiple acts of aggression over the weekend against Iran and Iranian forces in Syria. The attacks were the first offensive military operations under the ultra-right government newly installed in Israel, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Explosion from an Israeli drone attack at the Iranian Defense Ministry's ammunition facility in Isfahan. [Photo: Moshe Schwartz/@YWNReporter]

A drone attack, likely staged from within Iran by Israeli operatives, hit a weapons facility in the central Iranian city of Isfahan on Saturday night. This was followed Sunday night by airstrikes against a truck convoy operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as it crossed the Iraq-Syria border headed into Syria.

Definitive information about the scope, damage and casualties from these attacks was difficult to obtain, but the Wall Street Journal cited an unnamed US military source confirming Israeli responsibility for the drone attack in Isfahan.

There were conflicting claims from Iran and from Israeli sources about the damage in Isfahan. The Iranian Defense Ministry said they caused minor damage and no casualties, and that several of what it called “Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)” had been shot down.

Given the small size of the drones, said to be quadricopters, and the location of Isfahan in the center of the country, hundreds of miles from the nearest border, military officials said the attack had likely been launched from within Iran by Israeli operatives. Israeli agents have carried out dozens of attacks within Iran, including assassinations, bombings and other acts of sabotage.

Map of Iran, Isfahan is circled in red. [Photo by JRC, DG, ECHO, EC / CC BY 4.0]

Iran’s principal nuclear fuel enrichment facility at Natanz is located in Isfahan province, but well away from the city, and it did not appear to be a target of the latest attacks. There is also a large air force base, an Iran Space Research Center site, and numerous smaller military-related facilities, including at least one ammunition warehouse or factory which was reportedly hit by the drone strike.

The attacks came in the wake of a visit by CIA Director William Burns to Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials, and coinciding with the arrival of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who begins a two-day round of official meetings on Monday.

And it follows the largest-ever US-Israeli joint military exercises, held in the eastern Mediterranean and across Israeli territory, and involving more than 7,500 troops. Among the reported actions was to test systems that would be vital in the initial stages of a major war against Iran, including advance strikes to take out air defense systems and aerial refueling of warplanes.

The Jerusalem Post wrote, in a gloating tone:

“Experts noted that the US and Israel just spent an entire week conducting military exercises around attacking targets, such as Iran, so carrying out such an attack immediately after these exercises could be meant to send a message as to their seriousness. They estimated that the visit of CIA Director William Burns to Israel just before the attack was evidence of a need for a special face-to-face meeting between the CIA and Mossad chiefs preparing the attack.”

The coordination of the military strikes with Washington went beyond simply operational planning. It seems likely that the target within Iran was chosen in response to Iran’s military assistance to Russia in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine.

Russia has been making heavy use of Iranian-built drones in the war, although Tehran maintains that the weapons were sent before the war began as part of longstanding military cooperation.

Both the US and NATO have made highly public claims of Iranian participation in the war. With the drone strike in Isfahan, the US and Israel appear to be expanding the Ukraine fighting far into the Middle East.

A top aide to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made this connection explicitly on Twitter. “Explosive night in Iran,” Mykhailo Podolyak taunted. “Did warn you.”

Already, at his first Middle East stop in Cairo, where he met with Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Blinken reiterated the bullying US position that “all options are available on the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

In the airstrike in Syria, which has not been confirmed by Israeli or US military sources—as is usual in such acts of illegal warfare—fighter-bombers attacked a group of 25 Iranian trucks at the al-Qa’im crossing on the Syria-Iraq border. 

The Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya network said the trucks had crossed the border and then were hit. According to Syrian media, six refrigerated trucks were among those attacked. Syrian sources also said a meeting of Iranians was targeted in the airstrikes as well.

The details and implications of this expanding warfare will become more apparent. But behind the Israeli aggression is not only the strategic interests of US imperialism, but the deepening internal crisis within the Zionist state. 

Thursday’s bloodbath in Jenin, when Israeli troops on a raiding party shot dead 10 Palestinians, produced a retaliatory act of terrorism on Friday night when a Palestinian attacked a synagogue outside Jerusalem, killing seven Israelis. This was followed by further acts of violence around Jerusalem in which both Israelis and Palestinians were killed and wounded.

The new Netanyahu government has taken office with the most sweeping assertion of the reactionary expansionist goals in the history of Israel. Its statement of principles asserts the “exclusive right” of the Jewish people to Israel and the occupied West Bank, and the coalition was formed on the basis of an agreement to formally annex the West Bank when Netanyahu chooses to do so, and to legalize the dozens of unauthorized settlements there, which are illegal even under current Israeli law.

The government has already seen the largest opposition demonstrations in recent history, in which both Jews and Arabs took part, against its threat to neuter the Supreme Court and assume effectively absolute power. This has been followed by the Jenin massacre, which has provoked near-civil war conditions in the occupied West Bank.