We are a network of internationally collaborating universities from the Netherlands with longstanding collaborations with our partners at the African continent.
We will launch an international PhD programme that offers tomorrow’s leaders a unique opportunity to do high quality and novel research, related to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals on the African continent.
Supervision for the PhD students will be provided by globally renowned professors, supported by societal actors and academics from our African partners. With the projects we aim to make a real contribution to understanding and addressing the urgent worldwide challenges.
For GROW, five high ranking Dutch universities have joined up with 22 African academic and 17 non-academic partners to raise funds for 51 four year PhD positions with candidates from anywhere in the world to pursue scientifically challenging research that in some way links Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) in Africa with Europe. Funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND programme of the European Union has been granted. The possibilities are manifold, as fellowships are available in the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Humanities, and Engineering. The Triple-I design of the GROW programme offers the PhD students the chance to equip themselves with an advanced, future-proof set of scientific and complementary skills that they will take with them as they pursue high-flying careers in a world that is becoming ever more complex and interconnected.
TYPE:
PhD
Who Can Apply?
No doctoral degree: Eligible candidates must not have a doctoral degree at the date of their recruitment. Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but who have not yet formally been awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible.
Nationality: Candidates of all nationalities and countries of origin are eligible, unless national, international, or European legislation or embargos prohibit specific (combinations of (sub) disciplines and) countries of origin. The appointed PhD students must comply with the following mobility rule: they must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in The Netherlands for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the deadline of the co-funded programme’s call. Compulsory national service, short stays such as holidays and time spent as part of a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention113 are not taken into account.
Entry Requirements: Applicants must have completed a university degree that entitles them to embark in a doctoral programme in the Netherlands (Master of Arts (MA), Master of Science (MSc), or Master of Laws (LLM)). The degree must be dated less than 10 years prior to the call deadline. The eligibility window can be extended by 6 months per child for the mother, (additional) maternity or paternity leave (actual time up to 6 months per child), training for medical specialists (3 years), compulsory and reserve military service (actual time), or for refugees/ researchers at risk (up to 3 years). Documentation providing evidence must be included with the application.
Enrollment: The Candidate must be available to enroll full-time in the PhD program at the Host institution in The Netherlands; eventual suspensions for family or personal reasons shall be discussed with the granting authority.
English Certificate: Doctoral Candidates are required to have high level in the English language (if not native speakers). English level of short-listed applicants can be assessed during the selection interview and a mandatory passed test could become part of the Go-No Go decision after year 1 of the project.
Affinity with Africa: Doctoral Candidates will need to demonstrate a strong connection with the African continent and / or an understanding of the context of Low and Middle Income settings.
Network: After selection, we expect the PhD students to actively participate in the events organized by the programme, such as training/network events, and outreach activities targeting different audiences. The candidates are aware of and adhere to the principles set out in the Commission Recommendation on the European Charter for Researchers.
WHICH COUNTRIES ARE ELIGIBLE?
Candidates of all nationalities and countries of origin are eligible, unless national, international, or European legislation or embargos prohibit specific (combinations of (sub) disciplines and) countries of origin.
Doctoral Candidates will need to demonstrate a strong connection with the African continent and / or an understanding of the context of Low and Middle Income settings.
HOW MANY AWARDS?
51
What Is The Benefit Of Award?
The GROW programme is a four year international PhD programme that offers tomorrow’s leaders a unique opportunity to do high quality and novel research with supervision from globally renowned professors on pressing issues affecting the people of Africa, and make a real contribution to understanding and addressing worldwide problems, notably the UN – Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
A jobs massacre is unfolding in the German auto industry, the likes of which the sector has not seen since the Second World War. For some time now, manufacturers in Germany and their suppliers have been using the transition to electric vehicles (EV) to cut jobs and increase exploitation. In the meantime, they have fallen behind in the global competition because their competitors offer cheaper and technically more sophisticated models.
Ford workers demonstrate after the announcement of the closure of the Saarlouis plant, June 22, 2022
On Friday, the Munich-based Ifo Institute reported a further decline in business expectations in the German automotive industry based on a company survey. To ensure that their returns continue to rise, shareholders are now unequivocally demanding that the 800,000 or so workers employed by manufacturers and their suppliers must take a beating.
No jobs, no social benefits, no working conditions, no wages are safe. Studies predict that up to 40 percent of jobs will be lost as a result of the switch to EVs, which would mean more than 300,000 jobs going.
The harbingers of this earthquake are becoming ever clearer. In 2022, the Federal Statistical Office reported a year-on-year decline in employment of just over one percent, or 11,800 employees, in companies producing motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts. Most recently, 774,300 people were employed in this sector, 60,000 fewer than in the record year of 2018.
The supplier industry is particularly affected. The decline in employment there was 6 percent compared to the previous year, the sharpest fall in percentage terms since 2005. With an average of 273,900 employees, the level of employment among suppliers fell to its lowest level since 1997.
Reports in recent weeks indicate that this trend is set to worsen.
Volkswagen
The Volkswagen Group has sales problems, especially with its electric models. At a general meeting in its Wolfsburg headquarters at the beginning of the week, VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer declared that “the VW brand” was “no longer competitive.”
The “efficiency programme” pushed forward by VW Group CEO Oliver Blume aims to save €10 billion by 2026 and increase the VW core brand’s return on sales from 3.4 percent to 6.5 percent. This can only be achieved through massive job cuts. Schäfer emphasised that it was therefore necessary to “tackle the critical issues, including personnel.”
At the VW software subsidiary Cariad, 2,000 of the 6,500 jobs will be cut over the next two years.
VW’s Zwickau site, which employs 10,000 and is the first to exclusively produce electric cars, is cutting back production due to weakening demand. Production of the ID.3 and the Cupra Born is being paused for the rest of the year, as the production target has been completed. After the temporary contracts of 269 employees were not extended this year, 500 temporary jobs are to be cut next year.
Meanwhile, the IG Metall union and the works council are working at full speed on new mechanisms to cut thousands of jobs. VW personnel director Gunnar Kilian, who came over from IG Metall, warns: “We have to reduce our costs and manage with fewer staff.” He wants to make the targeted use of partial retirement to cut jobs.
Works Council Chairwoman Daniela Cavallo supports the cutbacks and wants to implement them in a “socially responsible” manner. VW brand boss Schäfer urges: “Now we have to finalise the key points of the agreement together with the employee side by the end of the year.”
Ford
At Ford in Cologne, it is still not clear which electric model will be built and when in the completely remodeled factory. Thousands of jobs will be cut in research and development and administration. In development alone, around 1,700 of the 3,600 employees are to leave the company over the next three years. The research centre in Aachen, which most recently employed a good 200, will be closed in just over six months.
At a plant meeting on Thursday, it was announced that the entire product development operation at the Cologne-Merkenich site will be outsourced to a separate limited company. This is usually the first step in downsizing or divesting a business unit.
Meanwhile, the works council in Saarlouis is winding up the Ford plant there. Since the company announced a year and a half ago that the plant would be closed, the works council has been stringing along the workforce until investors supposedly arrive and at the same time cutting jobs. This year alone, 650 jobs have been cut, and on January 1 the number of employees will fall by a further 250 to 3,850.
Nobody believes in new investors anymore. The works council, led by Markus Thal, is crafting a so-called “social collective agreement” for 2,850 employees in Saarlouis, who will lose their jobs by mid-2025 at the latest. A thousand are to be able to continue working on a short-term basis until 2032.
Opel
In the meantime, it is apparent that Opel will disappear from the market in the short- rather than the medium-term. Sales of Opel and its British sister brand Vauxhall have almost halved to 428,000 vehicles in Europe in the last seven years. Since the takeover of Opel by the French group PSA (Peugeot/Citroën)—now Stellantis—in August 2017, many thousands of jobs have been cut at the car manufacturer.
In particular, the development centre and the administration in Rüsselsheim are gradually being wound down. At the end of 2021, 7,000 people still worked there, but parts have now been sold and thousands of jobs have been cut. Last week, around 100 employees in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) department were informed, in part via video conference, that their department would be closed.
In Italy, the Stellantis Group, which was created in 2021 through the takeover of Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA) by PSA, plans to cut 15,000 of the remaining 45,000 jobs.
ZF Friedrichshafen
ZF Friedrichshafen, Germany’s largest supplier after Bosch, is currently playing out all possible redundancy scenarios in order to put pressure on its 165,000 employees worldwide. In this context, the management is threatening to cut more than 7,000 jobs at the Saarbrücken plant. Around 10,000 employees there currently still produce transmissions almost exclusively for vehicles with combustion engines.
Plant management and works council representatives are using these threatening scenarios to develop so-called “target image processes” for future orders. Based on these fictitious plans, massive concessions are then extorted from the workers and supposed “plant safeguarding contracts” are agreed that are not worth the paper they are written on. This is what happened, for example, to the 5,500 employees in the commercial vehicle division at the Friedrichshafen site. Truck, railway and marine gearboxes are manufactured there, among other things.
The 590 workers at the Eitorf site near Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia and their 350 colleagues in Gelsenkirchen will lose their jobs over the next few years. The Group Works Council expects the shock absorber plant in Eitorf to close its doors by 2027 at the latest.
The ZF site in Gelsenkirchen, which has long been threatened with closure, will close even faster. As production of the remaining steering systems and cable harnesses is now coming to an end, ZF management says that “the basis for production at the location will be lost in the coming months.” In these two ZF plants, job security will end at the end of the month.
Mahle
Piston specialist Mahle (with almost 72,000 employees at the end of 2022) is also restructuring its production. It was only in August that the Stuttgart-based company sold its entire thermostat division with around 600 jobs. Thermostats are used to regulate the cooling water temperature of internal combustion engines and are therefore less in demand with the move to EVs.
Just a few weeks ago, Mahle concluded a new future collective labour agreement with IG Metall, which rules out compulsory redundancies at the German sites until 2025. But in Germany, jobs in large companies are rarely destroyed using compulsory redundancies. An army of trade union officials and works council reps are working on plans and mechanisms to achieve this using different means.
Mahle is now also taking a different approach. In Wustermark, Brandenburg, where pump systems are produced, the company has converted the site into a limited company. IG Metall has announced that Mahle could separate the entire site from the corporation and sell it.
Vibracoustic
The 410 employees of Vibracoustic in Weinheim (with around 12,000 employees worldwide) were informed in mid-November that their jobs would be relocated to France and India. They manufacture rubber anti-vibration systems and air suspension systems to reduce noise and vibrations in vehicles.
Tire manufacturers
The tire industry in Germany is also under threat of redundancies. There are currently 12 tire factories in the country, four of which are to be closed in the coming years.
The US company Goodyear is ending its production in Fulda and Fürstenwalde, which have a total of 1,800 employees. French manufacturer Michelin is closing its truck tire plants in Karlsruhe and Trier by the end of 2025. In addition, the production of new tires and semi-finished products will be discontinued in Homburg. Michelin is relocating its customer centre from Karlsruhe to Poland. More than 1,500 will be affected.
The automotive supplier and tire manufacturer Continental had previously announced it would be eliminating 5,500 administrative jobs worldwide, 1,000 of them in Germany. From 2025, €400 million are to be saved annually. Continental employs more than 100,000 people in the automotive business, around a quarter of them in administration.
These announcements are just the tip of the iceberg. But with all this bad news, the managers and executive board members can count on the support of their “social partners”, i.e., the trade unions and the works councils, with whom they will “coordinate” the jobs massacre.
IG Metall and its works council reps take on the task of suppressing opposition within the companies and sabotaging any struggle in defence of jobs. They promote the reactionary view that workers and their exploiters share the same interests and that production sites can only be maintained by working together with the management to reduce “costs” and cut wages and jobs.
The trade unions and their works council reps divide workers between plants and play those in one country against those in all the others, like the Ford works council in the so-called bidding contest between Saarlouis and Valencia to see which plant would cut the most costs. In the end, there is nothing left on either side. While workers are made redundant with a pittance, the shareholders stuff their pockets, and the works council and trade union officials also make a handsome return.
In what amounts to a double ultimatum to the Australian parliament, the Albanese government is demanding the passage this week—the scheduled final parliamentary session of 2023—of two sweeping bills that eviscerate fundamental democratic and legal rights.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to the media after meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in London, Friday, May, 5, 2023. [AP Photo/Frank Augstein]
One bill attacks the right to citizenship and the other bill attacks the right not to be imprisoned without trial. Taken together, they constitute a warning of a turn by the ruling class to dictatorial measures amid mounting political disaffection.
The twin ultimatum has been accompanied by a foul witch hunt that, in effect, demonises refugees and other immigrants, depicting many of them as a danger to society. A reactionary climate of emergency is being whipped up by the very same forces that are backing the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Labor government, the Liberal-National Coalition and the corporate media are vying to outdo each other in branding as “murderers,” “sex offenders” and the “worst of the worst” all the people who could be thrown back into indefinite immigration detention as a result of the two bills.
One is the preventative detention bill, due to be tabled tomorrow. Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil proclaimed last week that the bill, then still to be drafted, had to be passed by both houses of parliament by this Thursday, or parliament would be kept sitting until it did so.
That bill, reportedly cynically rebadged as a “Community Safety Scheme,” is a transparent bid to flout a November 8 High Court order. Unanimously, the seven judges partially overturned the reactionary three-decade regime of indefinite immigration detention of asylum seekers and other non-citizens who had been stripped of visas.
A government spokesperson blatantly declared yesterday that the bill would re-detain most of the 148 or so detainees that the government was forced to release as a result of the seven judges’ unanimous ruling. The bill would allow the immigration minister to apply for a court order to re-incarcerate an ex-detainee on the flimsy allegation of “a high degree of probability” that “the offender poses an unacceptable risk of seriously harming the community by committing” what the bill classifies as “a serious violent or sexual offence.”
Clearly, by its spokesperson’s boast, the government is not waiting for a court to pass judgment on individuals, even by that arbitrary test. This amounts to punishment for a thought crime, based on an accusation of what the person might do in the future, not on what they have actually done.
The other bill is a no less far-reaching operation to evade two other recent High Court rulings that outlawed powers legislated in 2015 by the previous Coalition government with Labor’s assistance. That legislation allowed the home affairs minister to strip dual citizens of their Australian citizenship for allegedly committing acts deemed to “repudiate” their “allegiance” to Australia.
Last week, in partnership with the Coalition, the Labor government rammed the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023 through the House of Representatives in a single day and is demanding that the Senate rubberstamp it by this Thursday.
That is despite the vast implications of stripping someone of their citizenship, which even one of the High Court judges described as a punishment amounting to “civil death.” Without citizenship, no other political or civil right currently exists, including to vote, reside, travel and not be detained without trial, and the same goes for access to employment, health and welfare services.
In two cases in 2022 and 2023, known as Alexander and Benbrika, the High Court overturned parts of the 2015 legislation that blatantly violated the limited protection of the colonial-era 1901 Constitution.
This constitution contains no bill of rights whatsoever. But it contains a formal separation of judicial and executive powers. That essentially forbids most forms of punishment, which includes cancellation of citizenship, from being imposed without a court order, except in wartime.
Labor’s bill hands vague and politically-loaded powers to judges. Acting on a government application, they will determine whether a person’s “serious offences” have “repudiated their allegiance” to Australia by repudiating “Australian values.”
These values are said to consist of “values, democratic beliefs, rights and liberties that underpin Australian society.” Yet, the bill itself demonstrates the readiness of the ruling class and its political servants to override “democratic beliefs, rights and liberties.”
The “serious offences” listed in the bill include terrorism-related acts, advocating mutiny, treason, espionage, foreign interference and foreign incursion. These offences have the potential to be used to lay charges against opponents of any war waged by the Australian government, on the grounds, for example, that their political activities serve the interests of the enemy.
The bill’s definition of “serious offences” also applies to a broad range of offences that include preparatory conduct, that is, alleged plots or behaviour which have not resulted in a crime.
There is a threshold that a person must have been sentenced to at least three years’ imprisonment, but most of the listed offences carry sentences that can far exceed that.
The danger to democratic rights is highlighted by threats that have been made to charge people with crimes, such as “giving material support” to terrorism for opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Accusations have been made that denouncing the massacres of Palestinians constitutes assisting Hamas, which has been listed by successive governments as a “terrorist organisation” under Australia’s sweeping “counter-terrorism” legislation.
Because of the broad legal definition of terrorism, a person could lose their citizenship for supporting the right of people in Gaza to resist the Israeli onslaught. Likewise, the extensive “foreign interference” offences could cover anti-war and anti-government activists.
The government and the Coalition rode roughshod over proposed amendments in the House of Representatives last Wednesday. Independent Kylea Tink sought to raise the age of those who could lose their citizenship from 14 to 18. Another “teal” independent, Zoe Daniel, tried to have the section on “values” struck out. Both were brushed aside.
Greens leader Adam Bandt said: “It’s one of the most fundamental issues, the bedrock of democracy in this country, and we get an hour to debate it—and, as a result, someone can lose their citizenship!”
These objections only produced a doubling down. Opposition leader Peter Dutton wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last Thursday demanding that further offences be listed as “serious” in the bill, including advocating terrorism or genocide, and training with a foreign military.
Citizenship-cancellation powers are being used with little or no media coverage. According to figures released under Freedom of Information legislation by the Home Affairs Department last year, 59 people have had their citizenship revoked by governments since 2007, when the first cancellation powers were introduced.
So far, citizenship-stripping legislation has been restricted to dual citizens—those holding citizenship of another country. But that covers millions of Australians in an increasingly diverse population. Moreover, the High Court rulings do not legally prevent any extension to sole citizens.
Following the Supreme Court judgement ruling the climate fund to be unconstitutional, which has torn a billion-euro hole in the federal budget, the government is preparing social cuts on a massive scale. Health, education and housing are to be gutted to pay for the horrendous levels of armaments spending and billions in gifts to the rich.
Robert Habeck, Olaf Scholz and Christian Lindner [Photo by Bundesregierug / Denzel]
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrat, SPD), Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) and Finance Minister Christian Lindner (Liberal Democrat, FDP) have been negotiating behind closed doors since Sunday afternoon on how to plug the hole. Scholz therefore returned from a trip to the Middle East a day earlier than planned and Habeck cancelled a planned visit to the World Climate Conference in Dubai. By the time the cabinet meets on Wednesday, the tripartite group wants to present an agreement in principle so that the 2024 budget can be passed this year. However, it is questionable whether this will succeed.
The Supreme Court sent a political signal with its ruling on November 15. It has become the ultimate judge in budgetary matters, which are traditionally the prerogative of parliament in democratic states. Based on the so-called debt brake, which the grand coalition of the SPD and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) had jointly enshrined in the constitution in 2009, it declared the supplementary budget for 2021, which the Bundestag (parliament) had passed retroactively, to be unconstitutional and null and void.
As a result, the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF), which finances climate-friendly technologies in the steel industry, battery and computer chip factories, the modernisation of the railways and numerous other projects, is missing €60 billion. These projects must now be cancelled or financed directly from the budget through savings elsewhere.
However, the judgement not only affects the climate fund. Some of the federal government’s 29 special funds, which together amount to €870 billion, are also affected. This applies in particular to the €200 billion Economic Stabilisation Fund (WSF), used to subsidise gas and electricity prices, among other things, which have risen as a result of the sanctions against Russia. In addition, there are similar special funds operating in the federal states.
The Supreme Court has also made clear that it will keep a close eye on the federal government’s budget policy in future. The judgement states that it is subject to “full supreme court review” as to whether an extraordinary emergency situation exists. The Bundestag can decide on such an emergency situation so that the government can circumvent the debt limit.
The Supreme Court judgement means one thing above all: the government must squeeze the billions it is spending on arming the military, financing the war in Ukraine, subsidising large corporations and similar projects even more brutally out of working people than it already has.
The current draft budget already provides for the most severe social cuts in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Measured against inflation, the real budget is set to fall by 11.8 percent. The healthcare budget alone has already been cut by three-quarters compared to 2022, from €64.4 billion to €16.2 billion. The education budget has been reduced by 5.4 percent and housing by 5.1 percent. These plans are now to be vastly overshadowed.
The Supreme Court is acting as the direct mouthpiece of big business and the rich, who have been demanding this for a long time. It is only “independent” in formal terms, as it is not bound by instructions from the government. Politically, however, it is anything but independent. The two judges who had a decisive influence on the ruling, rapporteur Sibylle Kessal-Wulf and Peter Müller, were both nominated for office by the CDU/CSU, which filed a lawsuit against the supplementary budget. Müller was CDU state premier of Saarland from 1999 to 2011 before moving to Karlsruhe as a supreme court judge.
Although the judgement is causing difficulties for the federal coalition, it is by no means inconvenient as it is also determined to intensify the attacks on workers’ incomes and social benefits. Now it can appeal to an “independent” authority, the Supreme Court.
The SPD, which has been a member of the federal government for 25 years with one interruption and heads the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, is responsible for the “Hartz IV” welfare and labour “reforms,” which worsened welfare provisions and employment protections, increased the retirement age to 67 and carried out numerous other social attacks. As a result of its policies, the number of poor and low-wage workers has reached record levels. Now, together with the FDP and the Greens, the SPD is initiating a new stage of social cuts. The sums involved in the budget give an idea of their dimensions.
The government has adopted a supplementary budget for the current year that exceeds the permitted debt ceiling by €44.8 billion. To make this possible, the Bundestag is to declare an extraordinary emergency for 2023, citing the energy crisis and the costs of reconstruction following the flood disaster in the Ahr valley two years ago.
The finance minister has ruled out the possibility of another declaration of an extraordinary emergency for the coming year. According to Lindner, €17 billion would then have to be saved in the core budget. Other estimates assume much higher sums. According to the Federal Audit Office, the government will have a shortfall of €48.5 billion in the coming year. To make up for this, 8 percent of all expenditure would have to be cut or refinanced.
The government and opposition categorically rule out increasing taxes on the incomes and assets of the rich, which have been growing steadily for decades. The government will also not cut defence spending, which will amount to over €89 billion in the coming year, including ancillary budgets. Chancellor Scholz has just promised Ukraine a doubling of annual military aid to €8 billion.
The government will also hardly touch the expenditure summarised under the collective term “subsidies.” On the one hand, there are powerful lobbies behind them—such as the tax exemption for aviation fuel (€8.4 billion) and diesel (€8.2 billion) and the concessions for large industrial electricity consumers (€13.6 billion).
The abolition of the commuter allowance (€6 billion) would hit workers with a long journey to work particularly hard. The government has already stopped the electricity and gas price brakes (€6.3 billion), which will further increase electricity and energy costs for private households.
According to Scholz, the government intends to maintain the promised subsidies from the climate fund, some of which are simply trade war measures. Here, €19 billion is earmarked for the promotion of heat pumps and solar roofs, €4 billion in subsidies for the chip industry, €3 billion for hydrogen projects and €2 billion for charging stations.
The government, however, will not touch the interest payments to banks. At 8.7 percent, they are the third-largest item in the federal budget and have exploded in the last two years due to rising interest rates—from €4 billion in 2021 to €40 billion in 2023.
Instead, social spending is at the centre of the savings efforts, accounting for 42 percent of the core budget at €185 billion. Pensions account for the largest share of this.
Representatives of the CDU/CSU and FDP are already calling for massive cuts to basic child benefits, Bürgergeld (a form of social assistance) and pensions. The SPD is still reluctant, but everyone knows that the party of Hartz IV and the Agenda 2010 cuts programme is prepared to do so.
Finance Minister Lindner always mentions the social budget first when asked about possible cuts. Baden-Württemberg’s state Finance Minister Danyal Bayaz (Greens) has questioned the mothers’ pension (€19 billion) and paying pensions at age 63 (€13 billion).
Bavaria’s Minister President Markus Söder (CSU) called for the increase in Bürgergeld planned for January to be postponed by one year and completely rescheduled. Refugees and asylum seekers, including those from Ukraine, should no longer receive Bürgergeld at all. CDU leader Friedrich Merz expressed similar views.
The wage settlements in the public sector, railways and postal services, which are far below the level of inflation thanks to the help of Verdi and the other trade unions, also serve to pass on the costs of militarism and the enrichment of the wealthy to the working class.
On November 23, representatives of the Government of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), negotiating on behalf of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), held a secret signing ceremony at Oslo City Hall in Norway. Five days later, the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration and representatives of the National Democratic Front living in political exile in the Netherlands staged separate press conferences and announced that they would be resuming peace talks to bring an end to the insurgency waged since 1969 by the CPP’s New People’s Army (NPA), the longest running armed conflict in Asia.
Luis Jalandoni, National Democratic Front of the Philippines chair, in 2017 [AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino]
The joint statement of the 23rd—signed by Luis Jalandoni, chair of the NDFP, and Antonio Lagdameo, a leading businessman and Special Assistant to the President—declared:
Cognizant of the serious socioeconomic and environmental issues, and the foreign security threat facing the country, the parties recognize the need to unite as a nation in order to urgently address these challenges and resolve the reasons for the armed conflict.
References to concern over socioeconomic and environmental issues have been the boilerplate of such announcements for decades. “The foreign security threat,” however, is new. The Marcos administration is integrating itself with Washington’s drive against China and Manila is playing an increasingly prominent role in the preparations for war. China is the “foreign security threat” that both the Marcos government and the CPP present as the justification for “national unity.”
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief of Staff Romeo Brawner made this point explicitly in remarks to Reuters, “If this conflict will finally end, the Armed Forces of the Philippines will be able to shift our focus to external or territorial defense. Our resources, efforts will be poured into defending our territory.”
The announced resumption of peace talks was the product of nearly two years of secret negotiations initiated by the Philippine military and adopted by Marcos with the singular motive of ending domestic armed conflict so the Philippine military could focus its energies on preparations for war with China. The CPP is lining up behind the anti-China campaign and presenting it as an “urgent” justification for discussing the end of more than half a century of armed struggle.
The armed struggle and peace talks
The CPP and NPA launched their armed struggle in early 1969. Ferdinand Marcos Sr was president of the Philippines. In September 1972 Marcos declared martial law and imposed a brutal military dictatorship on the country that lasted until his ouster in February 1986.
The CPP is a Stalinist party; it has a nationalist political perspective. Like Stalinist parties around the globe, the CPP claimed that the tasks of the revolution in the Philippines were exclusively national and democratic in their character and not yet socialist. They told workers and the toiling masses of the Philippines that the nationalist character of the revolution in the Philippines imparted a progressive role to a section of the capitalist class, the so-called national bourgeoisie. The task of workers, peasants, and youth was to ally with the section of the capitalist class and give them critical support in the carrying out of the national democratic revolution.
The CPP was founded as a breakaway from an older Stalinist party, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). While the PKP followed the political line purveyed by Moscow and allied with the Marcos dictatorship, the CPP adopted the perspective of Maoism, which is a tactical variant of Stalinism. Maoism claimed that the ends of the national democratic revolution and the alliance with the national bourgeoisie could only be secured by means of armed struggle waged by a peasant army in the countryside. The armed struggle would gradually surround the cities, and the victory of the armed struggle would culminate in the national democratic revolution and the formation of a coalition government of workers and progressive capitalists. In the words of the CPP, peace talks with the “reactionary government” were a means of achieving the victory of the armed struggle and the success of the national democratic revolution.
Stalinism, in both its Soviet and Maoist variants, is an anti-Marxist program of nationalism and class collaboration. The Bolshevik party led the Russian working class to victory in October 1917 on the basis of the perspective of the Theory of Permanent Revolution first put forward by Leon Trotsky in 1906. The tasks of the revolution in every country were determined by the world system of capitalism and not by individual national particularities. It was world capitalism that imparted to revolutionary struggles, regardless of where they first erupted, the necessity of adopting socialist measures in order to succeed. The national and democratic tasks of the revolution, long belated, could only be realized through socialist revolution. The capitalist class was the enemy of the working class in every corner of the globe.
On the basis of their Stalinist perspective the CPP launched peace talks with multiple successive administrations, including those of Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Benigno Aquino III, and Rodrigo Duterte. The advance of the peace negotiations involved the leadership of the CPP cultivating in the minds of their followers and of the working class more generally the illusion that pressure brought to bear on the government could culminate in the realization of a just society.
Former Communist Party of the Philippines leader Jose Maria Sison [AP Photo/Andrew Medichini]
This took particularly grotesque form with Duterte in 2016. The CPP hailed the fascistic president as progressive, treated as good coin his claim to be “a socialist,” selected candidates to serve in his cabinet, and endorsed his murderous war on drugs. CPP leader Jose Maria Sison’s enthusiasm for Duterte was public and overwhelming. The CPP and the legal national democratic organizations that follow its political line campaigned for Duterte, propped up his administration in its first year, and sowed great confusion in the Filipino working class.
Under immense pressure from the military, which had been trained in anti-Communist counter-insurgency since the era of American colonial rule, Duterte broke off negotiations with the CPP in November 2017.
In the wake of the breakdown of talks, the CPP suffered tremendous setbacks. Their support for Duterte, whose ‘war on drugs’ led to the murder of over 30,000 impoverished Filipinos, and the political exposure of their support published by the World Socialist Web Site led to a substantial loss of followers for the CPP. The political rallies staged now by national democratic groups are poorly attended, pale shadows of what they were a decade ago.
The leadership of the CPP and NDFP is ageing and dying off and they have not trained replacement cadre for leadership. None of the negotiators of the NDFP are under 75 years old. Fidel Agcaoili, leading negotiator of the NDFP, died of illness in 2020 at the age of 75.
An image repeatedly circulated by Sison on Facebook in 2016 calling for “unity” with Duterte
The repressive Duterte regime that the CPP had enabled turned its apparatus of murder against the followers of the CPP. A number of leading representatives of the NDFP, so-called “peace consultants,” were murdered by the police, military, and paramilitary forces, including Randy Malayao, Julius Giron, Randall Echanis, Eugenia Magpantay, Agaton Topacio, and Rustico Tan. Others disappeared and have not yet been found. Benito Tiamzon and Wilma Austria, for years the heads of the CPP in the Philippines, were killed by the military.
Most devastating of all, founder and lifelong ideological leader of the CPP, Jose Maria Sison, died in December 2022 in exile in Utrecht at the age of 83.
The remaining leaders of CPP and NDFP come to peace talks in 2023 in a position of unprecedented weakness, as the organization over which they have presided since its founding is collapsing.
New talks
During his six years in office, Duterte pursued a policy of conciliation toward China, hoping that by distancing Manila from Washington’s aggression in the region he could secure improved economic ties with Beijing. A section of the military brass, many of whom had been trained at facilities in the United States, opposed this policy. There were repeated rumblings of possible coups.
The peace discussions with the CPP were initiated by sections of the Philippine military brass demanding that the government prepare for war with China. At the center of this was retired Gen. Emmanuel Bautista.
Jalandoni told the press that the peace discussions had started at the “discreet initiative of the GRP [Philippine government] emissary” which was “positively welcome and highly appreciated” by Jose Maria Sison. The emissary was retired General Emmanuel Bautista. Juliet de Lima, widow of Sison and head of the NDFP delegation, reiterated Jalandoni’s point. “The initiative of Gen Bautista was welcomed by Joma Sison. … We are grateful for this kind of initiative.”
Jalandoni asserted there had been two years of discussions that culminated in the joint statement of November 23. This would mean, however, that discussions began before Marcos was elected. They were certainly not launched by the outgoing administration of Rodrigo Duterte. They began with neither administration; they began in the military.
Bautista was AFP Chief of Staff under the Benigno Aquino III administration (2010-16). He was the chief architect of Oplan Bayanihan, the multi-pronged counter-insurgency strategy of the Aquino government, that was fiercely denounced for its bloody and repressive character by the CPP in numerous issues of its flagship publication Ang Bayan.
When Aquino nominated Bautista to head potential peace talks with the CPP in early 2015, Sison denounced the appointment as “an insult to the NDFP and the revolutionary movement.”
Bautista is a member of a shadowy organization, Advocates of National Interest, composed of generals and colonels and ex-Ambassadors who published a statement in May 2021 in the final year of the Duterte administration, calling for an aggressive prosecution of the Philippine claim to the South China Sea. They called for “national unity” in preparation for “conflict with China.”
That same week, Jorge Madlos, spokesperson of the NPA, issued a statement denouncing Duterte for being “sickeningly subservient and loyal to his Chinese imperialist boss. … We call on all patriotic soldiers to side with the people by withdrawing support for a traitor Commander-in-Chief. … Defend national patrimony and sovereignty!” The statement made no mention, not a word, of US imperialism.
There was a clear alignment of interests and perspective between the CPP and the sections of the military that Bautista represented. The outlook of this layer was clearly articulated by Bautista in an interview in April 2023, when he told the press it is “impossible for the Philippines not to get drawn in a Taiwan or South China Sea conflict … if you cannot deter war, prepare for war.”
Preparation for war is the motive behind the peace talks. In early 2022, in the midst of a fiercely disputed presidential election, Bautista secretly arranged to meet personally with Sison in Oslo. Press reports state that their meeting was coordinated by the Norwegian government, longtime mediators in the peace talks, during a visit by Bautista to Oslo, and thus we know that Sison and Bautista met in June 2022 before president-elect Marcos took office.
The initiative for the negotiations, in other words, began not with the office of the President but with coup plotting sections of the military who were demanding that the country be firmly reoriented back into the camp of Washington. It is their voice that is expressed in the joint statement’s appeal for national unity in the face of a “foreign security threat.”
Lining up behind Marcos
Marcos entered office a political cipher, wavering between sections of the elite who sought to continue Duterte’s conciliatory policies toward Beijing and those who sought to reverse this policy. Within months, he oriented to Washington, resumed construction of basing facilities for US troops in the country, and secured support from the Biden White House for his administration.
Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. at a rally in Quezon City, Philippines on April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
The Philippine military is staging provocative joint patrols with both the United States and Australia in the disputed South China Sea. Some of the basing facilities authorized for Washington’s use by the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) are operational. Marcos has launched discussions to craft a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) for Japanese forces in the country. The preparations for war with China have never been more advanced and the Philippines has resumed playing a leading role as a proxy of Washington’s interests in the Asia Pacific region.
The elite opposition to Marcos was mobilized to a significant extent on the fear that he would uphold his pledge to continue the foreign policy orientation of the outgoing Duterte administration. Marcos’s reorientation to Washington produced a seismic shift in Philippine political life. Marcos’s allies in the elite camp of Duterte and Arroyo that is oriented to Beijing, including his Vice President Sara Duterte, came into open conflict with the President. And the erstwhile elite opponents of Marcos swallowed their displeasure and have increasingly embraced the son of the dictator.
There is a growing alignment, initially subterranean but now openly expressed, between the Liberal Party opposition forces of the last election and the Marcos administration. This finds its clearest manifestation in Leila de Lima, niece of Juliet de Lima, and Justice Secretary under the Benigno Aquino III administration. She had been unjustly imprisoned on trumped up drug charges by Duterte, a reprisal for her conducting a Senate investigation into his drug war. De Lima was recently released by Marcos on bail and she has been made spokesperson of the Liberal Party and has, at the same time, aligned with the Marcos administration. It is widely mooted that she will lead a human rights campaign against Rodrigo Duterte with the backing of Malacañang presidential palace.
The NDFP, then aligned with Duterte, were part of the official lynch mob that put de Lima behind bars in 2017. Makabayan, a political umbrella coalition of groups that follow the nationalist line of the CPP, worked alongside the right-wing Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) to bring corruption charges against the Aquino administration. The drug charges against de Lima were filed by VACC stemming from this initiative. Burying its own culpability, the NDFP issued a press statement on November 28 hailing de Lima’s release from “unjust imprisonment.”
Vice President Sara Duterte has emerged as the center of the forces plotting against Marcos. Speaking at the fifth anniversary celebration of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), a deeply reactionary body of which she is vice chair, Duterte announced that the government’s agreement with the NDFP was “an agreement with the devil.” Leila de Lima, now spokesperson of the Liberal Party, denounced the Vice President on behalf of Marcos and defended the administration’s initiative.
Over the weekend, leading members of the national democratic organization, Bayan Muna, stepped in to defend the Marcos administration from any attempt at “destabilization.” Bayan Muna chair, Neri Colmenares, and Bayan Muna executive vice-president, Carlos Zarate, warned of reports to “destabilize” the government. Colmenares called on the military and police to remain loyal to the Marcos administration. Seven years ago, Colmenares campaigned to get Duterte elected and Zarate signed a public pledge of “full support” for Duterte. Now both line up to defend Ferdinand Marcos Jr from the Duterte wing of the elite. The orientation of the CPP has shifted, and so too has loyalty of the national democratic organizations it leads.
It is geopolitics that fuels the tensions in the Filipino ruling elite; it is this that drives the machinations and rumors of destabilization and coups d’etat. The sharpness of these tensions is a concentrated expression of the advanced danger of war with China, which both factions seek to remedy by increasingly desperate measures to either ally with or gain distance from the United States.
The CPP is lining up behind, and giving voice to, the overwhelming sentiment of the thin layer that is the petty bourgeoisie in the Philippines which demands the nationalist prosecution of the country’s claim to the “West Philippine Sea.” These layers are engaged in the angry, insistent assertion of sovereignty over rocks and reefs—many submerged at high tide—against China, while American forces again tread Philippine soil, with the extraterritorial immunity they enjoyed throughout the 20th century.
This geopolitical orientation of the CPP has been growing for years. While they still engage in their denunciations of US imperialism—although at times they forget to even mention this—their anger is reserved for China. The alignment of the nationalist orientation of the CPP with the agenda of Washington is increasingly open. In 2020, Sison gave an interview to the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia, in which he proclaimed that the NPA would be targeting Chinese firms blacklisted by Washington.
Prospects
The NDFP had always insisted in prior peace talks that the agreements reached with earlier administrations remained binding, including the Hague Joint Declaration, the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL). That is no longer the case.
Aged, weakened, and desperate, the leaders of the NDFP negotiating team repeatedly told the press that there are “no preconditions” to resumed negotiations and insisted that they were “making no demands.” They listed four points, including the release of political prisoners, but repeated to the press that these were not demands; they were issues to be discussed.
Juliet de Lima declared that through the peace talks, “We envision and look forward to a country where a united people can live in peace and prosperity” and that they hoped to arrive at an agreement that will “provide solutions to problems that have long burdened the Filipino people.” The problem that has long plagued the Filipino people is capitalism. No deal with the Marcos government, or any capitalist government, will solve this problem.
Hostility to the family name Marcos, and the brutal legacy that it represents, has to an extent been the defining feature, almost the raison d’etre, of the CPP for the past fifty years. Now they are lining up, preparing to provide critical support to the son of the dictator, in furtherance ultimately of the geopolitical interests of Washington. One of the very last political acts of Jose Maria Sison was to welcome the architect of counter-insurgency warfare as the negotiator of a peace deal with the administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The political decay of Stalinism has reached a stage of unimaginable rot.
Regardless of the outcome of the peace talks, the CPP stands utterly exposed as an agent and ally of the most reactionary social layers in Philippine society.
