Mass casualties feared from Vanuatu earthquake

Mike Head

At least 14 people have died and hundreds more have been injured after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck off Vanuatu on Tuesday. The shockwaves caused widespread damage across the South Pacific island country, about 2,600 kilometres northeast of Sydney, Australia.

According to eye-witness accounts of flattened buildings and overwhelmed hospital services, mass casualties are expected among Vanuatu’s population of around 334,000. There have also been many aftershocks, including one of magnitude 6.1 early this morning.

Rescuers work to free survivors trapped in collapsed building, Port Vila, Vanuatu, December 18, 2024 [Photo: Michael Thompson]

Social media videos showed rescue efforts through the night trying to reach some people yelling under the rubble, including in a three-storey structure that collapsed onto its lower floors.

The central hospital in Port Vila, the capital, has been damaged, with tents set up outside for the influx of patients.

National broadcaster VBTC’s images showed badly injured people being carried in people’s arms or driven in flat-bed trucks to the hospital, where others lay in stretchers outside or sat on plastic chairs, their arms and heads wrapped in bandages.

Finau Leveni, the deputy head of delegation for the Red Cross in Fiji, said today that more than 200 people had been injured and this number was expected to increase.

The initial quake, which struck beneath the ocean about 30 kilometres west of Port Vila, triggered a tsunami warning. That led to hundreds of people in the city of 50,000 fleeing low-lying areas. The warning was later cancelled.

A seven-day state of emergency has been declared by Vanuatu’s caretaker Prime Minister Charlot Salwai. It includes a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and proclaims that only essential services should operate.

A former British and French joint colony, made up of roughly 80 islands that stretch 1,300 kilometres, Vanuatu is in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where tectonic plates collide. It experiences frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

The US Geological Survey said: “The area where the Australia and Pacific plates meet is among the world’s most seismically active. In the century leading up to the December 17, 2024 earthquake, there were 24 earthquakes of magnitude 7 or larger within 250 kilometres of this event.”

Residents said this was the most serious earthquake they had experienced. Local journalist Dan McGarry told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that some buildings were “pancaked” by the “high-frequency shake” that lasted for about 30 seconds.

“It was a violent earthquake, more violent than any that I’ve seen in the last 21 years that I’ve been living in Vanuatu,” he said.

McGarry said a mass casualty triage centre was being established outside the hospital’s emergency ward. “There were several people there, three that I could see who were seriously injured, lying on gurneys, a great many others… walking around with minor injuries,” he said.

“There are buildings collapsed in the centre of town, so I’m quite certain that the casualty figure is going to rise.” He said there were “extensive landslides” on the road joining the Port Vila wharf to the city, and there were early reports that the runway at the city’s airport had been damaged.

Clement Chipokolo, World Vision’s country director for Vanuatu, told the ABC that he expected the death toll to rise due to the “quite significant damage.” He reported: “We observed as we drove around a number of buildings that were flattened completely. So we imagine that there are still some people that are under those buildings.”

Chipokolo said damage to critical infrastructure such as electricity and phone lines was hampering the recovery efforts. “Lights are completely out… We don’t have water across the city, and most of our communications systems are down.”

“We anticipate that the number of deaths will continue to go up, given the number of people that are being treated as casualties.” He said Vila Central Hospital was already under strain before the quake and now “they definitely are not coping.”

Video footage posted to social media shows damage to the building hosting the US, French, UK and New Zealand diplomatic missions, with a section of the building cleaving off and flattening the first floor.

The US Embassy’s Facebook page said all staff were safe, but the building was closed until further notice. The office opened in July as part of an aggressive push by the Biden administration to expand the US presence in the South Pacific to combat China’s influence in the region.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated 116,000 people had been affected by the earthquake. Basic aid, including clean drinking water, is urgently needed.

Vanuatu is still recovering from the impact of damaging earthquakes and cyclones that affected 80 percent of the population in 2023.

The response of the region’s imperialist powers to the latest disaster has been limited, however. Australia will send two air force transport planes carrying a medical team and a search and rescue team to Vanuatu today, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong stated: “We are closely monitoring the situation and stand ready to provide further assistance to the people of Vanuatu as the extent of damage becomes clear… Australia and Vanuatu share a deep and enduring partnership. We are family and we will always be there in times of need.”

A New Zealand military surveillance plane was due to fly above Vanuatu today to assess the damage. New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said his country hoped to send aid and equipment later today when the airport was cleared for use.

“With communications still badly affected as a result of the earthquake, it is going to take some time to work through with Vanuatu what assistance it needs in the days ahead,” Peters said.

French and US officials also promised to mobilise aid.

For all the language of “family,” France and the UK colonised the strategic archipelago in the 1880s and retained shared control over it, naming it the New Hebrides, until 1980. In collaboration with the US and France, Australia and New Zealand have maintained neo-colonial control over the region, keeping Pacific nations in a state of impoverishment.

Vanuatu and other Pacific states have increasingly found themselves at the centre of intensifying geo-strategic rivalry, primarily the result of the increasingly aggressive US confrontation against China.

Last year, Vanuatu was embroiled in a political crisis that led to Salwai becoming prime minister after the signing of a neo-colonial security agreement with Australia in December 2022 that allowed for a dominant Australian military presence. The agreement had been signed during a regional tour by Wong to advance the US drive to line up Pacific states behind Washington and against Beijing.

US, UK hail murder of Russian lieutenant-general in charge of nuclear defense

Andre Damon

On Tuesday, Igor Anatolyevich Kirillov, a lieutenant general in charge of Russia’s nuclear and biological defense forces, was killed in a bombing outside his apartment in Moscow.

Workers load a body of Lt. General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defence Forces into a bus after he and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov were killed by an explosive device planted close to a residential apartment's block in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. (AP Photo) [AP Photo]

Russian investigators said Kirillov was killed after “an explosive device planted in a scooter parked near the entrance of a residential building was activated on the morning of December 17 on Ryazansky Avenue in Moscow.”

The Ukrainian security sources promptly informed every major US and British newspaper that they had carried out the bombing as a deliberate assassination.

The murder was carried out just hours after Ukraine’s secret service filed a “notice of suspicion” against Kirillov, alleging, without substantiation, that troops under his command used biological weapons. Kirillov was “responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the defense forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine,” the notice read.

“Kirillov was a war criminal and a completely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military,” a Ukrainian intelligence official told the Financial Times Tuesday. “Such an inglorious end awaits all who kill Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable.”

In October, the UK sanctioned Kirillov, calling him a “significant mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation.”

The bombing is the latest in a series of assassinations of high-ranking Russian military and political figures carried out by Ukrainian forces. Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian military figure to have been assassinated.

While claiming not to have been informed, US and UK officials praised the killing.

A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: “It’s clear we won’t be mourning the death of someone who orchestrated an illegal invasion and inflicted immense suffering and loss on the Ukrainian people.”

Kirillov “was a general who was involved in a number of atrocities,” said US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “He was involved in the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian military.”

If the Ukrainian and American governments have not publicly and officially taken credit for the murder, it is because assassination and terrorist bombings are both war crimes.

The Geneva Conventions declare that “it is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by perfidy.” The use of a terrorist bombing, using a civilian object, is clearly such a crime.

The US and UK media glorified this act of terrorism and murder, with the Telegraph calling it “ingenious,” while the Wall Street Journal called it “audacious.” The New York Times reported on a video of the murder sent to it by the Ukrainian secret service in breathless terms. Predictably, not a single major news publication condemned it.

The US media has repeatedly glorified terrorist actions and assassinations by Ukrainian forces. Just days before Russian far-right media figure Daria Dugina was murdered in August 2022, the New York Times ran a laudatory profile of Ukrainian assassination squads operating inside Russia, under the headline, “Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe.’”

The Wall Street Journal wrote Tuesday that “Ukraine has at times recruited people inside Russia who have shown a willingness to aid the Ukrainian cause, and given them detailed instructions on how to orchestrate attacks. Tuesday’s attack had the hallmarks of a higher-level operation.”

The murder of a Russian lieutenant general is part of a pattern by the United States and its proxy forces, including Israel and Ukraine, of using terrorist bombings in pursuit of its military aims.

On September 17 and 18, 2024, thousands of pagers rigged by Israeli forces exploded in Lebanon, killing 42 people and injuring thousands. Later that month, Israeli forces murdered Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah using 20 bunker-buster bombs.

Last week, Ukrainian forces claimed that they killed Mikhail Shatsky, a leading Russian missile scientist, in Moscow. This followed the murder of Capt. Valery Trankovsky, commander of the 41st brigade of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, who was killed in a car bombing in November.

Even with this bloody legacy behind them, the murder of a general in command of a branch of the Russian armed forces marks a major escalation.

While Kirillov did not appear to be in the chain of command for Russian nuclear weapons as head of Russia’s Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense, he would have played a significant role in Russian nuclear war planning.

In murdering such a figure, the United States, through its Ukrainian proxy force, is making clear that there is no length it will not go to in seeking to subjugate Russia. It has, once again, demonstrated its willingness to cross all of the “red lines” declared by the Putin government and by the Biden administration for its own involvement in the war.

Last month, the US and UK authorized the use of NATO-provided long-range weapons for strikes deep inside Russia, followed just days later by the use of these weapons in strikes on Russian military targets.

The Biden administration is doing everything in its power to create “facts on the ground” that guarantee the continued escalation of the war after it leaves office.

For its part, the Trump transition team has made a point of embracing the Biden administration’s escalation of the war. “For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong,” said Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, last month. “We are hand in glove,” Waltz added. “We are one team with the United States in this transition.”

The deep rift in the global economy and its significance

Nick Beams

There is an extraordinary dichotomy in the world economy for which there is no parallel except for the “roaring twenties” of a century ago when a US boom led to the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.

As the rest of the world—all the major economies—struggle to record even a positive growth rate, let alone consistent expansion, the US is in the midst of a financial boom as money pours into its stock market and financial system from the rest of the world.

This phenomenon, which has markedly increased since the onset of the pandemic, has been accelerated by the financial hype surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI), reflected in the rise of the AI firm Nvidia from an also-ran among tech stocks to the second biggest US firm by market capitalization.

President-elect Donald Trump, with Lynn Martin, President NYSE, center, Melania Trump, right and trader Peter Giacchi, left, walks the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, December 12, 2024. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

And it has been intensified with the election of Trump to the US presidency, his placing of financial oligarchs in control of key areas of his administration, his commitment to cuts in corporate taxes, and the virtual scrapping of what remains of financial regulations.

It would take more space than we have available here to detail all the indications of the gathering slump in the global economy. Suffice it to point to some outstanding expressions of this process.

In Germany, the world’s third-largest economy and once the powerhouse of Europe, a wave of sackings is underway across manufacturing industry, the backbone of its economy. This is not a conjunctural downturn, from which a “recovery” can be expected in the course of the business cycle, but the disintegration of its very foundations.

Headlines in the financial press pose the question “Is the German business model broken?” The answer increasingly being given is yes.

In November, the Financial Times (FT) cited comments by Deutsche Bank’s chief economist Robin Winkler that the fall in industrial production was “the most pronounced downturn” in Germany’s post-war history.

Last September, Siegfried Russwurm, the president of the Federation of German Industry, warned: “Germany’s business model in grave danger—not some time in the future, but here and now.” He said that by the year 2030, one-fifth of Germany’s industrial production could disappear, and that “deindustrialization is a real risk.”

The mass sackings in steel and the auto industry—the threatened closure of three VW plants—have attracted international attention. But the crisis does not stop there. Chemical production, in which Germany has been a world leader since the last decades of the 19th century, is now down 18 percent on its 2018 levels.

A report by Germany’s Bundesbank issued last week slashed its forecast for growth in 2025 from 1 percent to near zero and warned that a US tariff war could push it into recession.

The central bank said that under current assumptions, Germany would grow by only 0.1 percent next year, but if Trump followed through on his threats to impose a 10 percent tariff on European goods and 60 percent on Chinese exports to the US, German GDP could fall by 0.6 percentage points.

Significantly, Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel, who insisted in September that “Germany is not in decline,” noted in his remarks on the latest report: “The German economy is struggling not just with persistent cyclical headwinds but also with structural problems.”

The latest data coming out of China, the world’s second-largest economy, and the major source of global economic growth since the global financial crisis of 2008–09, show it is struggling to reach its official growth target of “around 5 percent” this year—the lowest in more than three decades—and growth could fall even lower next year.

Alarm bells are ringing in Beijing and growing louder. Figures released earlier this week showed consumption spending grew by only 3 percent in the year to November, below predictions of a 4.6 percent rise and the increase the previous month of 4.8 percent.

At its annual Central Economic Work Conference last week, the Chinese Communist Party leadership called for “vigorous” efforts to boost consumption, and its report listed the issue as the top priority, significantly ahead of the call to develop “new productive forces” which has been the central pillar of the economic program advanced by President Xi Jinping.

Earlier this month, the government called for a shift in the stance of monetary policy from “prudent” to “moderately loose”—the first time such language has been used since the 2008 crisis—in a bid to try to boost the economy.

Japan has been well out of the picture as a center of global growth for decades and has struggled against persistent deflationary pressures, with its growth rate coming in only at between 1 percent and 2 percent at best. Its decline was expressed earlier this year when it lost its position as the world’s third-largest economy to Germany and was demoted to fourth place.

One could also cite the case of the UK or middling economies such as Australia where, but for government spending, the economy would be going backward, and per capita GDP has declined for seven quarters in a row.

By contrast, the US economy appears to be roaring ahead as money pours into its financial markets. While the prevailing sentiment is that the US will continue to power ahead, warnings are being sounded.

Regular FT commentator Ruchir Sharma, the chair of Rockefeller International, in a recent piece entitled “The mother of all bubbles,” detailed the extraordinary inflow of money into Wall Street and noted the rise of “American exceptionalism” in financial circles.

Global investors, he wrote, “are committing more capital to a single country than ever before in modern history” with the result that the US “accounts for nearly 70 percent of the leading global stock market index, up from 30 percent in the 1980s.” The divorce of the financial sector from the underlying real economy is highlighted by the fact that the US share of the global economy is 27 percent.

The drawing power of the US in global debt and private markets is stronger than ever. So far in 2024, “foreigners have poured capital into US debt at an annualized rate of $1 trillion, nearly double the flows into the eurozone” with the US attracting 70 percent of the flows into the $13 trillion market for private investments.

Sharma said talking about tech or AI bubbles obscured the broader picture. “Thoroughly dominating the mind space of global investors, America is over-owned [meaning that everyone who wants to hold a stock has already done so], overvalued, and overhyped to a degree never seen before.”

In a follow-up column, he noted he had received some pushback in response to his initial assessment, with virtually every Wall Street analyst insisting US stock would continue to rise. But clearly drawing on historical experience, he noted that “all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at a very advanced stage.”

The flaw in the US economy, he noted, was its “sharply increasing addiction to debt” and that it now took nearly $2 of additional debt to generate an additional $1 of GDP, a 50 percent increase in the past five years.

“If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing, but for now, they think America can get away with anything, as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the reserve currency.”

Another factor fueling the American bubble is the belief, at least in some sections of the financial markets, that the Trump tariff war, especially against China, is going to have beneficial effects.

Long-time China analyst Stephen Roach, the former head of Morgan Stanley Asia, outlined some of the underlying realities of the US-China economic relationship. He began by pointing to Beijing’s response to the latest US measures with the ban on exports of critical minerals. These were a “reminder that retaliation is the high-octane fuel of conflict escalation.”

He said there was a mistaken view in US policy circles that the relationship with China was one way, leaving out the other half of the equation.

“The US is also heavily reliant on low-cost Chinese goods to make ends meet for income-constrained consumers; the US needs Chinese surplus saving to help fill its void of domestic saving; and US producers rely on China as America’s third-largest export market. This co-dependency means the US depends on China just as China depends on America.”

He pointed to the ultimate Chinese financial weapon—its holdings of US Treasury bonds, government debt, amounting to more than $1 trillion, comprising $772 by the People’s Republic and $233 billion emanating from Hong Kong.

If China began withdrawing its holdings or even failed to turn up at auctions of Treasury debt, “this would be devastating for America’s deficit-prone economy and would unleash havoc in the US bond market, with wrenching collateral damage in world financial markets.”

The prevailing view among “cavalier Americans” is that China would not “dare flirt with this nuclear option” because the damage would be too great. But while such a scenario may seem far-fetched, because it would produce a financial meltdown, it would be “reckless to dismiss the ‘tail risk’ consequences of a trapped adversary.”

As we noted at the outset, the only parallel with the present situation is the “roaring twenties.” There is a perception that the Wall Street crash, which sparked the Great Depression, simply emerged out of the blue.

In fact, there were growing signs of what was to come before the events of October 1929. By 1927–28, there were clear indications of a developing slump, especially in Germany, which led to a series of political crises.

The financial catastrophe which followed—depression, mass unemployment, fascism, dictatorship, and eventually world war—posed the objective necessity for world socialist revolution as the only answer to the barbarism unleashed by the crisis of capitalism.

UK Labour government announces thousands of job losses and public sector pay restraint

Robert Stevens

The Starmer Labour government has announced plans for pay restraint throughout the public sector and 10,000 job cuts in the civil service.

Ministers in charge of the education and health departments gave evidence to pay review bodies last week, stating that they would allow only a 2.8 percent increase in pay for the 2.5 million workers in those sectors for 2025-26. They make up around half the public sector workforce, setting a benchmark to hold down the pay of more than 5 million public employees.

Governments are not bound by review bodies’ recommendations. Chancellor Rachel Reeves was declaring over a year in advance of coming to office that if a pay review body proposed a pay deal higher than a Treasury she headed would support, then it could be ignored.

Following her speech in Parliament, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves holds a press conference on "Fixing the Foundations" at HM Treasury, July 29, 2024 [Photo by Zara Farrar/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The announcement came amid reports that inflation was expected to fall to about 2.3 percent over the next year. But latest figures show it is on the rise: 1.7 percent in the year to September, 2.3 percent in the year to October and 2.6 percent in the year to November. The RPI measure of inflation is at 3.6 percent.

The effective pay cut and job losses are a down payment by the Treasury on far worse to come.

Earlier this month, Reeves and Treasury Chief Secretary Darren Jones launched a six-month “line by line” review of every penny of the UK’s £1.2 trillion of public spending. The Financial Times noted that the government is holding the purse strings so tightly that even the 2.8 percent pay offer is unfunded and would have to come from schools making “efficiencies”.

Announcing the review at a National Health Service hospital on December 10, Reeves said departments would be required to identify 5 percent “efficiency savings” for the coming years. The cuts this envisages—up to £60 billion—will require a further assault on jobs, pay and conditions.

Two days after the Treasury announcement, Cat Little, the head of the Cabinet Office, announced that 400 jobs will be slashed in the department responsible for the development and rollout of government policy. The department has, according to the Financial Times, citing annual headcount figures, a workforce of “6,315 full-time staff, with a further 1,045 attached to agencies this year.”

The 400 are only the first to go, with the FT noting, “Only about 3,500 roles in the department are considered ‘core; to its operations.”

Of the more than 500,000-strong civil service workforce, a Labour official told the FT, “There’s a general feeling that we can’t keep growing… The number of civil servants in the last few years has gone up and up . . . The reality is that departments are going to have to find a way of dealing with spending cuts.”

Sunak’s predecessor Rishi Sunak left office with a Conservative Party manifesto pledge to cut 66,000 jobs in the civil service, with Labour now taking on the task using language associated with the most right-wing section of the Tories.

In a speech earlier this month, Starmer went as far as to invoke the fascist US President-elect Donald Trump, who has described cutting government “bureaucracy” and spending as “draining the swamp”. The Labour leader commented, “I don’t think there is a swamp to be drained here”, before describing a civil service which wallowed in “managed decline” and attacking public sector workers whose productivity “is 2.6 percent lower than this time last year… 8.5 percent down compared with just before the pandemic”, which “wouldn’t be accepted in any other sector or walk of life.”

Defence Secretary John Healey, tasked with increasing the Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget to at least 2.5 percent of GDP (from 2.3) following a defence review to complete next spring, is reported to be planning huge cuts in its 56,800 civil service workforce. Questioned by Parliament’s Defence Select Committee last month, Healey said his department had to be “leaner” after complaining of the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, “Over the first five years, during that period of austerity, they cut defence by 18.8 percent in real terms.”

Defence Ministry permanent secretary David Williams told the same body that “a minimum” 10 percent reduction in the MoD workforce “over the lifetime of this Parliament is a good jumping-off point”, which could well rise as “we think through the opportunities in our productivity work and as we think through the recommendations” from the defence review.

Reeves’s October budget gave out a few billion in funding for departments on the verge of collapse, while ensuring that the increase in overall public spending was constrained to just 1.3 percent a year from 2026-27. This included £22 billion for the National Health Service—only enough for it to stand still and still conditional on productively increases initially set at 2 percent. NHS workers now face a further attack on their pay.

According to reports, the government is planning to slash civil service jobs via “voluntary schemes”—the preferred method of Labour’s partners in the trade union bureaucracy.

A study carried out by the GMB union in 2017 showed that almost one million public sector jobs were lost in just seven years under Tory government austerity as the sector’s headcount was reduced from 6.4 million to a 70-year low of 5.44 million. The vast majority were lost in local government, which has one of the highest rates of union membership, in deals between mainly Labour Party-run councils and the union bureaucracy.

Labour’s announcement for huge cuts in every department completely blows apart the deception practised by the union leaders, who claimed that if their members voted Starmer into office then years of cuts could be reversed by a government that would be “on their side”.

The Socialist Equality Party warned—in opposition to pseudo-left organisations who supported the election of Starmer’s Blairite cronies as a lesser evil—that Labour would carry out ruthless attacks on the working class to fund war in Ukraine and to enrich the oligarchs, and would do this in alliance with the union bureaucracy.

Workers should view with contempt the handwringing of the unions tops over Labour’s proposed civil service cuts and paltry pay deals.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), hailed by the pseudo-left as a steadfast fighter for teachers, stated, “There are no efficiencies that can be made without further damaging education. Starmer will be the only Labour Prime Minister other than James Callaghan [in office from 1976 to 1979] to tell schools to make cuts.” Stating “this won’t do” as “NEU members fought to win the pay increases of 2023 and 2024” he said, “We are putting the government on notice”.

Who is he trying to kid? NEU members, along with millions of other workers, fought for pay rises to end years of pay cuts and freezes during the 2022-23 strike wave, but they were sold out by the unions who agreed a series of rotten pay agreements.

In the case of junior doctors and teachers, the British Medical Association and NEU did deals with the incoming Labour government to ensure it faced no industrial strife. The NEU ended the teachers’ dispute as Kabede hailed a 5.5 percent pay offer “as a first step in the major pay correction needed,” when it did nothing to address teachers’ historic loss of wages over two decades.

Threats of deportation and agitation against Syrian refugees in Germany and across Europe

Katerina Selin

No sooner had the Islamist militias reached Damascus and overthrown the Assad regime earlier this month than the propaganda barrage against Syrian refugees began. Politicians and journalists are calling for their swift deportation to war-torn Syria and glorifying the Islamists of the HTS militia who have now taken power.

A Syrian refugee who immigrated to Germany due to the war condition in Syria works in a Syrian restaurant in Berlin, Tuesday, December 10, 2024. [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]

Authorities in Germany and numerous other European countries have suspended the asylum procedures of Syrian refugees until further notice—including Austria, Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Croatia, Greece, Finland, Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, which was instigated with the support of the NATO powers, hundreds of thousands of people have fled to seek protection in Europe. But only those who survived the dangerous escape routes and were not deported in illegal “pushbacks” made it to the European Union (EU) at all.

Today, almost 1 million Syrian refugees live in Germany, the largest Syrian diaspora in the EU. Over 47,000 asylum applications have now been suspended. This means that their protected status could be cancelled, and they are in acute danger of being deported or forced to “voluntarily” return.

Many Syrians have been living here for years, starting families, learning the language and working in all areas of society, from manufacturing to healthcare and hospitality.

According to a recent press release from the Federal Statistical Office on December 12, Syrian refugees made up the second largest group of all people seeking protection in 2023, after Ukrainians. On average, Syrian migrants have been living in Germany for eight years; most came with the wave of refugees in 2015.

If Syrian people were to be deported on a large scale or driven out of Germany by right-wing extremism, it would be a major blow for many areas of society, especially for the healthcare system. Almost 6,000 of them are doctors, making them the largest group of medical professionals among migrants, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Rural hospitals in particular depend on immigrant doctors and nursing staff. Gerald Gass, director of the German Hospital Federation (DKG), has already warned of noticeable consequences for staffing levels.

Even children born in Germany would not be safe from deportation. While in the United States, birthright to citizenship applies to all people born in the country regardless of their parents’ origin, a right that Donald Trump now wants to abolish, Germany only has a limited birthright principle. According to the official requirements, “at least one parent must have had their usual place of residence in Germany for five years and have a permanent right of residence at the time of the birth.”

A large proportion of Syrian immigrants do not meet these criteria. Around 624,000 have been granted recognised protected status in Germany, but in 90 percent of cases this is only temporary. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 12 percent of Syrian asylum seekers were born in Germany. As “asylum seekers,” however, they are still foreigners, even though many of them have probably never set foot on Syrian soil.

Austria has not only put asylum procedures on hold but has also announced a “repatriation and deportation programme to Syria.” In an interview with broadcaster ARD, Chancellor Karl Nehammer claimed that the real reason for fleeing had now been ended. Around 7,300 asylum seekers are now at risk of deportation; family reunification has also been stopped for the time being. A total of around 100,000 Syrians live in Austria.

In France, where 45,000 Syrian refugees live, the interior ministry has so far stated that it is working on a suspension of asylum procedures. For many refugees, France is also a transit country to the UK. According to a report by the Tagesschau news programme, almost 2,900 Syrians fled across the English Channel in small boats between January and September this year. More than 30,000 people from Syria were granted asylum there between 2011 and 2021.

Britain has already stopped processing asylum applications. Speaking to the BBC, asylum seekers who have been waiting for a decision for more than a year said they were “depressed” and “horrified” that their procedures had been suspended. One of them is 36-year-old Hussam Kassas, who lives in Greater Manchester. He fled from Syria to Jordan in 2016 due to political persecution and from there to Turkey, where he obtained a study visa for the UK in 2023. But that expires next month, after which he will not be able to work or rent an apartment. His family’s situation is uncertain.

Many Syrians in Germany also do not want to return to Syria because they fear insecurity and violence there. “Nobody knows who will come to power next. Nobody knows what will happen now,” Jihad Omar, a Syrian Kurd, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He fled to Germany with his wife Zahida and two small children in 2015, travelling by foot, bus and train via Turkey. They spent six months in refugee camps. Now both are employed, have learned German, and the children go to school and attend local sports clubs. Nevertheless, the family is not yet among the 143,000 Syrians who were naturalised in Germany in the years 2021 to 2023.

Khaled Homsi, 31, who fled to Germany in 2013 and is a member of the German-Arab cultural centre Daruna, is concerned about right-wing extremism. He says he has received a lot of support from the German population, but that the political situation in Germany is going in the “wrong direction.”

All the parties in the Bundestag (parliament) are now campaigning against refugees. Syrians and other migrants are being used as scapegoats for social problems that are actually caused by the social cuts and increased military spending which the coalition government has pursued.

The cynical and inhumane campaign for the deportation of Syrian refugees goes hand in hand with militarisation and rearmament. The propaganda for warmongering policies and the agitation against their victims are two sides of the same coin.

Most recently, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrat, SPD) announced in the tabloid Bild am Sonntag that they would have “Assad supporters” fleeing Syria prosecuted. This is a clear threat: anyone who flees from the Islamist rulers and the ongoing violence of the war in Syria in the future will be branded as an “Assad supporter,” put on trial and deported.

All European governments are joining in the anti-immigrant chorus and have implemented similar attacks on Syrian refugees as Germany. Italy and Greece, the two Mediterranean countries through which most people flee to Europe, have also put asylum procedures for Syrians on hold.

In Greece, this affects almost 10,000 applications. Pavlos Marinakis, the spokesman for the government under the right-wing Nea Dimokratia (ND), said the change of power in Syria must lead to “an end to the flow of refugees from that country.”

In fact, the violence of the Islamists and the war offensive of the Israeli regime, with the help of the NATO powers, will drive even more people in the Middle East to flee. When Marinakis speaks of “ending the flow of refugees,” his government and the other EU states are concerned with preventing these people from fleeing to Europe by any means necessary.

That is why they are pushing ahead with the expansion of Fortress Europe, locking up refugees in isolated concentration camps and criminalising sea rescues and other activities of aid organisations. The Italian government under fascist Giorgia Meloni has drastically tightened legislation against sea rescuers, forcing Doctors Without Borders to withdraw its large rescue ship Geo Barents from Italy.

The Mediterranean has been transformed into a gigantic cemetery over the last 10 years. In the summer of 2023, more than 600 people drowned in the Pylos shipwreck, caused by a pushback attempt by the Greek coast guard. This year, according to UN figures, 1,536 people have already died or gone missing in the Mediterranean.

In the last three weeks alone, five boats have been in distress off the coast of Greek islands and dozens of refugees have drowned. Just on Saturday, three boat accidents occurred off the small island of Gavdos, south of Crete. Five dead were recovered and 39 people, mostly Pakistani men, were rescued from the largest shipwreck of an overcrowded wooden boat. According to reports cited by Euronews, there could have been 80 refugees on board, which would put the death toll at over 40.

Like the first one, the other two boats came from Libya. 47 people were rescued from one of them and 88 from the other. Among the survivors were refugees from Egypt, Syria, Sudan and Bangladesh.

On November 20, six minors and two women died in a shipwreck off the island of Samos, while 39 were rescued. A few days later, on November 28, another boat capsized off Samos. Two children were among the four dead; 16 people were rescued.

Equally tragic scenes are also playing out off the Italian coast. On Wednesday last week, an 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone was found drifting in the Mediterranean. For three days, she had clung to two truck tyres on the high seas until she was spotted and rescued by chance 10 nautical miles off Lampedusa. She is the only survivor of the capsized refugee boat; her brother did not make it.

“We set off from Sfax in Tunisia three days ago. There were 45 of us on the iron boat, and my brother was among them. In the middle of the sea, we were caught in a storm with high waves. The boat filled with water and sank,” she told the volunteers of the non-governmental organisation CompassCollective. The old truck tyres that were on board served as makeshift life rings.

“For a while there were three of us. We were floating in the sea close together, clinging to the inflated tyres. We prayed and tried to keep each other’s spirits up, but suddenly I couldn’t see them anymore. From that point on, I was alone,” the girl continued. Her father, who stayed behind in the Tunisian coastal city of Sfax, had paid for her and her brother to make the crossing so that they could have a better future.

More than 30,000 dead and missing in the Mediterranean in the last 10 years—that is the official number of victims according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). The escalation of war and genocide in the Middle East and the sealing off of Fortress Europe will further increase the number of refugees who embark on the deadly journey to Europe.

All parties back war and cuts as German Chancellor Scholz loses confidence vote

Peter Schwarz

On Monday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz asked the Bundestag for a vote of confidence and, as expected, lost. Only the 207 Social Democratic Party (SPD) deputies expressed confidence in him, while the 116 from the Greens abstained and the 394 remaining members voted against Scholz.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz [Photo by DBT / Thomas Köhler / photothek ]

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier can thus dissolve the Bundestag prematurely and set new elections for February 23. This schedule was previously agreed to between Steinmeier, Scholz and the established parties. Scholz will remain in office until his successor is elected by the new Bundestag.

In the debate before the vote, Scholz explained that with the early election, voters could determine the course of future politics: “In the election, you decide how we answer the big questions that lie ahead.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The early election does not serve to let voters decide on the big issues of the future, but to bring a government into power that is stable enough to enforce highly unpopular measures—social cuts, mass layoffs, lower wages and longer working hours, the deportation of migrants, more rearmament and a further escalation of war.

All established parties agree on these issues. The heat of the debate was in inverse proportion to the differences in content. The speakers heaped accusations on each other, but agreed to continue supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia, to arm the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) more, to deport more migrants and to offload the consequences of the economic crisis onto the working class.

While berating each other, they simultaneously invoked “respect” and “compromise” because they all know they will continue to work closely together even after the election. Meanwhile, they are so hated by the population that they will be satisfied if the result is enough for a coalition capable of achieving a majority.

Especially in the SPD and the conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), many are hoping for a new edition of the Grand Coalition. To achieve this, however, other parties would have to miss the 5 percent hurdle for parliamentary representation. The CDU/CSU currently stands at 32 percent in the polls and the SPD at 16 percent. A coalition of the two would no longer be “grand,” but could at best count on half of the MPs. Among the Greens, many are hoping for a government alliance with the CDU. And the Free Democratic Party (FDP) is already acting as a junior partner of the CDU/CSU.

Robert Habeck, Minister of Economic Affairs and lead candidate of the Greens, called on all parties to join forces in the name of Germany’s geopolitical interests. “The world continues to turn, and it often turns against Germany,” he said. That is why the Greens have done everything to ensure that the government coalition remains in place and have made compromises “for three years up to and including self-denial.” Germany cannot afford self-reflection, he added.

The agreement of all parties on the war course was clearest of all. “Germany is Ukraine’s biggest supporter in Europe. I want it to stay that way,” Scholz explained to the applause of the SPD and the Greens. During his trip to Kiev, he therefore told President Zelensky: “You can rely on Germany.”

CDU lead candidate Friedrich Merz demanded even more. He wanted to supply Ukraine with Taurus missiles and reminded Scholz that in February 2022, he announced a “new era” and decided on a €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr, which the CDU/CSU supported. But nothing remained of the new era, he continued. Instead of investing at least 2 percent in the Bundeswehr at the same time, he financed the Bundeswehr’s ongoing operation from the special fund.

Both Merz and FDP leader Christian Lindner, the finance minister fired in November, called for massive social cuts to finance war spending.

“We oppose the stagnation and redistribution of social democratic and green economic policy with an economic policy committed to performance and competitiveness,” said Merz. This path will not be easy. Working hours in Germany are far too low, he asserted. As a positive example, he cited Switzerland, where 200 more hours are worked per year. “We all have to work more, we all have to try harder,” he added. Merz wants to abolish the Citizen’s Benefit, because “incentives to return to the labour market” are needed.

Lindner accused Scholz of rejecting the “necessary reorientation of economic and fiscal policy.” He does not want to make billions in investments, but spend it on a policy of redistribution, Lindner claimed. He wanted to lift the debt brake so that he could redistribute more.

Like Merz, Lindner also called for a reform of Citizen’s Benefit in order to “mobilise the labour market.” By lowering the standard rate and flat-rate accommodation costs, a lot of money can be gained to reduce taxes. On the other hand, he described the “debate about higher taxes for the upper so many percent or the billionaires” as an “attempt to campaign with envy.”

According to Lindner, the decisive decision in the Bundestag election was: “Does this country want a redistribution policy on request? Or do the citizens realize that an upswing must be worked for by all of us.”

The attempt to portray the SPD as a party of social redistribution is absurd. There is no other party that has contributed as much to the spread of poverty as the SPD—first with the Hartz laws of the Schröder government, then with the raising of the retirement age to 67 and numerous other “reforms” for which social democratic labour ministers were responsible.

Social inequality has also grown under Chancellor Scholz. The DAX stock exchange has broken through the 20,000-point threshold for the first time and is thus around 5,000 points higher than when Scholz took office. There are now 249 billionaires and 3,000 people living in Germany who own over $100 million. On the other hand, more than one in five is at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

For workers, young people and pensioners, there is no alternative and no lesser evil among the established parties in the upcoming federal election. The Left Party also supports the war course and organizes social attacks at the state level. Only months after its foundation in Thuringia and Brandenburg, the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) also entered into coalitions of austerity with the pro-war parties.

In the state of Saxony, a state government could work with the right-wing extremist AfD (Alternative for Germany) for the first time on individual projects to enforce the policy of war and cuts against the enormous opposition in the population. In the Bundestag debate, representatives of the government and opposition already adopted the AfD’s refugee policy wholesale and drummed up support for mass deportations.

Regardless of which of the parties form a coalition with each other after February 23, the new government will impose an extreme right-wing policy. Just as Donald Trump heralds the direct rule of the financial oligarchy in the US, here too the last remnants of the welfare state are to be smashed and Germany geared towards war and trade war. The reason for this is the deep, international crisis of the capitalist system.

Macron names new French minority government based on New Popular Front support

Alex Lantier

President Emmanuel Macron on Friday named his longstanding parliamentary ally, François Bayrou, to head a new minority government. This comes after Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s minority government fell when its 2025 draft budget was censured. Yesterday, the divided National Assembly passed an emergency budget resolution continuing the 2024 budget until a majority can be found to pass the 2025 budget.

The naming of Bayrou does not resolve the impasse facing the French political establishment, rooted in mass popular opposition to Macron’s policies of austerity and war. Despite weeks of talks, Macron failed to rally any new parties in the Assembly to join his government and support Bayrou. Polls found that only 31 percent of the French population believes Bayrou’s nomination is “a good thing,” and 73 percent believe he will continue the previous government’s policies.

Outgoing French Prime Minister Michel Barnier, left, welcomes newly named Prime Minister François Bayrou at the Prime Minister residence, December 13, 2024 in Paris [AP Photo/Christophe Ena]

The New Popular Front (NFP) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon has emerged as the main new source of support for Macron. While Mélenchon’s own France Unbowed (LFI) party is still threatening to censure the Bayrou government, the rest of the NFP is supporting Bayrou from outside his government. The big business Socialist Party (PS), backed by the Greens and the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), offered a pledge not to censure the government as long as it does not try to impose its budget via a confidence motion without a parliamentary vote.

It is the bankrupt policy of Mélenchon and LFI, propping up the the longstanding parties of bourgeois government around the PS, that allows the ruling class to constantly shift official politics to the right. By publicly supporting Macron, the NFP is handing the mantle of parliamentary opposition to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN).

The air of crisis and disorientation inside Macron’s coalition is unmistakable. When Macron initially called Bayrou into the Elysée palace on Friday morning, it was to explain to him why Macron would not nominate him as prime minister. According to various reports, Macron proposed to name close supporters such as Roland Lescure, the parliamentary representative of French people in North America, or Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister.

After an explosive, one-hour meeting during which Bayrou reportedly threatened to withdraw his Democratic Movement (MoDem) party from Macron’s coalition, Bayrou left the Elysée without the prime ministerial nomination. Fifteen minutes later, Macron called him back to the Elysée and told him he would be prime minister.

As Macron’s influence fades, the main forces gaining strength are on the far right. Le Pen has refused to promise that the RN will not censure Macron’s next government and is posing as the sole credible parliamentary alternative to the corrupt allies of Macron.

“Observing the display of mediocrity and debasement of our political opponents, I in no way regret this decision” to bring down Macron’s previous government, Le Pen said at a meeting yesterday in the town of Etrépagny in Normandy. “In ten days, all these parties of hypocrites have turned into a genuine one-party regime… which was already an unnatural electoral alliance,” she continued, mocking them as “willing to do anything to grab ministerial posts.”

If Le Pen can pose as the sole opposition to Macron, this is above all due to the bankruptcy of the forces that capitalist media falsely promote as the “left.” Though the PS did not dare openly join the government, and LFI is impotently threatening to send a motion to censure the government that it is too weak to pass through the Assembly by itself , the NFP is clearly backing Macron.

While PS secretary Olivier Faure offered Macron a pledge not to censure the government as long as a PS official was named prime minister, LFI is now mouthing empty threats against Bayrou. Mélenchon tweeted, “Mr Bayrou’s government is not viable. His group has even fewer deputies than Barnier before it. We will ask him to submit to a no confidence motion. If he refuses, we will manifest our lack of confidence by placing a censure motion.”

Mélenchon’s parliamentary word-juggling, rejecting any mobilization of workers in struggle, is a dead end. Mélenchon won 8 million votes in the 2022 presidential elections, concentrated in the urban working class, and the NFP has the support of all France’s union bureaucracies. Nevertheless, these organizations have never called on the working class to bring down Macron, even during last year’s pension struggles, when two-thirds of the French people wanted a general strike to block Macron’s wildly unpopular pension cuts.

Instead, Mélenchon focused his efforts on reviving the parties of the old Plural Left governments of the 1980s and 1990s—the PS, the PCF, and the Greens—which had disintegrated in the 2022 elections. It is clear that these long-standing parties of capitalist government, whose candidates ran in the last years with the endorsement of Mélenchon, are utterly hostile to the working class and to mobilizing it against the Bayrou government.

As he went in for talks with Macron, PCF chairman Fabien Roussel said the NFP “will not insist on the enacting of its entire election program.” Roussel made clear that, by this, he did not mean the NFP program’s support for sending French troops to Ukraine or further funding for military police and intelligence units. Rather, this meant that the NFP was ready to support austerity against the workers.

Roussel dropped the NFP program’s demand to abrogate Macron’s pension cuts, saying it would “place the matter in the hands of the social partners,” that is, the union bureaucracies’ talks with the Macron government and the employers’ federations.

Green party leader Marine Tondelier made clear that the NFP was seeking to get closer to Macron. “Each must make a step towards the other,” she declared during her meetings with Macron at the Elysée palace. She added that the NFP strategy was to convince Macron to drop the de facto alliance with the neo-fascist RN that he formed at the beginning of the Barnier government and instead rely on the support of the NFP.

“The solution would no longer be an agreement with the National Rally,” Tondelier told the media about her meetings with Macron last week. “He was very clear that the National Rally, for him, is not within the perimeter of parties that want to talk.”

This raises the question: what is it about the NFP that makes it compatible with a president who is himself compatible with the neo-fascists? And how can the working class stop the capitalist agenda of military-police escalation, attacks on democratic rights and deep austerity defended by Macron and the NFP? Indeed, it is all too clear that a situation where the RN is allowed to posture as the sole viable opposition to an anti-worker all-party regime is pregnant with the threat of far-right dictatorship.

The policies of what the capitalist media promote as the “left” will, in any case, only further disgust and embitter broad masses of workers. This was evident in the radio interview given by former 1997-2002 Plural Left government Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to France Inter, endorsing the PS policy of supporting Macron from the outside. Jospin said, “The socialists, the communists and the ecologists, considering that they had not been called upon by the president to form the government, decided to remain in the opposition. They are in opposition, and they must remain there.”

While the PS, PCF and Greens publicly declare themselves to be opposition parties, Jospin added, “at the same time they must contribute to making sure that this government, whose choices it does not share, will last.”

The political dishonesty of Jospin’s statement is self-evident. While loudly proclaiming that the PS and its allies are opposition parties that do not support Macron’s unpopular policies, it calls to make sure that this government remains in power so it can push through its agenda of imperialist war abroad and class war at home.