Spain’s fascistic Vox party surges in Catalan regional elections

Alice Summers

Amid mass abstention, the February 14 Catalan regional elections saw the far-right Vox party enter the Catalan parliament, the first time an avowedly far-right party has done so since 1982. Vox took 11 seats and nearly 8 percent of the vote, making it the fourth-largest party in the legislature.

No party won anywhere near the 68 seats necessary for a majority. The Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC), the Catalan branch of the ruling Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE), received the most votes of a single party. It took 33 of the 135 seats in the Catalan parliament, a significant increase on the 17 seats won in the 2017 elections.

Spain’s far-right Vox Party leader Santiago Abascal arrives for a campaign meeting in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Feb. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The second and third parties were the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Together for Catalonia (JxCat). The ERC took 33 seats, gaining one, and JxCat took 32 seats, losing two. The Catalan branch of Podemos, In Common We Can (ECP), maintained its eight seats.

Santiago llla, who led the PSC ticket, and Pere Aragonès of the ERC have both announced plans to form a government in Catalonia. Aragonès will seek an alliance with JxCat and the pro-independence, pseudo-left Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), having ruled out any coalition with the PSC. He is considered most likely to be installed as the next regional president, thus leaving a Catalan-nationalist government in power in Barcelona.

It is the first vote held in Catalonia since 2017, when Spain’s right-wing Popular Party (PP) government called special elections after the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. In this election as in the 2017 elections, Madrid’s hopes to resolve the stand-off with the Catalan nationalists in their own favour backfired, however. The 2021 elections returned a narrow majority for the separatist parties, as before, but the PP vote collapsed.

In this year’s election, voter turnout fell to 51.3 percent, the lowest ever since the 1978 Transition to democracy with the end of the Franco regime. This compares to a turnout of 79.1 percent in 2017 elections, the highest on record.

While COVID-19 certainly impacted the vote, the record low turnout cannot be explained by the pandemic alone. There is widespread popular disillusionment with a false “choice” between reactionary nationalist parties, whose pro-austerity policies and separatist rhetoric is discredited among workers and youth, and pro-Madrid parties which have moved far to the right. Moreover, Catalan nationalist parties have backed Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government, even as it imposed austerity and brutally cracked down on protests in Catalonia.

A recent survey by the Catalan government-linked Centre for Opinion Studies (CEO) found that only 44.5 percent of Catalonia’s population supported Catalan independence. Despite the stability of the Catalan nationalists’ parliamentary delegation, the record low turnout meant that the total number of votes they received plummeted. ERC and JxCat went from nearly a million votes each in 2017 to around 600,000 and 570,000, respectively.

Only with the seats of the pseudo-left Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), which increased its parliamentary representation from four to nine members, can separatist parties command a majority in the Catalan parliament. Pro-independence parties now hold 74 seats in the 135-seat parliament, an increase of four on 2017.

The Catalan-nationalist parties also failed to receive a majority of the popular vote: they collectively obtained 48 percent of ballots, only 0.5 percent more than in 2017. The PSC gained from this fall in support for the Catalan nationalists, increasing their vote by over 48,000.

So discredited are the Catalan nationalists that the SPC’s Santiago Illa, who as health minister presided over the PSOE-Podemos government’s disastrous response to the pandemic—which has claimed around 68,000 lives in Spain according to underestimated official counts—won the most votes. This was a vote by default, benefitting largely from opposition to Catalan nationalism. But Illa’s candidacy did not prevent Catalan nationalist parties from gaining a parliamentary majority.

The main beneficiary of the fall in support for the Catalan nationalists was Vox, which won 218,000 votes, and more seats than the right-wing Citizens party and the PP combined. Citizens’ performance was disastrous, losing nearly a million votes since the last election and falling from the single biggest party in the legislature to the second-smallest, with only six seats. They were beaten in the race to the bottom only by the PP, which won a mere three seats.

Vox ran best in tourist areas along the Tarragona coast, including small towns like Roda de Berà, Mont-roig del Camp, Cunit, Cambrils and Calafell, where it won over 12 percent of the vote. The pandemic has devastated these tourist destinations: small businesses reliant on holidaymakers saw their income almost completely dry up. Vox also won the most votes in two small municipalities, La Pobla de Mafumet (21.3 percent) and Vilamalla (22.5 percent), both traditional strongholds of anti-separatist sentiment, which saw mass abstention.

Responsibility for the surge in votes for Vox lies squarely with the PSOE-Podemos government and its regional affiliates, the PSC and ECP, who have shifted so far to the right that they have allowed Vox to present its policies as part of the mainstream. With tacit support from Podemos, the PSOE caretaker government of 2019 violently cracked down on mass protests in Catalonia against the jailing of Catalan nationalist politicians for organizing peaceful protests and the peaceful 2017 referendum on Catalan independence.

The PSOE-Podemos government has upheld the convictions of Catalan nationalist political prisoners throughout its time in office. A day after the Catalan elections, the government’s Prosecutors Office ordered that jailed Catalan independence activists be returned to prison, only two weeks after the Catalan regional government freed them with semi-liberty status.

All the established parties carried out rotten right-wing electoral campaigns. Their chief characteristic was an almost complete absence of debate on the “herd immunity” policies pursued by the PSOE-Podemos government. There was barely a mention of the tens of thousands of lives lost to the pandemic, the hundreds of thousands more who have lost jobs and livelihoods, the millions infected with the virus, or the billions of euros handed to banks and big business in EU bailouts.

Vox dominated the stage with xenophobic, anti-migrant rants and a “Stop Islamisation!” campaign.

Significantly, during the campaign, Vox spokesperson Javier Ortega Smith declared Vox’s willingness to back a minority PSOE government in Catalonia, stating: “If you put me in the position of choosing between a government led by the PSOE and a government led by the coup-plotters [referring to the Catalan nationalists’ 2017 independence referendum] and separatists, if we have to choose between the bad and the worse, we would choose the bad.”

“It is always easier to recover the government of Catalonia with the socialists [of the PSOE] than with the separatists of the ERC…. We will do everything in our power to support the investiture of a government which is not of separatists and coup-plotters,” Ortega Smith stated.

Illa and the PSC, for the time being, have ruled out a coalition with Vox.

Whatever parliamentary alliance eventually emerges from the elections, neither the bankrupt pro-austerity and separatist policies of the Catalan nationalists nor the reactionary politics of the PSOE/PSC and Podemos/ECP will combat the far-right. The PSOE-Podemos government has acceded to virtually every demand placed on it by Vox—from its refusal to implement lockdown measures to combat the pandemic to its brutal crackdown on refugees.

Ukrainian government sanctions pro-Russian oligarch and opposition leader

Jason Melanovski

The government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday announced sanctions targeting the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, the head of Ukraine’s leading opposition party.

Medvedchuk, who has an estimated net worth of $1 billion, has played a major role in Ukrainian politics ever since the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991. In contrast to the anti-Russian NATO-backed right-wing government of Zelensky, Medvedchuk has maintained close business and political contacts with the Russian oligarchy and is a personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2014, he was sanctioned by the US. Both he and his Opposition Platform–For Life party favor reestablishing close ties with Moscow and ending the nearly seven-year-long war in eastern Ukraine.

Viktor Medvedchuk in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 10, 2020. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

At a briefing last Friday, Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, announced that Medvedchuk’s assets were also frozen and that Ukraine’s state security service (SBU) would be carrying out an investigation of Medvedchuk’s ownership of coal mines that are located in separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine. Danilov also accused Medvedchuk of “financing terrorism.”

In an indication of the deep geopolitical conflicts within the Ukrainian oligarchy, the government also announced that it would be taking over the PrykarpatZakhidtrans oil pipeline. The pipeline carries Russian oil to Europe and is reportedly owned by Medvedchuk through foreign intermediaries.

The sanctions against Medvedchuk are part of an ongoing crackdown by the Zelensky government against all political opposition as the country continues to suffer both medically and economically from the coronavirus pandemic.

On February 2, Zelensky took the unprecedented step of closing down three popular opposition-affiliated TV channels—112, Newsone and ZIK—on the grounds of “national security.” While the channels are officially owned by Taras Kozak, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the Opposition Platform–For Life party, the channels are reportedly financially owned by Medvedchuk. Both Kozak and Medvedchuk also had their personal planes banned from operating in Ukrainian airspace.

While Zelensky was elected in 2019 with an overwhelming 73 percent of the vote—a vote that above all represented a repudiation of the 2014 US and German-backed coup—just 19.8 percent of Ukrainians are willing to vote for him now, according to a January 26 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).

The same KIIS poll suggested that in a hypothetical parliamentary election the Medvedchuk-led Opposition Platform–For Life party would win with 20.7 percent of the vote. Zelensky’s own Servant of the People party, which came into power in July 2019, would garner just 11.2 percent, rendering it a fourth-place party with little chance to govern unless aligned with another party.

The Opposition Platform–For Life party has been the largest but not the only political target of the Ukrainian government. On February 16, Ukraine’s SBU charged pro-Russian blogger and politician Anatoly Shariy with “high treason” and “incitement of ethnic or racial hatred” by spreading “Russian propaganda” in the media.

Shariy, who currently lives in Spain, is an extremely popular blogger in Ukraine. He has made a number of important investigative posts in recent years, uncovering far-right nationalism and anti-Semitism within the Ukrainian state as well as ongoing corruption. Shariy’s party also supports a negotiated settlement to end the war in eastern Ukraine, making his party a target of the far right. Several of its leading members have been attacked by right-wing thugs.

Seven years have now passed since the US- and EU-backed coup in 2014 that heavily relied on fascist forces and installed an aggressively pro-NATO section of the Ukrainian ruling class in Kiev. Like his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, the Zelensky government now appears headed towards collapse, endangering US foreign policy interests in the region.

In Washington, the possible return of a Moscow-friendly government to power in Kiev is viewed as militarily unacceptable, and the US has fully endorsed the sanctions against Medvedchuk. The US Embassy’s page noted on Saturday, “The US supports efforts yesterday to counter Russia’s malign influence, in line with law, in defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

By contrast, the Kremlin has made clear that Zelensky’s crackdown against the pro-Russian political opposition has severely undermined the chance for a resolution of the war in Donbas, increasing the chance for an outbreak of full-out war between Ukraine and Russia.

The crisis of the Zelensky government and the embittered infighting within the country’s ruling class are fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, which has devastated both the country’s impoverished health system and economy.

More than 26,000 Ukrainians have officially died due to COVID-19. The country’s dilapidated hospitals and underfunded medical workers have been overwhelmed, often reusing essential PPE and medical supplies, including such basics as syringes.

The horrific conditions in Ukrainian hospitals and the enormous impact of the crisis on an already deeply impoverished population are a direct outcome of the restoration of capitalism, following the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Three decades later, Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe and the standing ground for dangerous military provocations and war preparations by the imperialist powers against Russia. Meanwhile, the EU and US have refused any meaningful help in getting the vaccine.

While the country’s wealthier EU allies have already had access to a vaccine, Ukraine is just this week receiving its first 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, despite begging both the United States and EU for access to the vaccine for months. Under these conditions, the vaccine distribution has become a focal point of conflicts over foreign policy within the ruling oligarchy.

Last fall, Medvedchuk met with Putin and obtained permission from the Russian president for Ukraine to receive Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. More recently, he obtained a license for Biolik, a pharmaceutical company based in eastern Ukraine, to manufacture the vaccine in Ukraine.

While the Russian government undoubtedly views the distribution of Sputnik V within Ukraine as a chance to regain lost political influence in the region, the vaccine itself has proven effective. On February 2, the Lancet medical journal published third-stage results of Sputnik V’s clinical trials showing that it is one of the most effective and safest vaccines in the world. Despite the growing medical evidence of its efficacy, on February 10 the Zelensky government officially banned its use on Ukrainian territory, claiming that Sputnik V was part of a Russian “information war” targeting Ukraine.

The working class can only put an end to the social and economic catastrophe and the danger of war by intervening in the crisis on the basis of its own class interests, independent from all factions of the ruling oligarchy. This requires that the political lessons be drawn from the struggle of the Trotskyist movement for an internationalist socialist perspective in opposition to the nationalist betrayal of the October revolution of 1917 by Stalinism.

Germany: Left Party congress paving way for government participation and war

Johannes Stern

At its party congress this coming weekend, Germany’s Left Party will set an even more direct course towards government participation and support for war. The draft election programme presented by the departing leadership duo of Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger, and the statements of their designated successors, Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow make this absolutely clear.

“It is time to begin a new phase in the party’s development. The Left Party must give a clear indication that it will take responsibility,” stated Hennig-Wellsow in a joint interview with Wissler in the latest Sunday edition of the Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Susanne Hennig-Wellsow and Janine Wissler (state parliament pictures)

The future party leaders were quite explicit in their statements. The Left Party is ready for a coalition with the pro-austerity, pro-war Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens at the federal level, which would intensify social spending cuts, the build-up of domestic state repression, the rearmament of the military, and the murderous pandemic policies.

Hennig-Wellsow boasted to the Tagesspiegel that the Left Party is already a party of government and is recognised even by the political right. “We have Minister President Bodo Ramelow in Thuringia, play an important role in the Federal Council and in the conferences with the Chancellor,” she said. In Thuringia, a “Left Party/SPD/Green coalition is being tolerated by the CDU (Christian Democrats) for the first time in Germany, that shouldn’t be underestimated. We govern in Berlin and Bremen. Our group in the federal parliament also works professionally.”

Hennig-Wellsow’s reference to “professional work” means the imposition of the ruling class’s reactionary agenda in all areas. With regard to the coronavirus policy, she attack the limited lockdown measures adopted by the grand coalition from the right and provided propaganda for a rapid return to schools. The lockdown was “correct,” but “the measures did not impact or protect everyone equally.” She is “absolutely opposed to the performance pressure … is now being passed on to parents and children.” What is necessary are “unified regulations to bring this school year for the children to an end in a way that everyone can move up a year.”

As the Left Party’s state leader and parliamentary group leader in Thuringia, Hennig-Wellsow plays an active role in enforcing the murderous policy of mass infection, which has already led to 70,000 deaths in Germany. The Left Party/SPD/Green state government has reopened schools and day-care facilities even though the incidence rate remains high and the new, more infectious variants are circulating. Last autumn, Ramelow praised the “Swedish model,” thus explicitly backing the murderous policy of herd immunity.

Hennig-Wellsow also made clear that under her leadership, the Left Party would support foreign military interventions by the German army. “I can imagine certain classical blue helmet missions, such as in Cyprus, for example,” she stated. “When the issue is securing peace after a conflict, one needs to consider such missions on a case-by-case basis.” In January, the security policy spokesman for the Left Party, Matthias Höhn, appealed in a policy paper for German military interventions and the rearmament of the German army.

The Left Party is also prepared to go all the way on domestic state repression. “With the CDU (in Thuringia), we had to create three additional posts for the state intelligence service, otherwise they would not have backed the budget,” Hennig-Wellsow acknowledged. She cynically added, “That sounds banal, but for us it isn’t. As a party, we want to abolish the intelligence service.” Apparently, only on paper. In the political real world, the Left Party is strengthening the police as well as the domestic intelligence service, which is the agency at the centre of the right-wing extremist conspiracy within the state apparatus.

Wissler supports this course and also spoke in favour of government participation. “I’m not saying that Left Party ministers can’t achieve anything,” she said. Asked whether she thought it would be a “betrayal of left-wing ideals” if “as part of participating in government more positions within the intelligence service need to be created,” she said, “No, that is not a betrayal.” The important thing is to have “clear red lines in an election programme.” The Left Party will “not join a government that approves foreign interventions, eliminates social programmes or democratic rights, and pushes ahead with privatizations.”

This is a flat-out lie. Wherever the Left Party governs in coalition with the SPD and Greens at the state level, it is pushing ahead with the attacks on social spending and democratic rights, privatises everything it can lay its hands on, and ruthlessly deports refugees. Just a few days ago, it was revealed that the SPD/Left Party/Green government in Bremen intends to cut 440 full-time health care workers’ jobs. The assault on the health care sector is being overseen by the “left” senator for health, Claudia Bernhard.

With regard to foreign interventions, the party’s “red lines” in its programme are not worth the paper they are written on. Everyone knows that as a party of government, the Left Party would support the war policy at the federal level. Together with Hennig-Wellsow and Höhn, other members of the party, like the parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, and foreign policy spokesman Gregor Gysi, have made this clear. The current election programme is so strongly pro-military that it has even triggered disquiet in the party’s ranks ahead of the congress.

For example, in the party’s newspaper, Junge Welt, Sevim Dağdelen and Ulla Jelpke write in a piece with the revealing title “Farewell to a policy of peace,” “Language can be treacherous.” Due to the formulations in the election programme, “programmatic wiggle room to send the army on new foreign interventions” remains. This “suggests the interpretation” that this “leaves the door open to a government option including the SPD, left Party, and Greens,” which would “push ahead with the further militarisation of the EU, launch new foreign interventions with the blessing of the UN and EU, and approve new arms exports at the same time.”

They also hypocritically expressed their surprise that in the section titled “Enforce human rights,” an outright “regime change fund” is proposed, “which initially sounds like a means of international solidarity” but will “in the reality of a government of an imperialist power prove to be a fund for the overthrow of undesirable governments around the world, like similar funds in the US.”

Like Wissler, Sevim Dağdelen and Ulla Jelpke have no qualms about the regime change operations of German imperialism, but are themselves deeply implicated. They are merely concerned that too openly adopting militarist rhetoric would undermine foreign interventions and at the same time make it impossible for the Left Party to control the mounting opposition to the return of German militarism.

Dağdelen is the representative on the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the deputy member on the parliamentary defence committee, and is on the board of the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP), which played a central role in the reviving of German militarism. Jelpke is deputy member of the committee for human rights and humanitarian aid, and has repeatedly appealed for “humanitarian interventions.” In 2014, she was among the Left Party politicians who demanded a more forceful German intervention in Iraq.

The party tendency Marx 21, to which Wissler belonged until her candidacy, is more than any other faction in favour of an aggressive imperialist foreign policy. Marx 21 member Christine Buchholz has sat on the parliamentary defence committee without interruption since 2009. As a member of Bundestag delegations, she regularly visits the army units in their area of operations. Marx 21 also plays a central role in the imperialist offensive of Germany against Russia.

The Tagesspiegel presents Wissler as a “Marxist” and Marx 21 and its predecessor organisation, Linksruck (Left Shift) as “Trotskyist associations.” In reality, the right-wing and pro-imperialist policies of Marx 21 and Linksruck has nothing to do with Marxism, let alone the Russian revolutionary and founder of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky. He did not advocate the building of essentially right-wing bourgeois parties, but for the mobilisation of the working class on the basis of an internationalist and socialist programme against capitalism and war.

Marx 21 does not stand in the tradition of Marx and Trotsky, but rather the anti-Trotskyist tradition of the International Socialist Tendency founded by Tony Cliff. Shortly after the end of World War II, Cliff broke with Trotskyism and designated the Soviet Union as state capitalist, in spite of the continued existence of the progressive property relations created by the 1917 October revolution. Like other forms of state capitalism, Cliff’s standpoint amounted to an adaptation to imperialism and a form of anti-communism concealed with “left” rhetoric.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reintroduction of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the state capitalists and the privileged sections of the middle class for which they speak moved fully into the camp of imperialism. In Germany, they integrated themselves into the bourgeois state, first by joining the SPD and later the Left Party. With Wissler, they now have a party leader and potential key figure in the formation of a federal government and are ready to directly organise a new round of attacks on the working class and imperialist wars.

Canada’s indigenous population faces elevated infection rate, lack of health care as COVID-19 runs rampant

Alexandra Greene

Health officials announced Canada’s first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 25, 2020. Thirteen months later, the country has reported over 850,000 cases and more than 21,800 deaths.

During the pandemic’s first wave last spring, infection rates among Indigenous people did not greatly exceed the national average, in part because many First Nations and the governments of the three northern territories imposed severe travel restrictions. But First Nations, Inuit and Métis people across Canada have been greatly impacted by the “second wave” of COVID-19 infections—a second wave that is entirely due to the ruling elite’s prioritizing of profits over lives, with their back-to-work and back-to-school drives.

Sanikiluaq, pictured above, is one of many remote Inuit communities in Nunavut to experience a COVID-19 outbreak (Wikipedia)

Federal government figures show the number of COVID-19 infections on First Nation reserves has increased more than 10-fold since the end of October. More than 5 percent of those living on reserves have now had an official COVID-19 diagnosis since the pandemic began, more than double the percentage for Canadians as a whole.

Indigenous people across Canada face medical and social conditions—including grinding poverty, dilapidated housing, and inadequate access to health care—that place them at especially high risk for contracting the virus and transmitting it to others. When infected, they are often unable to obtain appropriate treatment and face higher mortality rates than the non-Indigenous population.

Communities have struggled to manage and contain outbreaks throughout the winter. The most recent data from Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) states that, as of February 18, there have been 19,455 confirmed positive cases on First Nations reserves alone, with 1,265 cases still active and 901 current hospitalizations. At the end of January, the rate of reported cases of COVID-19 in First Nations people living on-reserve was 40 percent higher than the rate in the general population.

Case numbers are steadily worsening for First Nations in Manitoba, where they account for a staggering 70 percent of the province’s COVID-19 cases, although they comprise just 10 percent of the overall population.

Two separate Manitoba First Nations recently reported suspected cases of one of the new more-contagious coronavirus variants.

The Pimicikamak First Nation, located roughly 530 kilometres north of Winnipeg, announced on February 15 that the B117 variant first detected in the United Kingdom is suspected to have infected at least one resident. Two days earlier, the Pauingassi First Nation in eastern Manitoba, where a massive outbreak infected as much as 25 percent of all residents at its peak, reported seven possible cases of the British variant. Samples were sent to Winnipeg’s Cadham Provincial Lab, where scientists were surprised to identify markers that may be of the B117 variant. Both communities are currently under lockdown.

Scientists and health officials are concerned by these developments, as Manitoba has only reported one other confirmed case of the variant to date. The infected individual tested positive after travelling to Winnipeg from Europe and is not known to have visited either of the affected First Nations communities.

Residents living on-reserve face many barriers in accessing health care and dependable social services. Many isolated rural communities face technological hindrances such as a lack of sufficient Internet connection and few cell towers, rendering sick people unable to speak virtually to a health care practitioner, let alone see one in person.

The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) has said that early data suggests off-reserve First Nations persons are even more likely to be hospitalized and die than those living on-reserve. This is doubtless bound up with the horrific social conditions faced by the large indigenous populations in cities across western Canada, like Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.

Indigenous people suffer higher rates of arthritis, diabetes, obesity and asthma, all of which are co-morbidities for COVID-19, than the Canadian population generally. Food insecurity in many places contributes to malnourishment, compromises immune systems, and exacerbates the high incidences of chronic illness.

Factors contributing to the risk posed by the pandemic vary from place to place. In the territory of Nunavut, for example, the largely Inuit population has been grappling for decades with tuberculosis rates 300 times higher than those observed in non-Indigenous, Canadian-born citizens, as well as a housing crisis and food shortages.

Fifty-eight Indigenous communities in Canada are currently living under boil-water advisories, making the hygiene standards necessary to prevent the spread of the virus much more difficult to meet.

Many families live in multi-generational, overcrowded homes, making it extremely difficult for infected people to isolate.

The federal government has initiated a push to vaccinate Indigenous communities more rapidly than the population at large in recognition of the heightened risks they confront. However, the miserable progress of the overall vaccine campaign, which has seen little more than 3 percent of the population receive one dose, does not bode well for Indigenous communities. A Public Health Agency of Canada document released this week estimates that, in order to meet the federal government’s intended goal of having 14.5 million Canadians fully inoculated by the end of June, an immediate 11-fold increase in the number of individuals vaccinated daily would be required.

As of mid-February, the vaccination rate in Indigenous communities was six times higher than the general population. More than 83,000 doses have been administered in over 400 communities. Indigenous Affairs Minister Mark Miller says that the three northern Territories and British Columbia are on track to have vaccinated 75 percent of Indigenous adults by the end of March.

In BC, senior health officials recently had to apologize to the Nuxalk First Nation after a medical health officer suddenly withdrew more than 200 COVID-19 vaccines intended to inoculate the people of the Nuxalk Nation in Bella Coola.

Reports of the incident allege that the medical health officer insisted on distributing the vaccine to the entire Bella Coola Valley, not just health workers and particularly vulnerable individuals living on-reserve as had been previously arranged. The population of the Bella Coola region is approximately 2,000, and with only 360 vaccine doses on hand, there soon was a disagreement between the doctor and Nuxalk health leaders as to who would receive the vaccine.

On the evening of January 21, the doctor sent an e-mail to the Nuxalk executive director insisting that the Nuxalk must provide him with a vaccine rollout plan by 10 a.m. the next day. The rollout plan was delivered at 10:02 a.m.—just two minutes late—and the doctor has since used this as an explanation of why he subsequently took the remaining 230 doses and left the community that day, accompanied by an RCMP escort.

Members of the Nuxalk Nation were stunned when the medical health officer referred to the vaccines as “a gift” rather than a medical necessity during a global health crisis that places communities such as theirs at extremely high risk.

The vaccine rollout is complicated by the almost total absence of medical personnel on reserves and in other remote regions. Statistics Canada reports that 82 percent of Inuit people living in Nunavut do not have a family doctor. One in five Indigenous people living off-reserve and 16 percent of Métis people also do not have a family doctor.

The conditions that make Indigenous communities in Canada particularly vulnerable to the physical and socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic existed long before the onset of the current global health crisis. These conditions are a direct result of the ruthless oppression and abuse of the Native population perpetrated by Canadian capitalism. To overcome the legacy of these historic crimes and put an end to the ongoing neglect and mistreatment of the Indigenous peoples, the working class—immigrant, native-born and Indigenous—must be mobilized to establish workers’ power, abolish the profit system, and reorganize society on socialist lines.

Sri Lankan government mobilises army to break health workers’ strike

Sakuna Jayawardena

The Rajapakse government this week mobilised the military to break a national strike by thousands of junior hospital staff who walked out in a sick-leave campaign on February 24–25.

The blatant repression of health workers’ democratic right to take industrial action is a serious warning to the entire working class. The deployment, which involved a total of 185 army personnel across almost 15 hospitals, including the Colombo National Hospital, Colombo South, Peradeniya, Gampola, Badulla and Mullaithivu, was initiated by Army Commander Lieutenant General Shavendra Silva. The government falsely claimed that the military strike-breaking was in order to “avoid inconveniencing” the general public during the industrial action. While the deployment was not large enough to replace all the striking workers, it was a clear dress-rehearsal for wider state repression against workers taking industrial action.

Sri Lankan army forces entering Gampola Hospital (WSWS Media)

Military strike-breaking has previously occurred under Sri Lanka’s repressive emergency laws and essential service orders. This week’s anti-democratic attack, however, was directly initiated by the government and the army commander. It is another indication that the Rajapakse regime plans to routinely use the military to break future industrial and political action by workers and the oppressed.

The two-day strike was launched in protest against “trainee employees” being used at the hospitals and the by-passing of formal recruitment procedures. The “trainees” are from the so-called Multi-purpose Development Task Force, established by the government last year. Health workers fear that the task force employees will be used to undermine existing jobs, salaries and working conditions.

This week’s two-day action was called by the 17-union Health Service Trade Union Alliance (HSTUA). The alliance includes the Sri Lanka Republic Health Workers Union, Sri Lanka Nidahas Employees Union and the All Ceylon Health Employees Union, which is controlled by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). While union officials directed workers to remain at home, many decided to protest outside their respective hospitals.

Health workers protest in Colombo on February 23 (Credit: UHWU)

Following discussions between officials in charge of the sector and the unions on the first day of the industrial action, the health ministry director general announced that authorities had “decided to temporarily suspend training of trainees” in hospitals and other health institutions.

The Progressive Health Workers’ Union, which is a member of the HSTUA, immediately withdrew from the industrial action. Distrustful of health ministry promises, many health workers, however, remained on strike yesterday.

On February 23, the United Health Workers Union, which is controlled by the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), held a protest march from the Colombo National Hospital to the Ministry of Health. The union, which did not participate in the February 24–25 sick-leave strike, called for job permanency, uniform allowances, a festival payment advance and other demands.

Exploiting workers’ anger over numerous union betrayals, the FSP has recently begun organising new unions and front groups while posturing as an alternative “militant” leadership. The rhetoric of the FSP and its unions, however, is bogus and designed to keep workers’ politically trapped within the capitalist framework.

Likewise, the industrial action called by the health unions is not designed to fight for workers’ demands but to diffuse mounting popular anger over escalating government attacks on jobs, conditions and democratic rights.

In the past year, doctors, nurses, lab employees and junior health workers have participated in strikes variously calling for the provision of proper COVID-19 personal protective equipment, full payment of delayed salaries, extended overtime work, and other demands. Hundreds of health workers have been infected with COVID-19 and at least one doctor and a health attendant killed by the virus.

Consecutive Sri Lankan governments have failed to overhaul the dilapidated health service in the past four decades. Confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rajapakse government brutally responded by reducing this year’s health budget by 30 billion rupees, slashing it to just 159 billion rupees ($US8.1 billion).

The health sector unions are completely opposed to a joint campaign of industrial action over the parlous state of the public health system and the dangerous situation facing frontline health workers. Instead, the unions have pitted one section of health worker against the other, playing directly into the hands of the government and its increasing attacks.

None of the health service unions, nor any other trade union, has opposed or condemned the government’s deployment of the military. Functioning as an industrial police force, the unions are terrified that unified working-class action will bring them into direct conflict with the government and the capitalist class.

The Multi-purpose Development Task Force consists of 100,000 previously unemployed youth from low-income families from across the island. Paid only 22,500 rupees per month, they are now being used by the government in various state institutions to cut costs and undermine hard-won conditions.

The use of military strike-breakers against health workers is another indication that the government plans to use the state to crush all working-class opposition to its policies. It follows Rajapakse’s insertion of retired and in-service generals into key government positions and the bolstering of authoritarian powers in preparation for a presidential dictatorship.

Last year, the government used its draconian essential services act to ban any industrial action by port workers concerned about surging coronavirus infections. It has also extended this measure to suppress strike action against the privatisation of the Colombo Port Eastern Terminal.

This weeks’ strike by health workers, which follows industrial action and protests this year by port, railway and plantation workers, is part of a rising tide of working-class struggles in defence of their jobs, wages and working conditions internationally. The fight for united action by Sri Lanka health workers poses the necessity for workers to break from the unions and to form their own independent action committees based on a socialist program.

Several workers spoke to the World Socialist Web Site, condemning the government’s deployment of the military and the unions’ response.

A worker from Wathupitiwala Hospital said: “The government is trying to attack our rights by deploying the military. This is a government which uses the military for everything. When the schools were closed, the government used those facilities to station the military. We have to fight this on a united basis—that’s where our strength is—but the trade unions are dividing the working class.”

Rohan, a senior staff member at a Puttalam hospital, said: “The government has called the military to the hospitals, not out of any sympathy with the patients. We support this industrial action and are refusing to do the strikers’ jobs. This means that hospital work has been completely halted, but our unions are not supporting this struggle.”

A Peradeniya Teaching Hospital nurse said: “Not only junior staff health workers, but all health workers, including nurses, must strike in unison. We have to break down the trade union barriers and seek support from other workers in the fight against this government’s militarisation program.”

WISAG airport workers on hunger strike in Frankfurt, Germany: “We will not give up”

Marianne Arens

On Wednesday, two dozen workers went on hunger strike at service company WISAG. They are fighting against sackings, wage theft and coronavirus insecurity. WISAG dismissed 230 workers in December, including 31 airport bus drivers who have not been paid since October.

Hunger-striking WISAG workers at Frankfurt airport (photo WSWS)

The Hessenschau, the Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurter Neue Presse (FNP) and other local and national media are aware of the hunger strike but most of them have refrained from reporting the dispute. This can only be understood as a deliberate kowtowing to WISAG, as the bourgeois press prefers not to offend the powerful corporation.

WISAG owners, Claus Wisser and son Michael, are among the 300 richest families in Germany. They are very well connected and maintain relations with Frankfurt’s mayor Peter Feldmann (Social Democratic Party, SPD), the Hesse state Minister of Economics and Transport Tarek Al-Wazir (Greens), the management of Fraport AG that operates Frankfurt airport and the services union Verdi.

But there is another reason for the media blackout: The WISAG workers’ hunger strike is an expression of the growing anger and willingness to fight that is spreading among more and more workers. In many companies, employers are using the pandemic to push through job cuts and massive attacks on wages and working conditions. A social storm is building under the surface of society. The ruling class fears that the hunger strike and similar measures of struggle will act like sparks to set off a social explosion and are trying to silence them.

The World Socialist Web Site counters this media blackout. It gives a voice to workers in struggle and organises all possible forms of support and solidarity. It illustrates how workers’ resistance is developing in many countries and explains why an international strategy and socialist perspective is needed in the struggle against capitalist exploitation.

“Only because we’re defending our rights, we don’t get paid for 4 months!!!” is written on the cardboard sign of apron (tarmac) bus driver Terzi. He tells the WSWS how it came to this: “In mid-September, we were told that our department at WISAG would be shut down and all drivers would have to transfer to a company called Sky City Bus GmbH. This company has only been around since March 2020, but I’ve been working on the airport apron for 21 years.”

As the workers explained, WISAG is known for constantly pulling new subsidiaries, subcontractors, and service providers out of a hat to cheat workers out of their well-earned rights. The company now has 341 different operations.

Terzi is 44 years old, has a family with two children and has worked for WISAG and its predecessor companies for over 20 years. “Sky City Bus is a trap,” he said. “Anyone who goes there loses all rights and starts again from scratch.” Terzi and most of the drivers were not prepared to do that, and they objected to the spin-off, whereupon WISAG managing director Michael Dietrich threatened them that they would no longer receive wages.

Terzi said, “On October 1, we were at work as usual. Manager Burak Baran gave us the choice of starting at Sky City Bus and boarding the buses—or leaving immediately. He gave us 15 minutes to leave, otherwise he was going to set the police on us. Since then, we have not received any pay. That’s almost five months now since the end of October.”

Some workers have tried to get interim support through the jobcentre and at the same time have complained to the labour court. But appointments are postponed and delayed for weeks and months: “The authorities let us starve to death. WISAG had a turnover of €1.9 billion in 2020, but we can’t hold out that long.”

“What are we supposed to live on?” Terzi asked. “We are all in the red, and rent, charges and all costs continue.” He says the workers have already held a collection among themselves in solidarity and opened an extra account. “No one else has helped us. From the WISAG side, there is zero. No politician has helped us, and not even the Verdi trade union.”

When they found out that leading Verdi members sat on the WISAG board and all the supervisory boards, they left the union, he said. “What they are all organising together there is modern slavery.”

Two other colleagues, Riza and Özkan, who worked in coordination, were dismissed on December 17. “Who is going to do our work now? The shift leader has to do all our work himself now, but he is staying quiet, and happy to keep his job,” one said.

As they report, work on the apron is continuing, even though WISAG has been receiving short-time allowances for airport workers paid from the Labour Office for a year now, since the pandemic began. “It would be easy for the jobcentre to check this and demand the money back from WISAG,” one of the workers said.

Dismissed WISAG workers on hunger strike (WSWS photo)

Adding that throughout the last year, they experienced how the back-breaking work and exploitation on the apron increased: “We all got sick because they don’t use enough people to handle the machines. Many have become ill because WISAG is only using 70 percent of the intended workforce on the machines, in the cargo area and on the belts—everywhere.”

Above all, he said, experienced, qualified workers who have been doing the work for decades and know the job have been laid off. “They were unceremoniously replaced by unskilled contract workers.”

They report that even the boss himself had taken part in loading the machines when staff shortages were too bad. But the workers have to lift the heavy pieces of luggage more than a metre, one after the other, for 300 to 400 pieces. The boss quickly gave up with back pain.

The worker added, “But what is more important is that we all had to qualify, train properly, and we have to undergo further training regularly. We work with dangerous goods, it’s a demanding job. If you don’t know how to load the cargo properly and close the doors correctly, anything can happen in the air. What if a door suddenly opens in flight? The temporary workers who are now at our workstations have been given two days ‘training.’ In the future, every passenger will have to think twice before boarding a plane ...”

Riza is convinced that it was a deliberate decision by WISAG to announce the dismissals so close to Christmas. “That was pure calculation: we wouldn’t be able to file an action for protection against dismissal because all the offices and authorities were closed. It was also an unfavourable time for demonstrations and industrial action. Also, they deliberately wanted to demoralise us.”

He said they did not succeed. “We will not give up,” reads one sign. “We are fighting for jobs and we are not giving up,” Riza also tells us. “It’s not only about getting our own jobs back, it’s not only about the 230 dismissed workers and their families. Workers in Berlin, Hamburg and elsewhere are also affected.”

With their strike, the workers are also targeting the company’s negligent coronavirus policy. “While we are fighting the pandemic, the employer is trying to throw us out,” one of their banners reads. As long-time worker Benli had told the WSWS, there have already been several coronavirus cases at WISAG. “Normally, colleagues should be informed and protected. But here everything is covered up—like the Mafia.”

Hunger strike by WISAG workers. Riza and Özkan in front of the banner (photo WSWS)

The WISAG workers’ hunger strike is an important call-out to their colleagues at other airports and to all workers. It is time to become active and take up a common struggle!

The sector union IGL, which is supporting the hunger strike, is limiting itself to making appeals and petitions to the Wisser family and the ministers and capitalists behind them. Such efforts are futile.

What is necessary is to make contact with WISAG workers in Berlin, Hamburg and other locations, as well as with workers in other companies—at Fraport, Lufthansa, etc.—and at all airports in Europe. Everywhere, workers toil under the menace of layoffs and spinoffs, always threatened by even more dangerous coronavirus mutations.

UK government declares testing and wearing masks “not compulsory” in reopened schools

Robert Stevens

All state schools and further education colleges in England and will be fully opened from March 8. Ahead of this, pupils in foundation year in Wales and those in Primary Years 1 to 3 in Scotland resumed face-to-face learning on February 22.

Boris Johnson holds a Covid-19 Press Conference with Chief Executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, as the total number of recorded deaths from Covid in the UK surpassed 100,000. 10 Downing Street. (Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street)

The Conservative government is opening schools as part of its homicidal herd immunity agenda that will see all shops opened on April 12 and the entire economy opened by June 21. School openings are a “national priority” of the government and opposition Labour Party so that parents are free to return to work and big business can keep the profits flowing in. A week after the March 8 openings, from March 15, the next phase of Scotland school returns, including primaries and some secondary schools, will go ahead.

For all their nauseating talk of making sure that children don’t “miss out” on their education, the Tory government don’t give a damn about the life prospects of children from working class backgrounds. These criminals are responsible for the social murder of over 135,000 people in Britain—where Covid-19 is listed on the death certificate—depriving many children of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the lifting of what he described as the “last lockdown,” which he admitted would result in “more infections, more hospitalisations and… more deaths.”

All schools must be back within a week from March 8, with the government only allowing secondary schools to stagger the return over seven days—supposedly to allow the Covid testing of all pupils to be carried out.

Yet within hours of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announcing his plans Wednesday, the government had torn up his policy, including that masks had to be worn at all times in school. On Thursday, School Minister Nick Gibb told Sky New s in relation to testing pupils twice a week, “We want to make sure it is not compulsory in that sense, and they will need the permission of the parents.” While declaring it was “highly recommended” to wear masks in schools, he added, “We are saying it is not mandatory for schools to have masks in classrooms…”

Despite being key workers in workplaces that even the prime minister has described as “vectors of transmission,” teachers will not be fast tracked to receive a vaccination.

The maniacal policy of sending 10 million pupils and education staff and several million more college students aged 16-18 back into unsafe classrooms can only result in a vast surge of COVID-19 and places the safety and lives of children in danger. This is being enforced with less than 1.5 percent of the population (734,000 people) have had the required two vaccination doses and where the R Reproduction rate value is just below 1. It look seven months and two national lockdowns, in November and January, to get R finally below 1.

Everyone who is supporting the back to work/back to school agenda knows where this leads. Within two months of schools reopening last September, 8,000 schools suffered infections with coronavirus, with schools accounting for 29 percent of all COVID-19 clusters. The infection rate among secondary school aged pupils surged by 2,000 percent and 600,000 pupils were forced to self-isolate at home.

The government and a select group of scientific advisers continually stress that COVID does not represent a danger to children, who only suffer “mild” symptoms. However, in November, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the government’s advisory body, wrote that the second wave of the pandemic had seen the prevalence of COVID-19 in school-age children rising “significantly”, with the increase “initially among those in school year 12 (age 16/17) – age 24 and young people (e.g. secondary school age).” SAGE noted that “The rising prevalence was first visible around the time that schools reopened.”

Reopening schools is bound up with increasing the exploitation of teachers and working them to the bone, and on a shoestring budget.

The government is requesting that secondary schools deliver face-to-face summer schools, exposing pupils and staff to even more danger. Just £400 million in funding was been announced, including more for the National Tutoring Programme, on top of £300 million announced in January for catch-up projects. This amounts to just £6,000 for the average primary school and £22,000 for each secondary. Shared between just over 8 million pupils in English state schools, it equates to a mere 86 pence for each child.

Earlier this month, schools minister Gibb told Parliament’s education committee he was “open to all ideas” on how to make up for lesson time lost to the pandemic. Among ideas being considered were longer school days and shorter holidays.

The pro-Tory Daily Mail hailed an extra £200 million towards “the National Tutoring Programme and other tuition schemes” as “it could be spent on extra clubs, activities or teaching for those who have fallen behind.” While noting, “However, radical measures previously discussed, like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day, do not figure in the plans,” the Mail pointed out, “Despite this, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson did not rule out lengthening the school day to help pupils catch up from the coronavirus disruption.”

Given the governments extensive privatisation of school aged education, the first Academies have already come forward, among these the Brighter Futures Learning Partnership Trust, which runs Hungerhill School, Doncaster University Technology College and five primary schools in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Another chain welcoming the policy, The GORSE Academies Trust, which runs 11 schools in the Leeds area, announced its intention to open over summer.

Teachers, in poll after poll and on social media, have voiced their opposition to returning to work under unsafe conditions, but are up against trade unions who are colluding in the government’s plans. The National Education Union (NEU) describes Johnson’s “big bang” reopening schools as “irresponsible”. Yet they have called no industrial action to prevent it. The NEU praised the Scottish and Welsh governments—who reopened even before Johnson—stating, “We believe a phased return like all other nations in the UK which is the right approach”.

On Friday, joint NEU leader Mary Bousted commented in Scho o l s Week, “Now the prime minister says again that opening schools is his priority. He wants our journey out of lockdown to be irreversible. On both counts, we agree. Once back, it is crucial that pupils remain in school and continue to benefit from learning in classrooms. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson’s ‘big bang’ school return jeopardises that.”

Mary Bousted speaking at an NEU Zoom meeting

The unions are allowing hundreds of thousands of their members to return when they know what the outcome will be. This week, Bousted retweeted a post from SchoolsWeek reading, “The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling said its 'consensus view' was that the opening of primary and secondary schools was 'likely to increase effective R by a factor of 1.1 to 1.5 (10 per cent to 50 per cent)'.”

National Association of Head Teachers leader, Paul Whiteman, could not make his support for teachers carrying out summer tuition in classrooms in the middle of a pandemic any clearer declaring, “Summer schools will be of value for some pupils but it will be important not to overwhelm students.”

A foretaste of the disaster to come was clear within two days of Scotland’s schools reopening this week. An entire class (around 27 pupils) in Gilmerton Primary School in Edinburgh were forced to self-isolate after a coronavirus case was confirmed at the school. Pupils were told they would need to stay at home for 10 days.