Volkswagen demands 20 percent wage cut

Peter Schwarz

Volkswagen wants to cut the wages of its 120,000 employees in Germany by almost 20 percent, thereby saving €2 billion a year. This became known on Wednesday evening after the second round of negotiations on the VW company wage agreement.

VW factory gate in Wolfsburg

Finance daily Handelsblatt had already reported on the proposed cuts in advance:

• Wages will be reduced by 10 percent (instead of the demanded 7 percent increase) and frozen for the years 2025 and 2026.
• Supplementary payments, bonuses and gratuities will be cancelled without replacement.
• Older workers who have been able to reduce their weekly working hours to between 25 and 33 hours (on the assembly line) or 26 and 34 hours (in administration) since the “Future Pact” contract of 2005 will have to work a full 35 hours again.
• Temporary workers will no longer be paid according to VW’s own wage scales, but rather according to the lower industry scales.
• The number of apprentices will be reduced from 1,400 per year.

The threat of mass layoffs and the closure of entire plants is still on the table with this provocative offer. Volkswagen wants to save a total of almost €4 billion a year. But management has indicated that it would be willing to discuss the preservation of production locations if the IG Metall union and the works council agree to massive wage cuts, whereby maintaining a location does not mean that all jobs will remain.

A wage reduction, as provocatively being demanded by the VW management, is unprecedented in post-war German history. For many VW workers who have families, houses to pay for and other obligations to meet, it would be financially devastating. Nevertheless, the IG Metall and the works council have already signaled their willingness to compromise.

Since the head of the works council, Daniela Cavallo, went public on Monday with the warning that VW intended to close three plants and lay off tens of thousands, all statements by the works council and IG Metall officials have focused on the demand to maintain all locations. They did not question the company’s cost-cutting targets, nor did they call for a fight against them.

Instead, they demanded management work very closely with them on the cuts and job losses, as it has in the past. IG Metall negotiator Thorsten Gröger, for example, declared that a “viable future concept for all locations” was the “entry ticket” for further negotiations.

By a “viable future concept,” Gröger means—just as VW boss Oliver Blume and the shareholder families Porsche and Piëch do—a concept that yields at least a 6.5 percent return.

Stephan Weil (Social Democrat, SPD), State Premier of Lower Saxony, which holds a 20 percent stake in the VW Group and where the company headquarters and main plant are situated, also stated that it was crucial “to maintain the industrial substance of the automotive industry in Lower Saxony,” and that all sides would have to contribute to this.

Coinciding with the second round of contract bargaining, Volkswagen reported a 64 percent drop in profits for the third quarter compared to the same period last year. But if one takes a closer look at the figures, the shareholders and managers are continuing to make massive profits.

In 2023, the group as a whole, which also includes brands such as Škoda, Seat, Audi and Porsche, posted record sales of €332 billion and a profit of €22.6 billion. It paid out €4.5 billion in dividends, more than is now to be saved on the VW brand in one year.

The VW Group was thus in line with the trend. The 40 most valuable German companies listed on the DAX stock index distributed a total of €54 billion in dividends in 2023–also a historic record. The front-runner was the Mercedes-Benz car company, which gave its shareholders €5.5 billion.

The Volkswagen brand, which has the lowest return on investment in the VW Group, is still in the black despite the slump in profits. It generated a surplus of €1.6 billion in the third quarter of 2024.

The austerity programme, for which the workers at VW are to pay with their jobs and incomes, is a consequence of the bitter global struggle for market share and profits, which is being fought on the backs of the international working class and is increasingly taking the form of trade wars and outright war.

Volkswagen is rapidly losing market share, especially in China, where it sold one in three cars until recently. Last spring, Volkswagen lost its position as market leader there to the Chinese electric carmaker BYD. BYD now sells more cars in China than all VW brands–Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Skoda, Jetta and Sehol–combined.

Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales survives assassination attempt

Andrea Lobo

Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales accused the government of President Luis Arce of sending “elite agents of the Bolivian state” to kill him after attackers shot multiple times at his caravan of vehicles on Sunday morning. The incident marks a sharp intensification of the conflict between factions of the ruling class in the resource-rich, South American country.

Screenshot of a video showing reflection of former President Evo Morales in bullet-shattered truck window [Photo: Evo Morales]

Morales published a video on social media showing him switching from a vehicle whose tires had been blown up to another vehicle, which also came under fire during a high-speed chase. The windshields and body of the trucks were riddled with bullets and the driver was hit in the arm and another bullet grazed his scalp. Morales was not injured.  

In a statement, the dominant wing of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party, which is controlled by Morales, charged that men dressed in black carried out the attack from two unmarked vehicles. They were then seen entering a military barracks at the site of the shooting and leaving in a helicopter. The statement concludes by blaming the Arce administration and calling it “fascist.”

The attack against Morales took place after several failed attempts by the police to clear major roadblocks, mostly in the central Andean highlands city of Cochabamba, which the ex-president’s supporters have maintained for over two weeks against attempts to arrest him.

President Arce had named a new military high command the night before the attack, ordering it to “ensure the restoration of public order” against the pro-Morales protests. Significantly, the military leadership had already been reshuffled in late June, leading to the ousted commander of the Army, Gen. Juan José Zúñiga, launching a failed coup attempt aligned with the fascistic right to overthrow Arce. 

Now, government officials are openly considering demands for a state of exception and a military deployment made by the far right, which has close ties to the US Embassy, including the fascist Santa Cruz Civic Committee, the Santa Cruz government, and the jailed leader of the US-backed coup that deposed Morales in 2019, Jeanine Áñez. Unable to suppress mass opposition, Áñez was compelled to call for elections in 2020, which were won by Luis Arce, at the time a close ally of Morales. 

On Tuesday, police attacked a roadblock in Mairana, Santa Cruz, but the pro-Morales crowd led by indigenous groups ambushed the police with rocks and dynamite. The government claims that about two dozen police officials and two journalists were kidnapped and tortured for several hours and that it would announce new repressive measures in response.

The Arce administration has sought to pin the blame for the failed assassination attempt on Morales himself, so far unconvincingly. 

Government Minister Eduardo del Castillo said during a press conference that the former president’s caravan had previously sped through a checkpoint of drug enforcement police, shooting at the officials and running over one of them. Del Castillo then played a recording where Morales apparently acknowledged to an interviewer that he personally fired shots at a tire. However, Morales was clearly speaking in broken Spanish about the shots at his own vehicle, while the video does not show anyone in his caravan shooting back as they were being attacked. 

The government has nonetheless filed charges against Morales for attempting to kill a police official, with Del Castillo warning: “No one and nothing will save him from this criminal process, no one who attacks a police officer can remain unpunished.”

The pro-Morales leadership has responded by expanding the roadblocks, and Morales warned on Wednesday to news agency EFE that if he were captured there would be an uprising among indigenous movements and mutinies within the police and the military.

For months, his supporters have demanded the resignation of Arce, whom they blame for growing economic ills, and letting Morales run for re-election, which is banned by the Constitution. 

The most recent wave of roadblocks was spurred by an arrest warrant issued against Morales after the Arce administration resurrected allegations first made by the Áñez regime in 2019 that Morales had impregnated a 15-year-old girl in 2016, when he was still in power. 

Morales, who has barricaded himself in his hometown of Villa Tunari, Cochabamba to avoid arrest, has indicated that a prosecutor in Tupiza, where the alleged victim lives, had dropped the case based on a lack of evidence, and that no one can be prosecuted twice on the same charges. 

Arce’s allies in the judiciary then opened three other criminal cases against Morales, including one of “foreign intervention” for using a truck allegedly donated by the Venezuelan state oil company. 

The pro-Morales wing in Congress launched its own sexual scandal against Arce, preparing a press conference where a woman named Yéssica Villarroel denounced the current president for having a secret relationship with her and forcing her to have an abortion.

As the political conflict in Bolivia moves from mudslinging to an assassination attempt and potentially civil war, Morales and Arce have relied on their control of sections of the capitalist state, the MAS party, peasant organizations and the union bureaucracy.

All factions, however, are doing everything possible to preempt a mass intervention of the working class in the political and economic crisis. A major hike in the cost of living this year, shortages of fuel and dollars and economic stagnation have led to limited strikes among teachers, truckers, and other workers, as well as pot-banging protests in cities. 

Following its economic “miracle” in 2003-2014, when the economy boomed in tandem with the rising gas export prices, Bolivia has proven to be a weak link in the breakdown of bourgeois rule internationally as a result of the US-led imperialist drive to recolonize and redivide the world, which includes securing control over lithium and other key natural resources in Bolivia and Latin America against China and Russia.

Facing economic stagnation as a result of the drying up of natural gas, lower gas and lithium prices, the growth of public debt and the depletion of foreign reserves, each faction of the Bolivian ruling class is vying for support from one or another imperialist or capitalist power. This process, which is taking place across Latin America, threatens to drag the country and the region into world war. At the same time, however, the entire ruling class is determined to secure capitalist rule and exploitation against the working class. 

Carlos Romero, a leader of the pro-Morales camp and former minister, had insisted earlier this year that “Morales is doing everything possible to contain a social mobilization.” On Tuesday, he warned Arce: “Military intervention would lead to an escalation of deaths and the escalation of deaths will provoke an uprising of greater dimensions and a greater state crisis, so what is the best way forward? For the government to convene a major national dialogue.”

European Union imposes tariffs on Chinese EVs

Nick Beams

At every meeting of international economic and financial organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund, there are warnings that tariffs and other protectionist measures are fracturing the global economy, leading to slower economic growth or worse, including the formation of antagonistic trade blocs that characterised the 1930s.

Models pose near the BYD Seal 06 Dmi unveiled during Auto China 2024 held in Beijing, Thursday, April 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

But despite these warnings, which are repeated in comments by financial and economic analysts, tariff barriers continue to be erected. The US has been in the lead with higher tariff barriers and controls on high-tech exports, initiated under the Trump presidency and markedly intensified by Biden.

It is now being joined by the European Union, which this week imposed an additional tariff of 35 percent on Chinese electric vehicles on top of a 10 percent tariff already in force.

The new measures, which will come into force next week, are to last five years. They were introduced on the basis that Chinese EV makers were benefiting unfairly from state subsidies.

The Chinese government rejected the claim of undue state support, saying it would “continue to take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all Chinese companies.”

While subsidies and assistance are provided, as in other countries, the real reason for the growing Chinese penetration of the EU market is that Chinese technology is more advanced, and its cost structure is significantly lower.

This is one of the reasons why the imposition of the tariffs met major opposition from the German government and German auto makers who are looking to collaborate with Chinese producers as their road to survival in the intensifying global struggle in the industry. They also fear that tariff measures will bring retaliatory actions that will hit their markets in China.

The decision to impose the tariffs came after eight rounds of talks aimed at trying to devise a mechanism through which a minimum price could be set along with the volume of Chinese exports. But the talks broke down with both sides saying the differences remained significant.

Further talks are to be held, with the EU accepting an invitation by China to send envoys to Beijing to see if some agreement can be reached on these mechanisms.

The tariffs came as the result of an investigation launched by European Commission (EU) President Ursula von der Leyen which was initiated in October last year. Their imposition received considerable opposition within the EU. Of the 27 members five, with Germany and Hungary in the lead, voted against and 12 abstained. In the lead up to the decision the Spanish government called for a “reconsideration” of the plan.

But the commission decided to go ahead, which tends to indicate that geo-political considerations, not least alignment with the US economic war against China, rather than the issue of subsidies, played a considerable part.

Announcing the decision, EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis stuck to the line that it was all about subsides and unfair market practices by China.

He said that by “adopting these proportionate and targeted measures after a rigorous investigation, we’re standing up for fair market practices and for the European industrial base.”

“We welcome competition, including in the electric vehicle sector, but it must be underpinned by fairness and a level playing field,” Dombrovskis stated.

However, the reference to the need to protect the “European industrial base” at least indicates one of the underlying reasons for the decision was that all the major powers seek to develop their capacities to shift to a war economy.

The divisions within the EU, which must rank as some of the most significant on trade issues in the history of the Union, were underscored by comments from Germany. Hildegarde Müller, the head of the German auto industry association, VDA, said the decision was “a setback for free global trade and so for prosperity and Europe’s growth.”

“The industry is not naïve in dealing with China, but the challenges must be resolved in dialogue,” a statement said.

A statement issued by the German Finance Ministry said that Berlin “stands for open markets. Because Germany in particular, as a globally interconnected economy, is dependent on this.”

The chief executive of BMW Oliver Zipse said protectionism would only make cars more expensive for consumers and accelerate plant closures in Europe.

The interconnectedness of the global car industry was indicated by Roberto Vavassori, who told the Financial Times (FT) that “for many suppliers in the automotive industry, [the Chinese] are both the biggest threat and the biggest customer.”

The attitude of some of the major car manufactures appears to be that under conditions where China is developing more technologically advanced components, their best hope for survival in the intensifying global struggle for markets and profits is not by erecting tariff walls, which raise costs and invite retaliation, but in developing some form of collaboration with Chinse producers.

The lower cost structure is significant. The FT has reported that major Chinese producers are turning out EVs that are more technologically advanced than their European counterparts and 30 percent cheaper.

Speed of innovation, not just cost, is another factor. According to one estimate cited by the FT, Chinese companies are developing new cars, incorporating better technology and design, in just one year compared to four years in Europe.

The motivations behind the opposition to the tariffs by some of Europe’s major producers were indicated in comments to the FT by Andy Palmer, the former head of the British firm Aston Martin.

He asked: “What did the Chinese do, what did the Japanese do and what did the Koreans do when they were behind on technology? They collaborated. The European industry needs to get the Chinese to localise in Europe and it needs to collaborate with them, particularly around battery technology in order to catch up.”

Survivors of abuse demand accountability over decades-long cover-up by the New Zealand state

Tom Peters

New Zealand’s National Party-led coalition government is desperately seeking to minimise the fallout from the explosive findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

People arrive at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024, for the tabling of a wide-ranging independent inquiry into the abuse of children and vulnerable adults in care over the span of five decades wrote in a blistering final report. [AP Photo/Charlotte Graham-McLay]

The long-running inquiry released its final 3,000-page report in August, documenting in horrifying detail the physical, psychological and sexual abuse suffered by generations of children, young people and psychiatric patients. The 3,000-page report concluded that as many as 256,000 people between 1950 to 2019 were abused and neglected—about one third of the total numbers placed in state or religious institutions.

The commissioners found that state and religious leaders “knew, or should have known, about the abuse and neglect that was happening. They failed not only in their duty to keep people in their care safe from harm, but they also failed to hold abusers to account.”

They also wrote: “Political and public service leaders spent time, energy and taxpayer resources to hide, cover up and then legally fight survivors to protect the potential perceived costs to the Crown, and their own reputations.”

On November 12, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and opposition Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins are scheduled to jointly deliver a national apology to survivors. The government says it will also reveal details of its response to the Royal Commission’s report, which included recommendations for redress, independent oversight of care institutions and the reopening of police investigations into specific allegations.

The aim of the apology is to divert public attention from the role played by numerous current and former government ministers, senior public servants, church leaders and senior police officers in the decades-long cover-up.

On October 23, Attorney-General Judith Collins rejected calls by survivors for the resignation of Solicitor-General Una Jagose, the government’s top legal advisor. Collins told Newsroom that she had confidence in Jagose even though the latter “accepted that the way in which Crown Law—over the years—conducted its litigation has not necessarily been focused on victims.”

Jagose joined the Crown Law office in 2002. In 2015 she briefly served as head of the Government Communications Security Bureau, the country’s spy agency, before being appointed to her current role in 2016.

Leoni McInroe, who was abused as a teenager at the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital during the 1970s, told Newsroom: “[Jagose] has made it very clear in all of their legal technicalities and assault on children that were abused—either in Lake Alice or in other situations—legally, she has fought vigorously and aggressively to have us go away.”

Jagose is mentioned numerous times in the Royal Commission’s report as she played a major role in defending the Crown against allegations from victims.

McInroe and other Lake Alice patients were given electro convulsive therapy (ECT) as a form of punishment, which the Royal Commission said amounted to torture. In the 1990s she filed a civil claim over what she had endured, which Crown Law spent years fighting in the courts.

Newsroom points out that “The Crown held overwhelming documentary evidence these allegations of torture [against Lake Alice’s Dr Selwyn Leeks] were true but withheld this evidence on numerous occasions.” In 1999, then Health Minister Bill English publicly admitted that there had been cases of torture at Lake Alice. Yet Leeks and other staff who abused more than 200 children and young people—including with electric shocks to the genitals and acts of rape—were never held accountable.

In a detailed analysis of the cover-up, Newsroom reporter Aaron Smale explains that “it was the Crown that held the largest body of documentary evidence [about the crimes committed at Lake Alice]. But if Leeks were held fully responsible, the Crown would be legally and financially liable.” Extensive evidence pointing to Leeks’ guilt was kept secret and withheld from police.

In May 2000, Labour Party Prime Minister Helen Clark and Health Minister Annette King presented a Cabinet committee with options for dealing with the Lake Alice allegations. Their preference was for out-of-court settlements that limited liability and did not set a precedent.

Clark and King also recommended that Cabinet “seek Crown Law advice on the likelihood of success of technical defences” against the alleged victims. The prime minister and health minister expressed the hope that by putting “the onus on plaintiffs,” who had extremely limited resources, to prove their claims, “a denial of liability by the Crown may succeed.”

Smale concludes that “The victims of the state were effectively treated as legal enemies of the state. The victims of the state’s crimes were treated like criminals, while the real criminals walked.”

In another case examined by the Royal Commission, a man referred to by the pseudonym Earl White took legal action in 2007 against the Crown for trauma resulting from being sexually abused at Hokio Beach School. The Crown’s lawyers knew that the perpetrator Michael Ansell, the school cook, had been convicted for sexually abusing other children at the school in the 1970s, but this information was not provided to White’s lawyer. One of the government lawyers involved in the case was Jagose.

Smale reports that in the lead-up to the White trial, the Ministry of Social Development and Crown Law hired private investigators to “dig dirt” on White—a fact that was only admitted in 2018. The Crown accused White of an “abuse of process” and sought to discredit his claim that the abuse had caused him significant harm.

High Court Justice Forrest Miller sided with the Crown: despite finding that White had been abused at least 13 times, he declared that it had been “embarrassing, not traumatic,” and had not contributed to his severe mental health and addiction issues. Thus, the Crown avoided liability. Miller asserted, without any evidence, that White’s “difficulties” were caused by early childhood experiences and genetics. Jagose defended Miller’s extraordinary decision when White went to the Court of Appeal, which again ruled in favour of the Crown.

The Royal Commission’s report states that Hokio Beach School had a “culture of severe violence” including “severe corporal punishment, sometimes inflicted with weapons and to the genitals.” In addition, peer-on-peer violence was encouraged, “sexual abuse was pervasive,” “racism and cultural abuse was normalised” and “solitary confinement was misused.”

Jagose was also involved in representing the Crown against Keith Wiffin, who took legal action against the Ministry of Social Development in the 2000s over sexual abuse at Epuni Boys Home in the 1970s. Crown Law withheld information from Wiffin’s lawyer Sonja Cooper, including the fact that the perpetrator Alan Wright-Moncrief had been convicted for sexually abusing other children.

In her evidence to the Royal Commission, Jagose admitted that the information should have been disclosed. Asked why it was not, she replied: “I don’t know, I can’t answer. It should have been.”

In September 2008, Crown Law wrote to Wiffin’s lawyer to dissuade him from proceeding with his criminal complaint. Wiffin told the Royal Commission he was led to believe that Crown Law was engaged in its own investigation of Wright-Moncrief, which it was not.

Newsroom’s Smale observes that “The political and official cover-up highlighted by the Royal Commission has had no direct consequences at all.” Several politicians, state officials, judges, lawyers and others implicated by the inquiry remain in positions of power and influence.

While the government and opposition parties prepare to deliver their national apology, the brutalisation of young people continues. Another 519 children were abused in state custody last year. The victims are overwhelmingly from poor, working class backgrounds, including large numbers of Māori.

The far-right coalition government recently reintroduced military-run “boot camps” for teenage offenders—despite the Royal Commission documenting cases of bullying, extreme violence and rape at similar programs.

The Royal Commission revealed the brutal reality of capitalism in New Zealand. As the global economic crisis intensifies, the business elite views hundreds of thousands of young people as surplus to requirements. They are condemned to a life of poverty, unemployment, incarceration or being pushed into the military to fight imperialist wars abroad.

Erdogan government arrests Kurdish CHP mayor in Istanbul

Barış Demir

On Wednesday, the mayor of Istanbul’s Esenyurt Municipality, Prof. Dr. Ahmet Özer of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), was detained and subsequently arrested on charges of “being a member of the armed terrorist organisation PKK/KCK”.

The Ministry of Interior announced that the deputy governor of Istanbul, Can Aksoy, had been appointed trustee of the municipality.

Ahmet Özer giving a speech in Van [Photo by Mezopotamya Ajansı / CC BY 3.0]

This arrest and the appointment of a trustee to replace an elected mayor is a clear attack on basic democratic rights. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long sought to stifle political opposition through such anti-democratic operations, building a police state.

This reactionary practice, which the government has systematically resorted to after 2015 by dismissing elected mayors, especially from the Kurdish nationalist movement, also means the de facto abolition of the constitutional right to vote and be elected.

According to the statement of the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, Ahmet Özer’s communications were intercepted because his name was mentioned in “organisational documents... seized from members of a terrorist organisation”. It was claimed that during the 10-year period “Özer had been in contact with PKK members many times and had contacted Kongra-gel co-chairman Remzi Kartal 14 times”.

Şevket Tuci, one of the people Özer is accused of meeting, has been his lawyer for 17 years and was present during his testimony to the police and prosecutors in this case. Faik Kaplan, who made the money transfer mentioned in the accusation against Özer, said that his daughter was a tenant in Özer’s house, that he paid the rent and had a rental agreement.

It was also reported that Özer was from the same tribe as Remzi Kartal, with whom he last met in 2015, and that at that time various official meetings were held with Kartal in Europe as part of the “peace process”. All this points to the fabricated nature of the charges and the political nature of the case.

Özer was elected mayor of Esenyurt on March 31 with 49 percent of the vote. Esenyurt, an industrial city with a large Kurdish electorate, is the largest district in Turkey with a population of around 1 million. Özer, a Kurdish sociologist and academic, was nominated as a candidate in the local elections as part of the cooperation between the CHP and the Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM Party). In line with this strategy, the DEM Party did not nominate any candidates in some cities and districts, especially in Istanbul, and called on people to vote for the CHP.

In his first statement, which was leaked to the press before his arrest, Özer said the following: “I am an author who has written around 40 books, some of them on regional development, some of them novels, some of them on the Kurdish question. I have published around 200 national articles and around 300 papers”.

Emphasising that this was a political case, Özer continued as follows: “I am a scientist who [became] a professor at a young age, I am an academic, I have been a member of the CHP for more than 10 years, I was a candidate in the last elections, I worked as an advisor to İmamoğlu [the mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality], I worked at the State Planning Organisation... until today there is nothing, they are trying to remove me from my post by bringing up some events from 10-15 years ago.”

CHP leader Özgür Özel in his first statement said that “The treatment of a scientist, opinion leader and politician who has held senior positions in the public sector and academia for years, who received clean papers from the relevant authorities as a candidate only six months ago, and who came to office with the great favour of the voters of Esenyurt in the elections he participated in, is unfair and the accusations are baseless.”

Özel also said, “These events are not independent of what has happened in recent weeks. We see the ugly game, the big conspiracy. We will neither be part of it nor surrender”.

The CHP leader called for a mass protest in Esenyurt on Thursday. Speaking at the rally, which was supported by the DEM party and attended by thousands of people. “Neither a condolence call to a relative nor a phone call from 10 years ago can be linked to terrorism. Erdoğan himself openly announced that Ahmet Özel would be arrested. So this was planned,” said Özel, adding that the prosecutors acted on Erdoğan’s orders.

The DEM Party condemned the operation in a statement on social media, saying, “The arrest of Esenyurt Mayor Ahmet Özer and the appointment of a trustee for Esenyurt Municipality is an open coup against the will of the people, a usurpation of the people’s will. This is a disregard for local democracy and the will of the people. We will not remain silent against this lawlessness and political coup.”calan

Before Özer’s arrest on fabricated charges and the appointment of a trustee in his place, Turkey had witnessed important developments. On Tuesday last week, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the fascist ally of the “People’s Alliance” led by Erdoğan, made an unprecedented statement. Bahçeli suggested that jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan should lift his isolation and address parliament, “shouting that terrorism is completely over and the organization [PKK] has been dismantled”.

Bahçeli’s statement, supported by Erdoğan, was welcomed by the DEM Party and the CHP as the beginning of a new “peace process” with the PKK. Öcalan was allowed to meet with his nephew Ömer Öcalan, DEM deputy for Şanlıurfa, as a sign of lifting the 44-month isolation imposed on him.

However, just one day after Bahçeli’s speech, while Erdoğan was in Russia for the BRICS summit, a bomb and gun attack took place at the Ankara facilities of the state-owned strategic defence company Turkish Aerospace Industries Corporation (TAI). Seven people were killed, including two of the attackers. The PKK claimed responsibility for the attack.

Ankara responded with days of airstrikes on what it claimed were PKK-YPG targets in Syria and Iraq. “In the last week, 198 terrorists were neutralised,” the Ministry of National Defence said on Thursday. The Mesopotamia Agency reported that 17 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 65 wounded in Syria as a result of air strikes. This was followed by a wave of arrests against the Kurdish political movement in the country. It was reported that 55 people were arrested in 17 provinces.

These developments come at a time when, in the Middle East, US-backed Israel has accelerated the genocide in Gaza, invaded Lebanon and is preparing a full-scale attack on Iran.

Turkey’s ruling elite is seeking to strengthen its hand at home, fearing that a widening of the war could undermine its interests in the region. Erdoğan’s statement, “While the maps are being redrawn in blood, while the war that Israel has waged from Gaza to Lebanon is approaching our borders, we are trying to strengthen our internal front,” was a clear expression of this.

Erdoğan approved Özer’s arrest and addressed CHP leader Özel, who opposed it, saying, “Why are you worried about this when our geography has turned into a ring of fire and members of the terrorist organisation are ravaging Esenyurt?”

On the one hand, the Erdoğan government advocates the release of Öcalan and reconciliation with the Kurdish movement inside Turkey in order to force the PKK to lay down its arms. At the same time, it defends the arrest of a mayor elected by the CHP-DEM party alliance on fabricated charges and continues its policy of military repression against the PKK-YPG. These are the efforts of the Turkish ruling elite to protect its interests through contradictory manoeuvres under the conditions of an escalating war in the Middle East.