This elections year, it is hard to imagine that European citizens will be satisfied with shallow political promises: they are furiously standing up against business as usual.
All over Europe, youth climate strikers are hitting the streets of cities and pushing to exit our brown, fossil fuel-based economy, which is supported by financial investors because it is (still) more profitable. In France, ordinary working people put on their yellow jackets and staged roadblocks for the whole of winter to protest against the government’s pro-finance, pro-business economic programme. In Greece, pensioners have held countless demonstrations against austerity policies, which led to cuts in their pensions, medicines, health insurance and to social exclusion in order to repay large amounts of borrowed money that mainly bailed-out German and French banks.
In actual fact, all these protests are linked because our environmental and social crises are consequences of the politics of financialisation that have transformed our entire economies and lives over the last thirty years.
Finance Watch has aclear visionhow we can reform our financial system, but how ambitious are EU policymakers to make finance serve society?
We have checked the financial reform proposals of all EU Political Groups ahead of the European elections against a set of policy demands we think are key. Find out how the parties scored in our Finance Watch Guide to the #EUelections2019
We have analysed and rated the commitments separately in four areas of policy changes needed to make finance serve society:
Stabilize the financial system,
Democratise the financial institutions as well as financial policy making,
Re-direct capital to a sustainable economy and
Prepare for a future financial crisis.
What you can do
It’s not enough to just hope for a better future: we all need to take responsibility for it. You can vote yourself, and you can persuade others to vote too. #ThisTimeImVoting
If we want to change finance, we also need to set rules to limit the influence of the financial lobby over our policymakers. This is the aim of the current campaign of the Change Finance Coalition. Have a look and write directly to our future Members of the European Parliament to stand up to the lobby and put the interests of people above the interests of finance!
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All over Europe, youth climate strikers are hitting the streets of cities and pushing to exit our brown, fossil fuel-based economy, which is supported by financial investors because it is (still) more profitable. In France, ordinary working people put on their yellow jackets and staged roadblocks for the whole of winter to protest against the government’s pro-finance, pro-business economic programme. In Greece, pensioners have held countless demonstrations against austerity policies, which led to cuts in their pensions, medicines, health insurance and to social exclusion in order to repay large amounts of borrowed money that mainly bailed-out German and French banks.