Brexit, now that’s democracy

Brexit is not just an electoral consultation that will decide on Britain’s potential departure from the Union. The issues are far more serious – and critical for some – than the relatively by-the-by stance of a country that has never really brought Europe together. Despite what has been stigmatised by the Remain campaign, Brexit is not a referendum for or against immigration and certainly not against foreigners. No, Brexit is basically a vote for or against Brussels’s neoliberal technocracy which has gradually transformed Europe into a citadel of mercantilism.

On the 23rd of June, British citizens will express themselves democratically in order to rein in those economic-financial elites who are making the most of cataclysmic youth unemployment, but who react with great offense and alarm as soon as their privileges are called into question. The debate – the real one – is thus not as much about whether the British Isles will disconnect itself from the continent than it is about whether the citizens of this country – and beyond that, Europeans – will finally decide to recover their rights in the face of corporate abuse, banking hegemony and secret agreements negotiated outside of all democratic frameworks. The result of the ballot on 23rd June goes much further than just Britain and even Europe because it is about – by voting to leave –unequivocally rejecting this globalisation that is becoming macabre since it only benefits the well-to-do. This transfer of wealth, institutionalised and perpetuated by Europe, as constituted since the treaty of Maastricht, should be abhorred.

We must re-establish the democratic balance that has been shamefully confiscated by barely scrupulous elites after successive votes of disapproval in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and in Ireland in 2008. We must dispossess the mega-banks of their unnatural powers. These are the real issues surrounding this referendum which is causing the world’s intelligentsia to shudder – we know it well – to the point of surrendering to the threat of this Brexit which would mark the genuine swansong of their domination. Why do you think that Jamie Dimon, head honcho at JPMorgan, made the effort to visit his London branch in order to threaten his employees with losing their jobs should Brexit occur, after the head of Citigroup had also proffered such ignoble blackmail?

Already these giants are shaking at the core which has suddenly become very fragile when confronted with the prospect of Brexit. Aren’t Deutsche Bank’s exploits at its lowest historical point and hasn’t Western banks’ capitalisation lost nearly 50% since this head-on threat to neoliberalism that is Brexit has become conceivable and palpable to a universe that is used to reigning without sharing and without ever being called into question? With Brexit, and thanks to it, the people will take back control over their political and economic fate.

Let’s hope that, through their vote, the people of Great Britain will put an end to the denial of democracy, the ideal that has been the trademark of Europe for the last twenty years.