On May 24, socialists and activists from across France and other countries including Germany, the Spanish State, Russia, the United States, Algeria, and more rallied at the Charenton Space in Paris to attend an internationalist rally against imperialist militarism, the international Far Right, and the genocide in Gaza. In addition to the 2,000 people who attended in person, there were another 2,000 individual connections virtually around the world.
Organized by Révolution Permanente — the sister organization of Left Voice and our international organization, the Trotskyist Fraction — the event was a collective shout of defiance against rearmament and austerity in an epoch of imperialist crisis. But it was also a call to organize internationally from below — for students, workers, and leftists to unite against the capitalist class in our own independent organizations and to join our struggles against genocide, the attacks of the bosses, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and all forms of exploitation and oppression.
The event featured speeches by comrades in the Trotskyist Fraction who are part of the worker and student movements all over the world, who struggle side-by-side with a strategy and program to use the power of the working class from below to fight to tear capitalist up from its roots and build a socialist society organized according to social need, not profit. Speakers came from France, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Germany, and the Spanish State. The TF-FI is formed of groups in fourteen countries across the world; it organizes the international network of socialist publications that publishes in seven different languages.
Below we republish the intervention of our comrade Inés Heider. Inés is a social worker, trade union activist, socialist, and revolutionary feminist. She is a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Internationalist Organization (RIO) and a contributor to Left Voice’s German sister site, Klasse Gegen Klasse. Heider’s political activism began during the 2018 student-worker strike in Berlin, the largest since 1986, where she advocated for the self-organization of workers and challenged union bureaucracy. In 2023, Heider was dismissed from her position as a school social worker in Berlin’s Neukölln district owing to her political activism against austerity measures. A solidarity committee, comprising colleagues, union members, and activists, campaigned for her reinstatement. In May 2025 the Berlin labor court ruled in her favor, ordering her reinstatement with back pay. Heider ran as a revolutionary socialist candidate in the February 2025 German federal elections, representing a coalition of RIO and the Revolutionary Socialist Organization (RSO) in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. Her campaign opposed militarism, austerity, and the rise of the Far Right, advocating for workers’ rights, anti-racism, and solidarity with Palestine.
Read More Here: “Over 2,000 Socialists From France and Other Countries Rallied in Paris Against Militarism, War, and Genocide”
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Comrades, I come to you from a country that has long been regarded as the symbol of the stability of European capitalism. As you know, Germany weathered the capitalist crisis of 2008 relatively well. But now the tide has turned.
The global crisis is now simply so deep, that even Germany could not escape it. We have been in a recession for two years. Tens of thousands of jobs are to be cut in the automotive industry and our bosses are considering closing production plants or producing weapons instead of cars. The elections in 2021 were still mainly about the climate. But then the former Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a military turnaround for the Ukraine war and pushed through an additional €800 billion for the Bundeswehr overnight. Suddenly, it didn’t matter at all that armies are the number one climate killers. But his government fell apart last autumn because militarization did not progress fast enough.
The new government consists of the Christian conservative CDU and, again, the Social Democrats. It has taken up the cause of boosting armament even more. And our new Federal Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the cost of this does not matter. He wants to build the “strongest army” in Europe and his foreign minister wants to increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP. That is more than a doubling. The budget would become €225 billion every year.
How will all this be financed? Of course through mass attacks on us workers and on our lives, where cuts are being made to social spending, educational services and hospital materials. As if that wasn’t enough, the eight-hour day is to be abolished. All of this is to be enforced with attacks on the right to strike and the increasing armament of the police.
Just like Trump, Merz has brought big capitalists into his cabinet for this project and it simply fits like a glove. Merz himself sat on the supervisory board of around a dozen companies and banks, including HSBC, where he earned €5,000 per day, almost €2 million in one year. I am a school social worker. When I retire at 67 — because that is the retirement age in Germany — I would never earn €2 million euros in my entire life.
Merz speaks of parallel societies when he agitates against immigrants. But folks, I’m wondering: Where is a parallel society emerging? Here in the working-class district where I live and work, or in your CEO cabinet? In fact, the Merz government is so keen on rearmament that it amended the constitution even before taking office. The result? In Germany, an unlimited amount of money can now be invested in the military.
At the same time, the state has negotiated poor wage settlements for the public sector, for the union leaders — there is no money. And the leaders of our trade unions have played along with this game.
But let’s not forget that I come here today from a country where less than 20 percent of people would want to take up arms themselves in the event of war. Of course, the government is doing everything it can to convince people. The Bundeswehr plainly advertises on pizza boxes and even has its own YouTube series. And there is also a massive advertising campaign by the Bundeswehr at schools and universities. At a school in my district, for example, 13-year-olds can play fighter jets during recess in a flight simulator sponsored by a lobby organization of the German Air Force.
But this total militarization is not only a German phenomenon. Across Europe, hundreds of billions of euros are being spent on weapons, ammunition, tanks, missiles and bombs. They all want us to pay for their confrontations and crises — for example in France and Germany with harsh attacks on our living and working conditions. Attacks on our democratic rights in Ukraine, Palestine, and many other places — with our lives.
The bosses and their governments want us to suffer the same fate here. That is why we have to say quite clearly that the government’s military plans mean one thing above all: they want us to fight their wars for profits and influence for them. They want their wars, with our deaths. That is why we as the TF clearly say, “no money, no people, and no weapons for war.” This is an important point because Germany is the second largest supplier of weapons for the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel is the German “raison d’etre,” which means that every German government considers it its duty to criminalize any solidarity with the Palestinian people.
You know a lot about the repression against all those who oppose the genocide in Gaza. Anasse is accused of glorifying terrorism, because he has spoken out against the real terror of the Israeli war machine. In Germany, too, our comrades have stood, and are standing, trial because they have campaigned for Palestine. But we won these court cases because we did not accept them in silence, but because we organized broad solidarity, because we led the campaigns publicly and politically. I’m also referring to my own court case. I was fired because day after day, I campaigned against the social cuts that were taking place because of rearmament. But now I have my job back.
Court cases are not the only repression we are experiencing. At Palestine solidarity demonstrations in Berlin, all languages except German and English were banned for a while, including Arabic, Irish, or even Hebrew. But they don’t just want to take our words, they also want to take our lives.
I say this because I am also speaking here today in memory of Lorenz, a young Black man murdered by the police. Lorenz was just 21 years old when he was killed by German police a month ago, with at least three bullets from behind, one in the upper body, one in the hip, and one in the head. For Lorenz and for all those murdered by the police: we don’t forgive, we don’t forget.
The police violence we are speaking of is only the tip of the internal militarization. The new federal government in Germany also wants to militarize the borders. They’re already doing it. At this very moment, refugees are being turned away directly at Germany’s external border. They want to deport even more, even to Afghanistan and Syria.
It is precisely this racism, which the government is actively fomenting, that is not only on the rise, but is also strengthening the extreme Right. This is why the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the strongest party in the polls. They are the party that put deportation tickets in letterboxes with non-German names during the election campaign, and fake flight tickets with racist content on them. This action is similar to an action from 1933 in which Nazis distributed free tickets to Jerusalem to Jewish people.
But it’s not just the AfD that wants more deportations, it’s also the CDU. They are the Social Democrats, the Liberals, and the Greens. The democratic parties are reacting to the shift to the right by gradually adopting the demands from the party programs of the extreme Right. Is anyone really surprised that this strategy is not working? If all parties are in complete agreement that we need mass deportations, then people will vote for the party that has been calling for them the longest and most consistently. In this case, the AfD.
As a result, there is now a lot of discussion about whether the AfD should be banned. And many people who are genuinely worried about the shift to the right would like that. Of course, racist, sexist, and anti-queer hate speech should be combated. But can we trust the state to suppress fascist activities? Of course not. The police and the secret services are full of Nazis. And even if the AfD were to receive less party funding from the state, big capitalists like Elon Musk are fully in line with them. Musk donated €1.5 million to the AfD during the elections. Don’t you think he would do it again? Why shouldn’t he do so? By calling for taxes to be cut for large companies and the rich, the AfD is doing politics for Musk and his company.
We, therefore, can not only just have the AfD banned by the state. We must smash the AfD. Many young people in Germany, as in other countries, want to counter the shift to the right. Some of them think that this means joining the Left Party (Die Linke). This is why there have been tens of thousands of new members joining the party since the beginning of the year. Many hope that the party will strengthen the fight against the extreme Right.
We will stand side by side with them on the streets to fight back against the AfD. But we also say quite clearly that Die Linke would rather have a stable government under the neoliberal racist Friedrich Merz to prevent further strengthening of the AfD. To such an extent, Die Linke capitulated and approved Merz’s rearmament plans in the Federal Council.
But the front of all democrats is a dangerous illusion, because we have nothing in common with Merz and his cabinet of big capitalists. They want to curtail the rights of women and queer people. And so, in my opinion, we can only fight the extreme Right if we fight this government and the greater power ambitions of German imperialism. The Left party is subordinating itself to the defense of German stability, and in concrete terms this also means subordinating itself to German imperialism. For example, they have supported the repression against Palestine solidarity activists by voting to ban Samidoun, like the French government that banned Palestine Vaincra.
They have been part of state governments without interruption since they were founded. They closed hospitals, they carried out forced evictions. And because they are part of this order, we cannot fight the extreme Right with a Left wing party. The lesser of two evils has led us to accept them governing with the SPD and to some extent with the Greens. That the CDU have elevated ministers to office who are hardly any different from the AfD. They just want to form a front that is all Democrats. Which is why Die Linke is not useful for fighting the AfD.
None of the parties in the Bundestag represent us. That’s why my comrade Leonie Lieb from Munich, who is a midwife, and I in Berlin, ran in the elections this year for the first time in RIO’s history. With a completely different program. Volkswagen, we said, arms companies, climate-damaging and real estate companies must be expropriated without compensation under the control of employees. Open the borders with the right to stay for all.
For us, it wasn’t just about collecting votes and then sitting in the warmth of parliament, but about talking to people about what they think and discussing with them how we can fight for it. It’s just not enough to make a speech on election day. We all have to talk to our classmates, fellow students, and coworkers every day about how important it is that we organize ourselves now. We want to create a kind of beacon with this candidacy. We wanted to send out a message from our districts that things can be done very differently. It was a mega important sign for revolutionaries in Germany.
But, as it has already been said, we are not the first, not even in Germany, to wage a battle against imperialism and war. Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht fought this battle generations before us. They fought tirelessly against World War One, while the SPD leadership backed the Kaiser. Karl Liebknecht was the only one to vote against the war credits in December 1914. To swim against the tide. But just a few years later, soldiers began to organize en masse. They refused orders and formed councils, while the workers in the factories began to strike against the continuation of the imperialist war.
We want to resume the legacy of these revolutionary workers who were betrayed by social democracy. A legacy that stands against militarism and for the fact that if we fight as a class, we have a world to win, in Germany, but also internationally.