The building of a broad anti-war and disarmament movement in Italy continues, as trade unions and left groups prepare for June 21 – the planned date of a national demonstration against Europe’s ongoing armament agenda. In the lead-up to the event, the political party Potere al Popolo organized meetings under the slogan “Let’s Disarm Them!” in both Naples and Rome during the weekend of May 24–25.
With international guests including Ione Belarra from Podemos, Clémence Guetté from France Unbowed, and Marc Botenga from the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA), the meetings aimed to highlight key priorities for a national and regional peace movement to rally around.
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Momentum ahead of June 21 was further boosted by the announcement of the progressive trade union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) of a general strike, scheduled for the day before. The strike will protest the harmful effects of Giorgia Meloni’s government’s policies on Italy’s working class and emphasize the need for workers to support international solidarity struggles. According to USB, the strike will also call attention to the “complicity of Meloni’s administration” in the genocide in Gaza.
Ending Europe’s support for the genocide in Gaza
Throughout the mobilization events, speakers insisted on European responsibility for the crimes committed by Israel in Palestine. Many speakers, including Clémence Guetté, addressed the EU member states’ and institutions’ unwillingness to impose sanctions on Israel or suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. This reluctance, Guetté noted, is not limited to the right but is also shared by centrist and nominally social-democratic parties.
Yet grassroots movements across the region have launched initiatives to push for meaningful action and hold leaders accountable. “The strikes and blockades by dock workers, from Belgium to Italy, passing through Catalonia, to stop the import and export of arms to Israel show how the working class can act to break the chains of complicity with the war regime being imposed on us,” Giuliano Granato of Potere al Popolo said in reflection on Saturday’s meetings.
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“‘Let’s disarm them’ also means standing side by side with the Palestinian people and their resistance, to win that self-determination which international law, reduced to wastepaper under the boots of Western rulers, claims to uphold,” the meeting’s closing statement added.
NATO vs. public services
Another key topic spotlighted over the weekend was the impact of Europe’s ReArm agenda on workers and public services. “Leonardo, Rheinmetall, Dassault, Indra smell blood and pounce on their prey: government budgets. That is, the money of workers across the continent,” the meeting statement read. Allocating €800 billion to ReArm Europe – alongside pressure to raise NATO contributions from 2% to 3% or more, as demanded by the Trump administration – threatens to wipe out public education, healthcare, and other essential services in Europe. Marc Botenga illustrated the scale of these numbers: Belgium’s entire annual GDP – the total value of goods and services produced in 12 months – does not reach €800 billion. Similarly, allocating 5% of the GDP to NATO, as some have recently suggested, would gut the country’s social security system.
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If Europe’s new warlords are not stopped, Botenga warned, ReArm Europe could dismantle the rights that workers fought for over decades, potentially degrading healthcare systems in many countries to levels seen in the US. “Every euro handed to the military-industrial complex is one euro less for our needs. One euro less to buy an ambulance, one euro less to secure our schools, one euro less to pay increasingly impoverished workers,” summarized the final statement of the meeting.
And while pursuing this agenda of systemic destruction, political leaders continue to speak of so-called European values and the supposed economic benefits of a new war economy. But these, Botenga insisted, are illusions: history should have taught Europe that an arms race doesn’t make countries safer – it only pushes their neighbors to arm themselves even further.
Fighting militarization, fighting capitalism
Speakers agreed that the only real alternative to the rearmament agenda lies in an international peace movement committed to uniting struggles for disarmament, solidarity, and social justice – in other words, socialism. “Being a peace activist today means being an anti-capitalist militant,” Guetté noted. Popular struggles for disarmament in Europe, she added, must recognize that the arms race is taking place in a context that primarily benefits large weapons manufacturers, and that it is being led by a coalition far broader than just the far right.
Read more: What are European leaders going to choose: people or war?
This convergence of interests between the military industry, the far right, and the political establishment poses a clear threat to the growing popular movements – not only those campaigning in solidarity with Palestine or against armament. In France and Spain, speakers noted, decisions to boost arms spending are often made while sidelining standard democratic procedures in parliament. In Belgium and Italy, governments are floating repressive laws targeting the right to protest and dissent. According to Botenga, this trend serves a specific purpose: preparing the ground for a crackdown on mobilizations that will inevitably grow once the consequences of the militarist agenda become fully visible.
In response, the meeting concluded, the left and broader popular forces must commit themselves to building a “continent of peace.” This vision echoes much of Potere al Popolo’s original call to action for June 21. “No to the police state and neo-fascism,” the party declared last month. “No to the destruction of democracy in the name of internal security and external threats. Fascist laws such as the new security decree must be opposed in every way, just as we must resist warmongering propaganda, witch hunts against dissent, and the criminalization of pacifism.”
