Documents

Spring Alliance brings together civil society stakeholders from environmental, social and development organizations and trade unions to present a positive vision for a Europe that puts people and planet first.

Despite a prevailing sense of crisis, the Spring Alliance believes that there is still an opportunity to adopt a better way towards solving Europe’s problems.
This however requires a radical departure by the new European Commission and European Parliament from current policies which have not succeeded in solving the crisis and have led to citizens increasingly losing their trust in their political leaders and in the European project. As a result Europe has gone backwards in a number of crucial areas in the last five years and has failed to make sufficient progress
in others:

• EU Democracy: EU citizens are turning their backs on European institutions. The 2009 elections had a turnout of 43%, the lowest registered since 1979.
• Poverty: since 2009, more than 10 million Europeans have been pushed into poverty.
• Employment: 27 million people in Europe are unable to find work.
• Environment: greenhouse gas emissions in the EU have only been reduced marginally and not sufficiently to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, while the loss of biodiversity has continued.
• Global justice: for every euro that Europe spends on “development aid” we actively take 13 euro back from the receivers of “aid” through illicit financial flows, without even taking into account the impact of trade imbalances.
• Economies: EU economic growth is not fairly shared and this diverging growth path is jeopardising the EU project.

Together we have developed a comprehensive political manifesto that proposes six solutions to six key challenges.

Read more.