THE economies of every EU country face permanent recession according to Barclay’s Bank chief economist for the EU, Sylvia Ardagna, under the impact of the raging cost of energy following the sanctions on Russian gas and oil imports.
Ardagna said that the attempts by the EU to achieve ‘independence from Russian gas’ will stifle any growth in the economy, increase inflation and drag down the euro, and that ‘costlier sources of energy will likely have an impact on eurozone competitiveness.’
Her warnings were echoed by the financial news site Bloomberg, which reported this week that a poll of economists found that eurozone recession is ‘close to inevitable’ due to soaring energy prices along with a severe power-supply crunch.
Germany, for decades the economic powerhouse of the EU and its largest economy, is the most exposed to reductions in cheap gas from Russia, along with Italy.
In Germany, the chairman of the government committee on energy, Klaus Ernst, warned last week that the country faces a wave of bankruptcies as a result of its sanctions policy on Russia.
In a post on Twitter, Ernst quoted the statement by German chancellor Olaf Scholz that insisted sanctions should not hit Europe harder than the Russian leadership.
Ernst wrote: ‘We now have imposed seven packages of sanctions, and Gazprom (the Russian gas company) is making record profits. At the same time, we are threatened with a wave of bankruptcies.’
Italy is at risk of losing up to 582,000 jobs according to a study by the Confindustria Association of Industrialists reported by the Italian press last Sunday, with the country facing mass closures of businesses and industries if gas supplies from Russia are shut down completely from October.
Meanwhile, household food bills across the EU have been driven up dramatically in recent months with the price of bread in the bloc on average 18% higher than last year, according to official data.
In France, private households have been told they will face power cuts this winter in the event of severe frosts despite the fact that France relies on nuclear energy more than any other European country, generating 70% of its electricity through nuclear power.
The working class of Europe and the UK are expected to pay for the inflationary crisis accelerated by the imperialist war drive and sanctions against Russia.
Deliberately, the US and its tame imperialist allies in Britain and Europe place the blame for the crisis, which is plunging the working class into mass unemployment and poverty, at the door of Russia.
The US, UK and NATO are responsible for starting the war. It was they who organised and financed the fascist-led coup in Ukraine in 2014 to drive NATO forces to the Russian border in order to provoke a deliberate war to weaken Russia and leave it open to capitalist domination.
Sanctions against Russia, designed to crush the Russian economy at no cost to the capitalist world, have now backfired spectacularly and helped propel Europe and Britain into a massive recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Liz Truss made clear, when she landed in the US yesterday, that the Tories are committed to hand £2.3 billion to Ukraine, with the promise of even more to keep the war going at a time when the working class in Britain is being hammered by inflation and the prospect of mass unemployment as energy costs shoot through the roof.
All capitalism can offer is a future of poverty, starvation and war for the working class of Europe, the UK and the world.
The enemy of the working class is not Putin or Russian workers – it is the ruling class at home.
The only way forward is to turn the imperialist war against Russia into a revolutionary war against the real enemy at home.
The burning issue today is to unite the working class across Europe and the UK by building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to mobilise general strikes to bring down their own capitalist governments and go forward to establishing the Socialist United States of Europe.
