Iran as a Global Hope

Among many flawed and rigged electoral processes in the world, this Iranian presidential polls embodied a little seed of hope.

We congratulate Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent president, who overwhelmingly won the majority of votes cast by Iranians on Friday, 19 May 2017, and was re-elected.

We now wait for many more good news: Iran must stick closely to the nuclear deal (JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action); it is time to grant a universal amnesty to all political prisoners; freedom of information must be extended; regime controls on many social, economic, political realities must be weakened; women rights must be boosted; greater local self-government and stronger social, public services are expected by all Iranian cities and regions; and many more reforms are needed.


This blogger always believed in a slow, gradual, pragmatic, nonviolent, progressive transition in Iran. Such a development is coherent with our findings on social mobilization in the globalized world.

It is time to hope and celebrate, tonight.

Hayir - No

This blog dedicates this day, which is important in Italy as the Liberation Day, to commemorate the Turkish democratic resistance to the Turkish Hoax.
We will never recognize the late Turkish referendum on "executive Presidentialism".
We will never appease Erdogan and its regime.
We will ever support, instead, Turkish social and political opposition forces in their request of referendum repetition, in fairer conditions.
In particular after that all the political prisoners, representatives, journalists are eventually freed, and full press freedom has been established in Turkey.
This is a dramatic question, which requires moral clarity and resoluteness.
Let's hold it hard.

* * *

To deepen this dramatic topic, those who understand Italian can follow the great job of Mariano Giustino, correspondent of Radio Radicale from Istanbul.

EU is so rotten that even a Labourist can understand it

In the vigil of the French elections, which I believe will greatly shake the status quo, I suggest this reading to those who missed it:


The Sixth Way: Devolution by Dorette Corbey, published by Social Europe on 4 April 2017


Dorette Corbey is a politician from the Dutch Labour Party. Yes, exactly the party who went destroyed in the last Dutch political elections.


European Union is so rotten that even a Labourist can understand the necessity of profound Euroreform, and a new season of devolution.

Only the multiplication of strong local self-governing authorities - both newly independent republics as Scotland and Catalonia, and the multiplication of European autonomous regions and provinces - may bring democracy and socialism back to the people, keeping at bay chauvinism, preserving peace, justice, and free circulation in Europe.

The people need a say in the great challenge of overcoming the present sense of deprivation, the rising of inequalities, the fear of more neo-colonialist, imperialist wars.

Human-scale democracy, provided by the multiplication of free republics in Europe, scaling down EU and big states' concentration of power, may provide to the people new spaces of hope.
 
Let's go on, studying and working against what's wrong in Europe and beyond.