Democracy is under threat: Gonzalez

Jesus Rafael Mora Gonzalez, general secretary of World Federation of Democratic Youth was in India briefly on the way to Nepal, where his organisation has adopted a village hit by the recent earthquake. WFDI, an umbrella organisation of Leftist students and youth organisations, holds campaigns to strengthen democracy worldwide. Gonzalez, a member of Communist Party of Cuba and a physician by training, talked to BusinessLine on the recent trends in world politics.

How strong is democracy in the world now? What’s your take on new movements all over the world?

Democracy is under threat from the Capitalist forces. Even the internet is under the clutches of rich. We need to have free internet. The poverty rate has increased. Concepts like free education are facing challenges. We need to build a better world and in our view, the better world will be socialist. We believe not in the representative democracy, but in democracy of people. In my region, Latin America, there have been attacks by the US against progressive forces in Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

We countered those attacks with the power of the people and in various countries we are in power to build a new inclusive society.

Even in Europe, we are we are seeing a new wave of movements. Syriza is in power in Greece. In the November elections, progressive forces will probably win in Spain. There are efforts all over the world to out power unilateral tendencies and bring a multilateral world order.

It seems your campaign and struggles in the past are limited to economic issues.

We are going through a big capitalist crisis. Capitalism has lot of ways to attract your ways and styles of life. Big media is being used as a tool for this purpose. Big media came to Africa, came to Asia and came to a lot of Latin American countries and imposed their ways of life. We are opposing not only the new issues in economy, but also the efforts to impose a capitalist and consumerist way of life.

Fundamentalism is emerging stronger day by day. How do you challenge this?

The alternative is socialism. The alternative is to preserve our lives. If we continue liberating our environment from capitalist forces, we will help the future generation to survive. Socialist governments stand for real democracy. The participation of the people in taking all the decisions, control in the mineral resources, big participation in the society with free education, free health, social services.

We have studied about fundamentalism in detail. In most of the cases, fundamentalists are illiterate. They never had studied anything. We need to fight this with providing free education. When people learn, when people know, they are able to choose their positions. They will not allow themselves to be manipulated by fundamentalists.

In Middle East, fundamentalists are looking for youngsters, who don’t have money. They pay a lot of money to enrol youngsters in such groups. There is a lot of economic disparity and they exploit the material needs of people. We need to live in peace.

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