Trade unions and left parties in Europe have expressed widespread solidarity to the January 23 general strike in Minnesota, stressing the importance of resistance in the face of growing violence by the Trump administration. “The horrific images of children as young as five years old being arrested, of people being executed in police gunfire in the middle of the street, are part of an organized operation by the US government to terrorize entire neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces,” wrote the Greek All-Workers’ Militant Front (PAME).
“Murders, arrests of children, terror inflicted on the population: these are the methods of a fascist police,” French MEP Emma Fourreau similarly wrote on social media, responding to the killing of nurse Alex Pretti. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot dead by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on Saturday, January 24.
Commenting on Pretti’s killing, PAME warned that such events cannot be understood as isolated incidents. “They are the result of a policy that seeks to impose silence and fear, to break resistance, to criminalize protest, and to slander the people as an ‘enemy’ whenever they raise their heads,” the organization wrote.
Read more: Killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis a day after general strike ignites community outrage
Some reactions also recognized the significance of choosing the general strike as a method of struggle against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attacks, putting the working class at the forefront of the resistance to the current US administration’s agenda.
“The strike, under the motto ‘No work, no school, no shopping,’ is a powerful, peaceful expression of solidarity and resistance,” wrote Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA). “Hundreds of businesses closed, and thousands of people took to the streets – even in extreme freezing temperatures.”
“It recalls the general strike of February 1941 in Amsterdam, when workers, tram drivers, and ordinary people mobilized to resist the Nazis’ raids against the Jewish community,” he added. “It was the largest act of resistance against the raids in occupied Europe at the time. It took courage, just as those in Minnesota are showing courage today.”
Responses to the Minnesota strike also reflected on what the US administration’s increasingly aggressive behavior could mean for Europe. Several French parliamentarians criticized attempts by political elites – nationally and across the region – to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump, while warning that far-right forces are eager to replicate equally destructive policies in Europe. “The French far right grovels at Trump’s feet,” wrote Mathilde Panot of France Unbowed (La France Insoumise), pointing to National Rally leader Jordan Bardella’s enthusiastic endorsement of Trump’s agenda. Her party colleague Manon Aubry warned that, under its preferred national security doctrine, the US administration will use European far-right parties as “tools to attack our sovereignty.”
“The escalation of imperialist aggressiveness by the bourgeois state of the USA abroad, imperialist rivalries, interventions, wars, and the war economy, inevitably brings escalation at home as well: intensified repression, restrictions on rights and freedoms, the targeting of migrant and refugees, and an attack on the lives of the working class,” PAME stated.
“When the people pay for imperialist war through soaring prices and poverty, and when they organize and struggle, the bourgeois state mobilizes its mechanisms to intimidate and subjugate them,” the union concluded. “We strengthen the common struggle against repression, racism, authoritarianism, and state violence. We strengthen the fight for work and life with rights, for the protection of migrants and their families, to put a stop to state terror, and to overthrow anti-people policies.”
Following the successful general strike on Friday, groups in Minnesota have issued the call for another mass shutdown on Friday, January 30, but this time, calling for groups across the United States to join them.
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