The Party of the European Left (EL) condemns the deliberate nowadays tendency to roll back the democratic principles and values in Europe. The EL condemns the lack of appropriate response from the official structures of the European Union and the Council of Europe to concrete facts in a number of European states, the authorities of which perceive silence as encouragement for further anti-democratic actions.

A single center of anticommunist and anti-democratic struggle in fact intended to be the so-called “Platform of European Memory and Conscience”, signed in Prague on the occasion of the summit of Prime Ministers of the Visegrád Group (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia) on 14 October 2011. The main idea of this process is to substantiate equal responsibility of the Soviet rule and the Nazi regime for the crimes of the 20th century.

Through the “condemnation of communism” in Eastern Europe, a number of ruling regimes are attempting to whitewash the criminal regimes, which collaborated with Hitler and were convicted by the Nuremberg tribunal, and at the same time to ban the European communist and leftist parties.

Thus, a special group has already been created in the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic , which is preparing the grounds for a possible ban of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.

In Hungary , in autumn 2011, the leader of the parliamentary group of the ruling Fidesz party stated his intention to change the Hungarian Criminal Code, under which all the deeds by Hungarian functionaries during János Kádár’s rule are expected to be regarded as crimes against humanity, as representatives of “the past socialist occupation”.

In Estonia , the President annually grants the official Estonian awards to Waffen SS veterans, and the Ministry of Defence budget provides funds to support the Nazi veterans. To legalize their position, the Estonian Ministry of Defence is preparing to submit in spring 2012 a bill to the Parliament, under which the Estonian veterans who fought in Hitler’s army to be granted the status of “fighters for Estonia’s freedom”.

In Latvia , more than 14 percent of the population still remain “non-nationals”, are not recognized by the Latvian authorities as a minority, being therefore limited in their basic civil rights as the right to elect and to be elected.

Lithuania has not yet joined the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, so that national minorities have been experiencing significant setback in pursuing their rights in recent years. A bill designed to give the status of “participant in the resistance movement to Soviet occupation” to both the “fighters against the first occupation in 1940-1941” and “those who fought against the 1944-1990 occupation regime” has been recently submitted to the Lithuanian Seimas. There is still ongoing trial against the head of the Socialist People’s Front of Lithuania A. Paleckis, who dared to deny the Soviet occupation and said in a radio interview that on 13 ^th of January 1991 in Vilnius it was “brother-on-brother killing”.

The Romanian President takes the liberty to make public statements justifying and glorifying the deeds of war criminal and Hitler’s ally General Ion Antonescu.

In Moldova , the memorials in honor of the fallen in World War II are renamed into the memorials to victims of Stalinist repressions, while the representatives of the ruling coalition say from the parliamentary rostrum about the need to “wipe out” all the Soviet monuments remaining in Moldova. A number of representatives of the Moldovan authorities demand and continue to insist on the prohibition of the biggest Moldovan political party, the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, communist symbols, as well as to ban the expression and dissemination in the media of the “false values ​​ of the Soviet period”.

EL urges European Council, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe Committee of Ministers and Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly to consider the rollback of democratic values ​​ and principles in the above countries, as well as to take immediate appropriate measures to eliminate and further prevent such antidemocratic practices in the Council of Europe and the European Union member states.

We reiterate our repeated call for all democratically-minded people – to be active and not to allow Europe devolving into the revival of the “brown plague”.

Party of European Left

Berlin, 14 January 2012