The ESF participants showed that there is an urgent need of compensate the Left absence and to go against the austerity measures imposed by governments through a bigger participation, solidarity and resistance from organizations and movements.

In the EL/Transform! seminars about the crisis in Europe was emphasized that this crisis has to be seen as a danger, but also as a chance, and the result depends on the mobilization and capacity to fight and find solutions against the capitalist system and the banks. “We need a Europe of people and not of banks!”, repeated Samil Altan, member of BDP and speaker of ESF and Mesopotamian Forum.

M. Aleksander, from Russia, asked in the one of the meetings that Europe cannot forget that Eastern countries need more cooperation and education to learn how to mobilize and to organize people.

Kinga Kalocsai, from the Hungarian Workers Party 2006, remembered that the first general strike in Hungary happened last year and the advance of the extreme right in the country is very dangerous and powerful in a period where just one in every two youngsters find a job in the country. According to Kinga, Hungary lives a similar situation with other Eastern countries and that perpetuates the inequalities between East and West, the most developed countries like France and Germany have colonized the Eastern countries.

The European Left demands the increase of EU budget to vanish inequalities and to change the mode of protection, underlined Christine Mendelsohn, from PCF, during the same seminar. People should not support this crisis during the next years living within precarious conditions and people must realize that the exit of the crisis is political and workers will resist and will beat the capitalist system and neoliberal governments when it is time. The resistance of workers in Greece should be seen as example to all European social movements, A. Tsipras, president of Synaspismos Party, defended in the Political answers to the crisis seminar. “We must work for a political convergence, with all social forces with a common objective”, concluded Pierre Laurent, national secretary of the PCF.

The consequences of political and socio-economic crisis in women's lives were stressed in six seminars that had the presence of EL members from Spain, Denmark, Greece and Germany and the Swedish member of the European Parliament, chair of women's committee, Eva-Brit Svensson, who urged for the necessity of acting over employment, child care and equal pay. The women are most affected by the crisis, but governments keep spending their budget in military expenses, for example.

The Kurdish problem and the Palestinian situation were also in the center of the ESF debate and actions on these problems were planned in the final Assembly.

The final declaration of ESF

We, the participants at the Istanbul ESF, affirming that we have a strong  engagement against all war and occupation  and that we are for a political resolution of the Kurdish issue, have made the following resolution :

Act together in Europe against the crisis

In the context of a global crisis and faced with the EU's, the governments' and the IMF's offensive to impose austerity and social regression policies, the social movements which have gathered in the ESF in Istanbul issue a call to act together in Europe.

Mobilisations and resistance movements are developing across Europe to challenge these policies. It is urgent to build, on the long term, a convergent struggle in Europe, which brings together social movements, trade unions, associations, organisations, and citizen networks. This is why we issue a call for a first step on the way to developing mobilisation across Europe, on the 29th of September and the surrounding days.

We must impose alternative policies, which enable us to fulfill social, needs and ecological requirements. All social movements call for a European assembly on the 23-24th of October (or 13-14th of November) in Paris to further our mobilisation and the coordination of our movements and also to make valuation and discuss the future of the ESF.

(The EL video on all our seminars will be available soon!)