Dear friends,

we had a great event in Paris at the beginning of May, where I also spoke and ended my speech with a quote from Julian Assange: ‘If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’ And I would like to remind you that we have now achieved an important success: 1. Julian Assange has been released, and 2. my colleague Laura Castel and I have managed to get a resolution adopted in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that declares him a political prisoner. And Julian Assange made his only public appearance there. It was a great success for the peace movement and the international Assange movement. I wished to mention it, because I believe things like this should be celebrated.

 The last few days I was in Georgia as an election observer for the Council of Europe. Laura was in Moldova. Tomorrow, 3 November, there will be a run-off election in Moldova. I mention this because the double standards in the treatment of these two elections show the extent to which our governments, and above all our media, are ready for confrontation. In both cases we are witnessing geopolitically charged elections.

In Moldova, the presidency was at stake, but so was a referendum on EU membership. Unfortunately, the EU is no longer as neutral as it seemed at first. And to some extent, it has come into conflict with the Moldovan constitution, which stipulates neutrality. And until it seemed that the majority had voted against EU membership, as the majority in Moldova actually did, there was talk of massive intimidation in the elections through a cyber operation by Russia and then also through votes from abroad. I have to say that in Italy there were 60 polling stations for expatriate Moldovans, but only two in Russia, where there are many more. But thanks to the votes from abroad there was a narrow majority and no one in the media talked about intimidation, electoral fraud or manipulation of the elections.

In Georgia it was the other way round. In Georgia, a ruling party – not a left-wing party, but a party that did not want to get involved in the confrontation with Russia – ran its election campaign on the slogan ‚peace or war‘. Huge election posters were put up everywhere with pictures of destroyed Ukrainian towns and churches, juxtaposed with pictures of intact Georgian towns and churches, because there is pressure on Georgia to participate in this war in one way or another. And the overwhelming majority in Georgia said No, we don’t want that. We may not be fans of this government, but we don’t want to be pushed into this war.

That is why 54% of Georgians voted for this government, for the Georgian Dream.

And in the post-election poll, the Edison Research Institute, a polling organisation close to the CIA, said the government would only get 41%. In the end it was 54%. At first there was no talk of fraud. But since it became clear that the majority had voted that way, not a day has gone by without findings of electoral fraud in Georgia being communicated to the population by the media.

And this shows that even democratic rules and standards can no longer withstand the geo-politicisation of conflicts that we are currently experiencing. I believe that we must, in the spirit of Julian Assange, counteract this by revealing the truth in order to achieve peace.

I would like to briefly touch on one other thought that has not been brought up at this conference.

We have a situation in which the warmongers make considerable use of liberal forces, sometimes even left-wing rhetoric, and manage to involve parties such as the Greens in Germany or other liberal parties, sometimes even the Social Democrats, in this warmongering. And this leads to a situation in which a regime like Erdogan’s in Turkey becomes a mediator for negotiations that we support; a mediator for the exchange of prisoners that has taken place.

Consider also that a Viktor Orban in Hungary did something completely right during his presidency, namely to go to Ukraine, to Russia, to China and to visit both candidates in the US. That was absolutely right – we say that even if we don’t agree with his other policies. And this is a new situation in which we find ourselves, because opposition to the war, at least in Germany, was for a long time the preserve of the left, and today it is partly led by forces that are described as right-wing, whether it’s Orban or Trump. We have to learn how to deal with this. We need a strong and broad anti-war movement that stops the dramatic escalation, for example through the supply of Taurus missiles or the stationing of US intermediate-range missiles in Germany.