On October 14th, the trade unions organised a demonstration in Brussels against the anti-social plans of the so called 'Arizona' government. It marked a turning point. 140,000 people took to the streets. That number was immediately downplayed by the right, but reveals the scale of the popular resistance. Benjamin Pestieau, deputy general secretary of the PVDA-PTB, explains the reasons for this massive mobilisation, the government's strategy of division and repression, and the essential conditions for pushing back this government of social destruction.

At the 2025 European Forum in Vienna, David Pestieau, Political Director of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PVDA–PTB), delivered the following speech during the plenary “Austerity and the War Economy: Our Opposition to the EU ReArm Initiative. Fighting War Means Fighting Austerity“.

At COP30, States are required to update their climate plans, ten years after the Paris Agreement, and after the failure of COP29 in Baku. Meanwhile, the UN’s latest climate report, “No More Hot Air… Please!” makes it clear: global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising despite all declared commitments. The world continues to face an average rise of global temperature whose impacts are already felt in the lives of the peoples.

140,000 people marched today, October 14, through the streets of Brussels. An exceptional mobilisation — one of the largest union demonstrations in the past 25 years.

The so-called twenty-point plan of Donald Trump for Gaza, enthusiastically received by Benjamin Netanyahu, is not a peace plan but a unilateral U.S.–Israeli ultimatum. It is an imposed capitulation that will only pause the genocide in Gaza, not end it. The international solidarity movement was moving to isolate Israel. With this plan Trump and Netanyahu want to reverse the roles. Their central aim is to isolate the Palestinians. The objective is to pressure Palestinians into accepting impossible, neocolonial conditions. If they refuse, Trump and Netanyahu will portray them as “obstructionists.” Then Washington will “pledge full support to finish the job” — meaning the full annexation of Gaza into a “Greater Israel.”

Discover the speech by PVDA-PTB president Raoul Hedebouw at the 2025 edition of ManiFiesta, the Festival of Solidarity. Saturday 13 September 2025