The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are running in the elections for the student parliament (StuPa) at Berlin’s Humboldt University (HU), which will take place on July 3, 2025. We are publishing here the election platform of the IYSSE at Humboldt University, which will also be printed in the official election brochure.
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We from the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have been fighting against the militarisation of Germany’s universities for over 10 years. As early as 2014, we warned that universities were being transformed into ideological centres for war and dictatorship. Even back then, professors like Jörg Baberowski were trivialising the Nazi war of extermination and justifying Germany’s war policy.
Today, what we warned against is being escalated to an unprecedented extent: the German government and university leaders are actively supporting genocide in Gaza. Anyone who speaks out against it is to be exmatriculated and if they are a foreign student, deported. Student protests are banned and bludgeoned with police violence.
While the Trump government arrests students and war opponents in the US on a daily basis and sends them to deportation camps, here too, universities are also rigidly policing the campuses. In agitating against refugees, all the establishment parties are adopting the agenda of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The threat of nuclear annihilation has never been as great as it is today. Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, the German elites are once again preparing for war against Russia. The recent deployment of German combat troops in Lithuania shows how aggressively they are continuing the Nazis’ old great power policy.
The Merz government has decided to rearm to the tune of more than one trillion euros and wants to increase the war budget to 5 percent of GDP. The pro-war policies are supported by all parties in the Bundestag (parliament)—including the Greens and the Left Party—and the trade union leaders.
In order to finance militarism, universities and the education and social sectors are being cut to the bone. This means rising rents and food prices, dilapidated lecture halls, fewer courses on offer—and young people consigned to barracks instead of receiving an education. The government wants to reintroduce compulsory military service and use us as cannon fodder in its wars.
Socialism or barbarism!
We oppose these attacks and are building an international anti-war movement among workers, students and youth. We will not allow genocide and world war to be prepared again at German universities eighty years after the end of the Second World War.
But appeals to university management and the government are a dead end. Instead, we must focus on the international working class—the only social force that can stop the development of war.
The fight against war requires a fight against its cause: capitalism. Today we are faced with the same alternative that the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once summarised as socialism or barbarism! That is why we are fighting for a socialist perspective.
Join us! Vote for IYSSE!