The Coordinator of Organizations for Development, made up of more than 600 cooperation and humanitarian action entitiesamong which are, among others, Oxfam, Alliance for Solidarity, Doctors of the World, Spanish Red Cross, Educo, Unicef ​​or World Vision Spain, plants bloody umbrellas in front of the European Parliament headquarters in Madrid, at the Gate del Sol and in the Plaza de Callao on the day of the day of reflection to draw attention to the importance of voting in the European elections.

“With this bloody umbrella, we want warn about the risk which would mean a setback in human rightspeace, equality and climate transition in the European Union,” explains Javier Ruiz, president of La Coordinadora.

“The rise of anti-rights parties and movements that deny scientific evidence on climate change, the loss of biodiversity or gender violence may have very serious consequences on democracyhuman rights, gender equality and the sustainability of the planet, hence the importance of voting in this key event,” he adds.

The EU has tripled its security and defense budget, reducing spending on solidarity and rights; In the last 10 years, at least 29,827 people have disappeared in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe; according to

Official data, 20% of women in the EU have suffered some type of violence for being women; Not to mention that maintaining the current European production and consumption model would exhaust the resources of four planets, which also compromises the lives of future generations.

These are just some of the data released by the campaign #WhereIsYourUmbrella, with which a large part of the sector of cooperation and humanitarian organizations have called to defend democracy, sustainable development and human rights in the face of the advance of a war-mongering and anti-rights agenda in the European context. With four slogans, based on the axes of peace, feminism, environmentalism and human mobility, La Coordinadora explains through its campaign the importance of these elections with an analogy: “If you get lost on the beach, you lose your umbrella. If you get lost in the European elections, we lose our rights.

In parallel to the campaign, a letter was sent to the main political forces with a battery of proposals, agreed upon by the more than 600 organizations that make up this platform, conveying their “concern over the fact

that the European institutions have proposed and adopted decisions aligned with investment interestsgeopolitical, security or energy” compared to the founding values ​​of the EU.

“We draw attention because in these elections to the European Parliament there is a clear risk of entering a new cycle marked by austerity policies and police and military security to the detriment of investment in policies that guarantee a dignified life, gender equality, a just ecological transition and international cooperation policies for sustainable development,” explained Maite Serrano, director of La Coordinadora, “for That is why it is crucial to mobilize the vote for political options committed to human rights because, as our campaign motto says, if we get confused on the beach we can lose our umbrella, but in the European elections a mistake can lead us to war and loss of rights”.

And he concludes, “from social organizations we know that the path cannot be a militarist rise, nor should it relegate the green transition, as Ursula von der Leyen announced days ago, or buy the agenda from denialist and anti-rights forces and movements that can shape a political bloc that questions the origins of the European project”.

The cursed correlation: analysis of the impact of the policies of the 27 on sustainable development The Coordinator also presented this last week the study ‘The cursed correlation in the EU. Analysis of policy coherence in Member States for sustainable development’. The report raises the concept of cursed correlation to point out that in the EU progress in the four transitions (ecological, socioeconomic, democratic and feminist) It implies the increase in planetary pressures or ecological impacts, until we reach the point where we currently find ourselves, where the sustainability of life is at risk.

At the threshold of the European elections and from the point of view of the cursed correlation, none of the EU countries, nor the world, is in the so-called empty quadrant: a space in which progress in transitions is compatible with relatively small impacts.

The report highlights that the reformulation of our development model is the unavoidable issue of the European Union. If you want to advance the transitions in a coherent way, it is it is urgent to drastically reduce the impacts and planetary pressures that all the countries of the European Union, to a greater or lesser extent, have. The unavoidable issue for the European Union is to show that we can live better, with prosperity and rights, without this implying condemning the entire planet to unsustainability and injustice.