Medya News spoke with Lila Athanasiadou, who is part of the Dutch tenants union BPW (Bond Precaire Woonvormen), based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, at the Peoples’ Platform Europe. Athanasiadou told us about her reasons for joining the platform and what she took from discussions about self-sovereignty and autonomy during the platform.
The People’s Platform Europe (PPE) conference, held from 14 to 16 February 2025 in Vienna, Austria, brought together over 800 delegates from 160 organisations across more than 30 European countries. Under the slogan “Reclaim the Initiative!”, the event explored grassroots solutions to global crises, with participants discussing and sharing perspectives in nine workshops covering topics such as War and Peace; Anti-fascism; Ecological Resistance; Women’s Democratic Confederalism; Youth Identity and Resistance; Building Autonomy; Activism and Organization; Fighting Genocidal Policies and Democratic Media.
Lila Athanasiadou, who joined the ‘Building Autonomy’ workshop, highlighted the need for collective struggles for self-sufficiency in Northern Europe, the need to refer to socialist history and to build up and recreate community on the basis of these struggles, while also finding ways to redistribute and share resources from Northern Europe with struggles in other parts of Europe.
Read the full interview, slightly edited for clarity, here:
Hello and welcome to our interview. What is your name, where are you from and what’s your organisation?
I’m Lila, I came from the Netherlands, from Rotterdam, and I came with the Tenants’ Union, it’s BPW or Bond Precaire Woonvormen, and it’s a tenants’ union for people that live in the most precarious situation of housing, so flex housing, really expensive housing, bad maintenance, etc.
With which aim did you come to the platform?
I came because basically as an organisation we are trying to not depend on structures that oppress us, and this is getting more difficult in Northern Europe, so that was the goal, that’s why I joined the autonomy workshop.
During the autonomy workshop what did you discuss about and what results came out of the workshop?
We discussed about a lot of things, also there was so much knowledge from groups that had experiences with food sovereignty, with housing, with neighbourhood organising, giving shelters, providing to direct needs, also creating safer spaces for FLINT (Female, Lesbian, Inter, Non-Binary, Trans) people, and feminist organisations, so the discussions were a lot. I joined the group on self-sufficiency specifically, and one of the things that came about was that basically we all live with certain contradictions, and especially, I mean there are contradictions all over Europe, but especially in the common struggles in Europe, we have to live with certain contradictions, like they’re up to a certain part, we are dependent on certain structures of the state, etc. And then the idea is not to lose the aim, that is to create actual self-sufficiency, and exploit also these contradictions.
So we also talked about that we have a lot of professional networks in Northern Europe, especially when it comes to legal support, etc., and access to funding, how can we redistribute both the knowledge, the professional network, and the funding to other places, in other places of Europe. And another thing that I took from the workshop is that we seem to struggle a lot with how to create community, but then there is a history of community building, and there is a revolutionary history in every place in Europe, you just have to go back maybe 20-30 years to find it, and I think this is also a way that you can recreate community by sharing the revolutionary histories of the territories.
Great, thank you a lot. And is there something else you would like to share, a last message you would like to share?
Well, I hope that these kind of events happen more often, and I hope they happen also in the places of struggle, that the organisations will figure out how to support each other in their local struggles.
