The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are standing in the student parliament elections taking place on 18 and 19 June 2026 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Below, we are publishing the statement of the IYSSE university group at Humboldt University, which is also included in the official election brochure.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) has 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 then, HU professors such as Jörg Baberowski were trivialising the Nazis’ war of annihilation and justifying German war policy.
Today, what we warned about is escalating to an unprecedented extent: the Trump administration is threatening the annihilation of Iranian civilisation, and the German government supports this war course. In Gaza and Lebanon, the government and university management are actively supporting genocide.
The Middle East is only one front in an escalating global war. Eighty years after the end of Nazi rule, Germany is once again waging war against Russia and risking a nuclear conflict. At the same time, the largest rearmament programme since the Nazis is being implemented, and tank and ammunition factories are being built in Berlin. All parliamentary parties, including the Greens and the Left Party, support this war course.
To finance militarism, the entire education system is being ruined by austerity. Lecture halls and entire buildings are being closed, degree programmes cancelled, and rents and canteen prices increased. Conscription is being reintroduced to send us to our deaths as cannon fodder in the wars of the rich.
Anyone who speaks out against this can have their place at university revoked, and foreign-born students can be deported. Student protests are banned and met with police violence. While the Trump administration in the US arrests students and opponents of war on a daily basis and drags them off to deportation camps, universities here are also reintroducing disciplinary regulations. In the agitation against refugees, all parties are adopting the agenda of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
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 at German universities once again, 80 years after the end of the Second World War.
But appeals to university management and the government are a dead end. Instead, we must orientate ourselves towards the international working class—the only social force that can stop the drive to war.
The struggle against war requires a struggle against its cause: capitalism. Today, we face the same alternative that the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once summed up: socialism or barbarism! That is why we are fighting for a socialist perspective.
Join us! Vote IYSSE!