“Europe has a need for strong States that are able to guarantee social welfare”, declared Fintan Farrell, director of EAPN, the European anti-poverty organization, on addressing the 6th annual Austrian Conference on poverty, which ended at Salzburg in recent days. “We cannot dispense with the decision of the European heads of state, agreed during the Lisbon summit, to make a decisive contribution to the fight against poverty”, recalled Farrell, who warned: “the European common social strategy must be reinforced, not watered down”. In his intervention on the social future of Europe, the director of EAPN said he was optimistic about the fact that the growing danger of poverty is being more widely perceived throughout Europe and that this has repercussions on the outcomes of elections and referenda. “Politics are increasingly evaluated in terms of the contribution they can make to the prevention of poverty”, he said. “Citizens no longer believe in the ‘economic myths’ that have been foisted on them for years”, declared the theologian Michaela Moser, Austrian representative of the EAPN. “In Austria, the seventh richest country in the world, the struggle against poverty is in itself a question of political priority”, said Martin Schenk of the Conference for Poverty. “A policy of social equalization of the fairer distribution of wealth must guarantee that wealth suffices for everyone”, he stressed, adding: “the fight against poverty is possible; poverty can be prevented”. The results of the Conference, entitled “Courage is possible. Poverty can be prevented”, were presented to the Austrian Federal President Heinz Fischer by a Conference delegation, which was joined by the general secretary of Caritas Austria, Stefan Wallner, and the head of the equivalent Evangelical aid organization (Diakonie), Michael Chalupka.
