forced to back down in each successive negotiation? And do so all the more painfully as the means designed to throttle the will of a restive populace were shown publicly, while the tormentors chuckled as they recounted the most recent confrontations.
Tsipras knew they were waiting for his total capitulation. Because every time he dug his heels in and mobilised the support of the Greek people, it was a challenge to the straightjacket of the current economic order and the engrained way of doing politics. After all, it took barely 24 hours after his election for President François Hollande to visit Berlin, tear up his campaign promises – the renegotiation of the European stability pact and the battle against his “real enemy”, finance – and calmly endorse his predecessor’s policies.
Less than 10 days after Syriza came to power, the eurozone’s central bankers fired their first salvo when they suddenly cut Greece’s banks off from the main source of funds. This was their way of forcing Greece to negotiate an urgent agreement with its creditors – other EU states and the IMF – and to reinstate the previous government’s austerity programme. Hollande judged the European Central Bank’s actions “legitimate”, as did the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi. We may not always know where exactly the French president stands, but we are in no doubt where he does not stand – with the people of Greece.
As Europe’s vice tightened and the financial markets stepped up the pressure on Greece, the rules of the game were becoming all too clear. Greece faced a diktat: in exchange for the funds it needed, it was being forced to endorse dogmatic, harmful demands with immediate effect, all of which were contrary to its government’s programme: further cuts in pensions and salaries; a further hike in the VAT rate; the privatisation of 14 airports; further reduction of trade unions’ bargaining power; the allocation of its rising budget surplus to paying off its creditors, at a time when the social distress of the people is acute.
As its finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has made clear, Greece is “determined not to be treated like a debt colony that should suffer”. What is at stake goes beyond the right of a people to choose their destiny, even when a judge of democratic niceties as fine as German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble reckons that they have “elected a government which is acting somewhat irresponsibly”. Because the question also concerns the possibility of a state extricating itself from destructive policies, rather than having to further toughen those policies each time they fail.
Since Europe’s institutions turned their attention to Greece and subjected the EU’s most depressed economy to its most draconian austerity policy, what success have they had? No better than was expected and just as they were warned: ballooning debt, collapsing spending power, lacklustre growth, soaring unemployment, declining health standards. But the EU’s sound system remains stuck: “Greece must respect its commitments.” The holy alliance, utterly convinced it is right, is unwilling to listen even to the US president, whose analysis is supported by a host of economists and historians.
Greece’s economic collapse, which has now lasted six years, is comparable to the damage that four years of military destruction and foreign occupation inflicted on France in the first world war. Which explains why Tsipras’s government gets enormous popular support – even from the right – every time it refuses to prolong such a destructive policy, and why it is unwilling to survive “like a junkie waiting for his next fix”.
But Syriza has few friends outside Greece. To investigate the potential killers of Greece’s hopes would mean interviewing every EU government, and the chief suspect would be Germany: the failed disciplinary strictures are German, and it intends to squeeze those – especially in Mediterranean countries – who refuse to endure them indefinitely. In Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the governments’ motive for the crime is more sordid. Their citizens would benefit if the iron fist of austerity stopped pounding them.
But their governments are afraid, especially when they feel threatened by a domestic challenge from the left, that Greece will demonstrate that it is possible to refuse to follow “a well-marked path, a known path, a path that the markets and the institutions and all the European authorities know,” the path that French finance minister Michel Sapin claims must be “explored right to the end”. The prospect of Greece breaking free would show that all these governments were gravely mistaken to make their people suffer needlessly.
Everyone knows that getting Greece’s debt repaid would be like “extracting blood from a stone” (Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 29 January). So why isn’t it equally clear that Syriza’s economic strategy to finance urgent social expenditure through a determined fight against tax fraud could draw on a young, determined, popular, political force, originating in social movements and free of the compromises and corruption of the past? Even if not marked out, the path is discernible. The Greeks’ struggle is universal. Our good wishes no longer suffice. The solidarity it deserves calls for action. Time is still, as always, running out.
Excerpted from: ‘Greece under pressure’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org