Last week’s parliamentary endorsement of the Greek bailout deal prompted sighs of relief in some quarters, but on the streets of Greece the popular mood was predominantly disconsolate, and understandably so.
After all, it came less than eight months after the Syriza coalition was voted into power, chiefly on the strength of its anti-austerity platform. What’s more, it was just last month that voters overwhelmingly rejected, in a snap referendum, the bailout conditions proposed by the European Union (EU).
They had actively been encouraged to do so by a government that, armed with this renewed mandate, promptly caved in to the demands of Greece’s creditors. The consequence is austerity on steroids and what’s effectively a surrender of Greek sovereignty on the economic front, with bureaucrats from Brussels micromanaging policy down to details such as the shelf life of pasteurized milk and what constitutes a loaf of fresh bread.
The Syriza-led government has also felt obliged to sign up to crossing what it had decreed as red lines, such as pension cuts and large-scale privatization of state assets, with the bulk of the proceeds going straight to the creditors, most prominently German banks.
It is hardly a coincidence that many Greeks see Germany as the primary promoter of their distress (just as it was seven decades ago), and it’s certainly interesting that even Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly faces a revolt within her conservative party in today’s Bundestag vote on the bailout package, not least because some MPs view the conditions to which Athens has signed up as too onerous for it to actually implement.
Furthermore, even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a member of the troika to which Athens is beholden, sees the bailout conditions as untenable without a substantial write-off of Greek debt, which Syriza has long implored but Germany has thus far rejected.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras lost sufficient support among Syriza MPs in last week’s parliamentary vote to necessitate a vote of confidence, whose result could in turn entail a snap election.
There are indications that Tsipras retains a substantial degree of popularity despite his betrayal of the hopes he helped to sow and the principles he expounded, mainly on the valid basis that he at least strove to the best of his ability to change the EU’s mind, and relented only when he realized it was a hopeless enterprise. Or, viewed another way, he sought to melt the EU’s heart but eventually understood it doesn’t have one.
If an election does indeed take place within the next couple of months, the results will be interesting to follow. There is a strong likelihood that a sizeable chunk of Syriza will break away, and it will be intriguing to see how Tsipras distinguishes himself from his predecessors this time around — and whether the fear of a surge in support for the far right turns out to be well-founded.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the EU’s neocolonial enterprise in Greece exclusively in terms of hostility toward the political direction it chose in January. This is meant to be a lesson for anyone who contemplates deviating from the neoliberal orthodoxy. The message is: don’t even think about it.
Among the more obvious targets is the Spanish electorate, which displayed a certain independence of mind in recent municipal elections. Some of the indignados who were protesting against austerity on the streets of Madrid and Barcelona now populate the town halls of these and other cities. The hope in Brussels must be that the Greek example will serve as a deterrent to Spanish voters inclined to follow their hearts and minds in the parliamentary elections later this year.
In Britain, meanwhile, panic has gripped the political class and much of the media over the prospect of left-wing backbencher Jeremy Corbyn emerging as the leader of the opposition Labour Party. The vaguely socialist, anti-austerity agenda he espouses would, we are reminded ad nauseam, indefinitely exclude Labor from power. Some of those who regurgitate this argument may be well-intentioned, but their intellect is clearly constrained by the brainwashing of the Thatcher and Blair years.
They find themselves unable to even imagine a world in which Mammon is not the supreme deity, sustained primarily by the profit motive — or, more specifically, a Britain in which Labor needn’t position itself as Tory-lite in order to aspire to a parliamentary majority. In doing so, they ignore the fact that Corbyn’s platform has found a resonance beyond dyed-in-the-wool Laborites, and enthused many who would normally have been disinclined to bother with electoral politics.
More broadly, it’s pertinent to remember that the West has long been dedicated to snuffing out challenges to capitalism whose appeal, it feared, may prove infectious. The so-called domino theory was instrumental in the war against Vietnam. The Cuban revolution was undermined in large part because of its potential as an exemplar. There are innumerable other examples, from Guatemala to Iran, but in Greek context perhaps its most pertinent to recall that the eventually successful attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile relied initially on “making the economy scream.”
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has helped to popularize the notion that 21st-century coups rely on banks rather than tanks. It is yet to be proved, though that resistance, on the streets as well as through the ballot box, is futile.
It is notable, meanwhile, that whereas the EU is keen to control Greece and its policies in so many ways, it has not lifted a finger to alleviate the burden of refugees inexorably fetching up on Greek islands such as Kos and Lesbos, which are separated by just a few kilometers of water from the Turkish mainland.
The refugees, many of them from Syria, generally see Greece as a way station en route to a richer European country. Many Greeks empathize with the flood of humanity arriving on dinghies, but their government can ill afford to cope with the steady stream of arrivals, which Turkey appears to be letting through without being taken to task, even though it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be compared with Libya, a dysfunctional country that is the departure point for multitudes from the Middle East and Africa heading toward Italy and other European destinations. There has even been talk of military intervention in Libya, even though a previous bout of such “assistance” contributed to the very dysfunction that now adds to Europe’s discomfiture.
But then, no one ought to be surprised by the EU’s double standards.
