There are limits to humiliation. Barring an extraordinary upset, Syriza, a radical leftwing party previously confined to the political margins, will win Sunday’s Greek general election. Last-minute opinion polls gave Syriza a lead of between 4% and 6% over the ruling New Democracy party of prime minister, Antonis Samaras. Its youthful leader, Alexis Tsipras, may not win an outright majority. He may struggle to find coalition partners. But that will not diminish the significance of Syriza’s victory, nor lessen its potentially dramatic implications for Greece and all Europe.
Many explanations can be found for this political upheaval, but humiliation is a good place to start. Since the 2008 crisis, Greeks have been subjected to what many feel is a sustained, brutal and unnecessarily destructive attack on their basic living standards, way of life and national independence. If a country is invaded and occupied by hostile forces, it might expect to lose its freedom and its voice. But the subjugation of Greece, in the name of fiscal responsibility, debt reduction and structural reform, was undertaken by so-called friendly powers, principally, Germany, Europe’s paymaster, and the troika comprising the EU commission, European central bank and IMF. While dictating terms in the form of a €240bn bailout and a swingeing austerity programme, Greece’s new masters forgot that Athens, home of the polis, the original democratic city state of enfranchised citizens, had not lost its power of speech. It had not forfeited its right to resist. Modern Greece is a small country of 11 million people. It was never wealthy. But as its history shows, what Greece has, it holds, or will ever try to do so. Thus Sunday’s elections look set to produce an angry, nationwide outcry from freeborn citizens, saying: this is our country and we want it back. National humiliation must end.
This is not simply a protest vote. To a degree, the election outcome is an admission that the pervasive corruption, tax-dodging, cronyism, irresponsibility and apathy of the past, of which so many in Greek society were guilty, can no longer be afforded. It is recognition that the self-interest and ineptitude of the discredited mainstream parties contributed to the disaster. But the vote is also a powerful statement that a damaging, externally imposed policy of depressive economic retrenchment that produced 25% unemployment, put three million people on or below the poverty line and left Greece close to social breakdown is unwise, unwanted and ineffective.
It remains uncertain whether this crucial lesson is understood by more fortunate, northern EU states whose indifference to austerity-related suffering in Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere has undermined European cohesion. If Syriza pushes ahead with plans to repudiate half or more of Greece’s €320bn debt, the eurozone crisis that may ensue will focus minds. Yet Angela Merkel’s Germany still does not get it. Fixated on a non-existent inflationary threat and primly determined that debtor countries do not “get away” with past profligacy, Berlin still holds back, not only from more sympathetic assistance but from accepting the logical (and costly) consequences of shared eurozone membership, meaning closer, more efficient economic, fiscal and monetary union.
Under German pressure, the European central bank specifically excluded Greece from the debt-buying provisions of its quantitative easing programme announced last week. Speaking at Davos, Merkel was uncompromising, recasting Greece’s appeal for pan-European solidarity as a need to “show the responsibility to shoulder one’s own risks”. Merkel, sitting pat on a record 2014 budget surplus, justified her stance in terms of the future needs of German pensioners. Is this really Berlin’s final word to an all but broken, fellow EU member where up to 50% of young people are jobless, where suicide rates are rising, where hunger is rife, where debt is still 175% of GDP, and where neo-Nazism is on the march? If so, it is dangerously short-sighted.
Europe’s new and insurgent political parties of left and right, including Podemos in Spain and the Front National in France, will watch the Greek fallout with keen attention. Across the EU, moulds are shattering, the old ways no longer work. And austerity is not working, either, as a group of leading economists noted last week. “The historical evidence demonstrates the futility and dangers of imposing unsustainable debt and repayment conditions on debtor countries [and] the negative impact of austerity policies on weakening economies.” Greek debt should be cancelled, they wrote, and this “should mark the beginning of a new EU-wide policy framework favouring pro-growth rather than deflationary policies”.
