GREECE LIGHTS A FIRE

You will have read the papers and watched the TV stories. Greece has decisively turned away from the two parties, New Democracy and PASOK, who have dominated Greek politics for 40 years, and have voted for leftist SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras. SYRIZA got 149 of the 300 parliamentary seats and, to get a working majority, have formed a coalition with Independent Greeks, a conservative group led by Panos Kamenos, who have 13 seats. The Greek public is ecstatic at this radical change.

The result was never in much doubt. The New Democracy-PASOK coalition has totally failed to pull round Greece’s economy; the EU Troika’s 5-year “austerity” programme has merely strangled any hopes of recovery. The middle classes have been decimated by ever increasing taxes and unemployment is at totally unprecedented levels. The Greeks felt they had nothing to lose by voting for off-beat SYRIZA. I do not believe the Greek electorate endorsed SYRIZA’s programme, if such a thing exists, as it did not much feature in the campaign. The Greeks simply wanted change at any cost, an end to daily misery, to daily deprivation, to daily humiliation. The Greeks want hope: a world where they can live to modest standards of comfort: the Greeks are a proud people, hating to be beholden to anyone and determined to keep up appearances and to conceal need.

Tsipras sworn in as Prime Minister this afternoon

Public services in Greece are in a sorry state. I recently went to one of the best state hospitals in Athens, its corridors crowded by patients on trollies and standards of cleanliness deplorable. Yet the barely paid doctors were polite and efficient. Many doctors and nurses are fleeing the country for better things. On my holiday island of Samos (population 40,000 and the island 45km long) there is only one ambulance on call. A few weeks ago a patient at one end of the island had a heart attack and the ambulance arrived too late; the patient was dead. Simultaneously a motorcycle accident at the other end seriously injured a man; by the time the ambulance came, this victim was also dead. There is no money for that essential second ambulance. Electricity charges are among the highest in Europe, family allowances are only spasmodically paid,  pensions have been brutally cut back, though some were over-generous, dustbins are regularly scoured for food. Greece is already in the Third World.

SYRIZA is right to seek a renegotiation of the nation’s huge debt burden. Greece clearly cannot keep to its obligations to the troika but the Berlin and Brussels paymasters are deaf to reason. “Pay up, or we will ruin Greece by bankrupting her banks!” they threaten this morning. Hostility to Greece in Northern Europe is endemic; ex-US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was shocked by the relish in the talk of “crushing Greece” from continental Europeans at a G7 meeting in Canada in 2010, and talked them round to sanity. Since then, Greeks have been experimented upon like laboratory rats, as one hare-brained EU policy after another is tested on them. Tsipras will try to get a deal, but he will have to be persuasive and subtle. Hard-faced Mrs Merkel and Mr Schaueble, not to mention devious Mr Juncker, will defend their pet Eurozone project and seek every pound of flesh from the Greek bail-outs. Much more rational would be a Greek bond negotiation followed by a return to the drachma and devaluation. But SYRIZA and the Greeks want to stay in the euro (why?) and the EU screams “impossible” if Grexit is even mentioned. Room for manoeuvre looks very limited.

Hard news on Tsipras’ programme will have to wait at least a week. I would expect populist moves, like the reinstatement of sacked government cleaners (a local cause celebre), a ban on home repossessions, and conditional electricity reconnection of some poor people – not “free electricity for the poor” as Sky TV claimed today. In time SYRIZA will want to investigate graft and theft by former PASOK and New Democracy ministers for which there will be plenty of evidence.

After today’s excitement, will there be any lasting effect on Europe? Smaller parties will be mightily encouraged by SYRIZA’s triumph. In 2009 SYRIZA won 4.6% of the votes and 13 seats; now in 2015 it has 36.4% and 149 seats, 2 away from an absolute majority. Big, fat and smug parties can learn another lesson on the pace of change. In 2009 PASOK won 43.9% of the votes and 160 seats; now in 2015 it ignominiously won 4.75% and holds 13 seats. Watch out, Labour! If any progress is made with the EU, how encouraged will be Podemos in Spain, Front National in France and Five-Star in Italy – a nightmare for Brussels. Political certainties always crumble in time and SYRIZA’s victory opens new doors and stimulates new thinking; it lights a fire which need not be destructive but hopefully brings light and warms the hearts of all Europe.

SMD

26.01.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

PS. Sky TV always gets the pronunciations wrong. Tsipras (say, Tzeeprass) with accent on the first syllable. SYRIZA (say, Seereeza), again with the accent on the first syllable!