By ROGER COHEN, Sep
19, 2013
New York Times, nytimes.com
ATHENS - The perfect
political storm for violent extremism has descended on Greece. It consists of
national humiliation, economic disaster, high immigration, political division
and international tutelage. Look no further than Weimar Germany to understand
its ingredients.
In the subdued streets of the Greek capital,
where a vague menace hangs like a pall, tempers are frayed. The economy is
turning slowly, after draconian cuts and two bailouts totaling € 240 billion,
but not enough yet to be felt. The cry of the extreme right resounds: We, the
fathers of civilization, have been sold out by the international loan sharks!
These are familiar insinuations. It is well known where they can lead.
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is rising, from a negligible fringe group in
2009 to what is almost certainly the country’s third political force today,
representing close to 15 percent of the vote, according to polls. If the most
acute phase of Greece’s economic crisis has passed, the most acute phase of its
political trial is upon it.
I have little doubt that if Greece were not
part of the European Union, with the protection and example afforded by this
much maligned democratic club, it would have tumbled into catastrophe by now,
much as a humiliated Germany did after 1918. Europe has been Greece’s protector
even as the single euro currency has been its tormentor.
A typical confrontation occurred the other
morning. Alex Soultos, who works in the jewelry business, was in a shouting
match. A graduate of Northeastern University who returned to Athens from Boston
in 2009, he was making his way through a crowd of strikers outside the Ministry
of Administrative Reform and E-Governance when he lost it.
“You should be working instead of blocking
the road!” he screamed, his American work ethic boiling up. His business is in
a downward spiral in an economy that has shrunk by a quarter. A group of women
screamed abuse back at him. At our age, they demanded, where can we find jobs?
They are among the 2,000 “school guards” who were ousted as the government
scrambled to find 12,500 public employees it could shift by the end of this
month to meet a deadline set by Greece’s international creditors. “We have
bills,” Vespina Papadopoulou shouted.
But as Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the minister
responsible for the cuts, explained to me inside the besieged ministry, the
message from the “troika” (the International Monetary Fund, the European
Commission and the European Central Bank) is clear: “If you don’t do it, no
more money!” Europe’s requirement is: Reform or else.
Greece, with an estimated $ 3.3 billion
shortfall in its social security fund this year and a larger financing gap
looming over the next two years, still needs money, if much less than before.
More urgently, it needs international understanding. The combination of the
demands of the troika (widely seen by Greeks as a Trojan horse for Germany) and
the frustration evident outside the ministry - Soultos’s private sector has
lost close to 1.5 million jobs as unemployment has reached 28 percent - is
combustible.
I watched Antonis Samaras, the conservative
prime minister, give an impassioned speech this week in which he spoke of the
way “Democracy breeds its own enemy, which is basically extremism.” He warned
that Greece was in the “blind spot” before improvement is felt - a few
“crucial” months that “are not the most difficult” but are “the most
politically sensitive.”
Golden Dawn has been on a rampage. The
police say one of its activists was responsible for the stabbing to death this
week of Pavlos Fyssas, a leftist hip-hop singer who had denounced the party. In
recent weeks Golden Dawn supporters have manhandled a mayor trying to honor
victims of the Civil War and attacked Communist Party sympathizers, leaving
nine hospitalized.
Samaras is squeezed between the demagoguery
of this rampant right and the populism of the left-wing anti-austerity Syriza
party, which is promising to restore most if not all of what has been lost
since Greece, in the local phrase, fell from the clouds.
Troika officials will visit Athens next
week. If they make further demands for cuts in wages and pensions they could
push Greece over the edge. Germany has not yet learned to play the benign
superpower. It is time; and after the German election this Sunday there may be
a little more wiggle room. Toughness toward Greece has played well in Germany
but, as Mitsotakis put it: “The country has been stretched to its limits. This
needs to be very, very clear.”
In fact, of course, Germany has also saved
Greece from bankruptcy. It did so for the European Union, which helped usher
Germany from its cataclysmic “zero hour” of 1945. Through Europe, Germany came
back. Through Europe, Greece has been saved from the fate of Weimar. At a time
when pettiness surrounds thinking about the E. U., and the assumption is
widespread that the Union’s peacemaking role is over, it is critical to recall
that the Union is Europe’s surest safeguard against the Continent’s darkest
hours.
