ATHENS - The
long-dormant euro crisis could come roaring back to life Monday with a vote in
the Greek Parliament that is expected to bring down the pro-austerity
government and open the way for a radical leftist party to take power for the
first time in the history of the European Union.
For Greece, the
expected collapse of the government comes just as the economy here had begun to
stabilize. Now, with the far-left Syriza Party forecast to win the elections
that would follow at the end of January, all bets are off.
The party has vowed to
halt payment on Greece’s debt until the terms of the country’s $284 billion
bailout agreements can be renegotiated, and it says it will thumb its nose at
international lenders by ramping up public spending.
The prospect of a
renewed clash with creditors has badly rattled financial markets and revived
painful memories for some Greeks of a time in the not-so-distant past when
their country flirted with ruin. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras warned over the
weekend that a Syriza government could lead the nation to “bankruptcy and exit
from the euro.”
But for others here -
and in debt-ridden countries across southern Europe - the rise of the far left
has kindled a once-faint hope that the continent can escape the chokehold of
austerity.
Critics say that by
relentlessly cutting the budget and attacking the deficit, the dominant
European response to the financial crisis has left little room for growth and
has kept unemployment at staggeringly high levels. Now, they say, it’s past
time for an alternative.
“Europe is changing,”
said George Stathakis, a Syriza Member of Parliament and one of the party’s
leading voices on economic policy. “Because of the fact that the European
economy is the only one in the world that is doing this badly and has stuck to
a growth less kind of situation, it’s become clear that things have to change.”
Stathakis pointed to
emerging leftist groups in Spain, Italy and Portugal that share Syriza’s
contempt for the European economic consensus and are prepared to join the party
in pressuring authorities in Brussels and Berlin to change their tack.
But unlike those
countries, Greece is no longer the master of its own fiscal destiny. Any shift
away from austerity for Greece would require a high-stakes renegotiation with
its bailout paymasters that analysts say could plunge Greece back into the
depths of a debt crisis.
“We could be entering
a process that leads to a point of no return,” said George Pagoulatos, a
professor at the Athens University of Economics and a former government adviser.
“There is no will among the Greek public or even among Syriza to exit the euro.
But if they start playing hardball, speculation about a Greek exit will revive.
And that’s dangerous because speculation can become a self-fulfilling
prophesy.”
Syriza officials have
declined to say what they will do if the so-called troika of international
lenders - the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the
International Monetary Fund - refuses to yield to the party’s demands.
Asked about Syriza’s
fallback plan, Stathakis was unequivocal. “There is no plan B,” he said. The
prospect of a hard-liner Syriza government going toe-to-toe with equally
uncompromising European negotiators has prompted a sharp spike in Greek bond
yields, even before the current government falls.
The trigger for the
government’s ouster is likely to be a vote that was once viewed as a formality
- the election of a new president. The job is largely ceremonial, but the vote
has become a referendum on the center-right government, which came to office in
2012.
Samaras’s candidate,
Stavros Dimas, has come up short in the first two rounds of balloting this
month. If Dimas cannot garner 180 votes from the 300-member Parliament in
Monday’s session - as most observers predict - new elections will be called for
the end of January or the beginning of February.
Polls show that most
Greeks don’t want new elections. But Syriza, which is leading the charge to
bring down the government, is likely to be the biggest beneficiary. It has
consistently held a lead of several points over Samaras’s New Democracy Party,
with a smattering of smaller parties trailing well behind.
Syriza, a Greek
acronym that stands for Coalition of the Radical Left, has risen rapidly,
having emerged as a unified party only last year. Led by a combination of
far-left activists, union organizers and university professors, it has lately
moderated some of its stances, including its earlier threat to tear up the
bailout and default on the nation’s debt. But the party still presents itself
as an anti-establishment assault on Greece’s notoriously corrupt and insular
brand of politics.
With 1 in 4 Greeks out
of work and 1 in 3 living in poverty, it is no mystery why that approach has
proved popular.
“It’s the only thing
we have to hope for,” said 43-year-old Vivi Vlachou, a divorced mother of two
teenagers who lost her job cleaning government offices under the
bailout-imposed austerity policies. “We don’t expect Syriza to save the nation.
We don’t expect everything to be perfect. We just want something different.”
To Vlachou, that means
getting her job back - an $8-an-hour position that she once thought would be
hers for life.
But to others,
“something different” means a return to conditions earlier in the decade, when
Greece was in free fall.
Dimitris Zafolias has
watched his family’s century-old butter-and-cheese business shrivel from 26
employees across three locations to one employee at a modest Athens shop front.
If Syriza thrusts the country back into crisis, Zafolias said, he’ll probably
shut the whole thing down.
“Right now, Greece is
like a turtle going step by step,” said the 70-year-old. “But the election
would be very painful for the country and for my job.”
The election may be
especially messy given the compressed time frame - just a month for
campaigning, followed by a deadline for hammering out an agreement with
international lenders that pops up only weeks later.
Antonis Papagiannidis,
a veteran Greek journalist and analyst who thinks it’s more likely than not
that Greece will leave the euro in the next two years, said Syriza will need
allies if it wants to succeed in those negotiations. But the party may be hamstrung
before it even starts by lingering resentment at home.
“They will have to
corral wider support to negotiate with Europe and the IMF,” he said. “After an
ugly campaign, that will be very difficult.”
(Πηγή: washingtonpost.com)
