John Milios’s phone
rings a lot these days. There are hedge funds and financial institutions and
investors, all curious to know what the German-trained professor thinks.
He is the first to
concede the programme is radical. “I am a Marxist,” he says. “The majority [in
Syriza] are.”
Sipping green tea in
his favorite Athens cafe, he explains: “Alternative approaches to the economy
and society have been excluded by the dominant narrative of neoliberalism.”
Milios, who attended
Athens College, the country’s most prestigious private school - graduating in
the same class as the former Prime Minister George Papandreou -is part of an
eclectic group of experts advising Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, on the
economy.
Others include the
Oxford-educated Euclid Tsakalotos, the political economist and shipping family
heir Giorgos Stathakis, the leftwing veteran Giannis Dragasakis and the
Texas-based academic Yanis Varoufakis.
If the Athenian
parliament fails to elect a new head of state by 29 December, the Greek
constitution demands that snap polls are called. The ruling coalition’s narrow
majority has made it unlikely that the government’s candidate, Stavros Dimas,
will get the presidency. With the radicals in the ascent, Milios and his fellow
Marxists are likely to take the reins of the EU’s weakest economy.
There are few who do
not believe that the insurgents will win even if their time has not yet come.
After five years of catastrophic austerity Greeks are baying for change. “The
people created us,” says Milios. The alliance has seen its electoral ratings
surge from 5% before the country’s economic meltdown to 27% in mid-2012. “We
have no other option. Every day the situation gets worse. We have to stay calm
and deal with it.”
The son of a lawyer
and a dentist with distinctly non-leftist views, Milios is typical of a
generation who embraced Marxist ideology during the 1967-74 colonels’ regime.
He ascribes his own radicalism to the Vietnam War and the visiting American
professors who taught him. But while the 62-year-old insists his leanings are
in the French Marxist tradition - “I never had any affiliation with Soviet
Marxism” – he is regarded as the most hardline of Tsipras’s tight-knit circle
and, as such, the man most in touch with Syriza’s radical spirit.
Although the rebels
have ridden the wave of anti-bailout fury, a sense of realpolitik has ensured
they have softened their rhetoric. Last week, the telegenic Tsipras was forced
to acknowledge times ahead are likely to be hard. Debt-stricken Greece is still
stuck in grueling negotiations with creditors who have extended the lifeline
they have thrown the country but are far from deciding what comes next. The
controversial adjustment programme ends in February. Athens faces debt
repayments of €17bn (£13.4bn) in 2015 alone.
“Everything we will do
is in the context of staying in the eurozone,” says the mild-mannered Milios,
rejecting any suggestion Syriza policymakers would willingly opt out. “The
government has launched a fear campaign to terrorize Greeks into thinking the
worst but in reality nobody believes all this talk about Grexit anymore.
[Angela] Merkel herself has said it is impossible for any country to leave.”
And therein lies
Syriza’s secret: a high-stakes game of poker that makes the brinkmanship over
presidential elections look tame. After almost five years of reinforcing the
Greek economy with €240bn in rescue funds, the EU, European Central Bank and
International Monetary Fund may not like what the leftists represent, but the
radicals are clearly gambling it is not they who will blink first. Too much
sweat, they say, has been expended on the biggest bailout in financial history
for the project of monetary union to fall apart now. “Because if any country
leaves the eurozone that is what will happen,” says Milios. “Greece, in its
weakness, is actually very strong.”
For Milios, the
priority is dealing with the humanitarian crisis that has rolled over Greece
like a tidal wave since bankruptcy forced Athens to seek emergency aid. The
country has seen its economy contract by close to 30%, its middle class
decimated, it’s manufacturing base collapse and its youth migrate, all as a
result of tax increases and budget cuts demanded by lenders.
Unemployment has reached
record heights, with more than 26% out of work. Demands for more austerity –
rejected outright by Syriza – thwarted Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s attempt
to reach an agreement with creditors this month.
Milios rolls off the
party’s priorities one by one. It would make concerted efforts to help those
hardest hit by the crisis - free electricity for Greeks who have had supplies
cut off, food stamps distributed in schools, healthcare for those who need it,
rents covered for the homeless, the restoration of the minimum wage to
pre-crisis levels of €750 a month and a moratorium on private debt repayments
to banks above 30% of disposable income.
“We do not want
anybody in Greece to work under conditions that resemble slave labour which
austerity has created,” he says. “We have young Greeks working for two to three
euros per hour in many sectors of the economy.” He argues that the
approximately €1.3bn cost of such measures could be mostly covered by a
reallocation of state revenues and crackdown on tax evasion – claims that have
raised howls of derision among financiers.
A recent charm
offensive in the City of London saw investors decrying the policies as unworkable
as and “worse than communism.” At best, critics quip, the plan is incomplete.
On the back of euro exit fears, the spectra of bank runs and capital flight has
resurfaced. But Milios remains unperturbed. Negotiations will be tough but
Syriza is well prepared with “an arsenal of arguments and weapons”.
Ending policies that
have pauperized Greeks is, he says, only one part of the equation. The other
will be dealing with Athens’s monumental debt pile – at €320bn, or 177% of GDP,
it is more than a third larger than it was at the crisis’s start. The leftists
have taken a leading role in putting the problem of public debt on a
pan-European level, proposing the extension of maturities on bonds held by the
ECB.
Where opponents speak
of naivety, an inevitable collision with the powers that be, the Marxists speak
of an historic opportunity to eradicate the politics of austerity both in and
beyond Greece.
“We will not deal with
this on a bilateral level with Germany but in a much wider context,” Milios emphasizes,
adding that the party was collaborating closely with Germany’s Die Linke and
other leftist groups, on the issue.
“More than 50% of
Greek debt needs to be written off,” says Milios. “The solution [of debt
forgiveness] that was given to Germany at the London conference in 1953 is what
we must do for Greece.”
The idea – put forward
by creditors – that a primary surplus could service a debt load of such scale,
was he said, “An enormous austerity trap that deprives society of valuable
resources.”
As a fluent German
speaker, with two PhDs earned in the country, Milios has already met Berlin’s
finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. He lets out an embarrassed laugh when talk
turns to his making frequent visits to Berlin. The great merry-go-round that is
the Athens rumor mill suggests the radicals have been jetting to and from the
German capital for brainstorming sessions with senior officials.
For no one is keener
than the German government to get to know them, too. If Syriza does come to
power there will be fears that its inexperience and lack of technical expertise
could be the tripwire to default. But many also recognised that in being so
removed from the vested interests that have stifled Greece – the endemic
problem of corruption does not pertain to Syriza – the radicals may well be the
force to change a country that has so far defied all attempts at reform.
Ultimately, Syriza’s biggest challenge may not be Angela Merkel but the
tortuous road it will have to take not to betray those who so want to see it in
power.
(Πηγή: theguardian.com)
