It’s the meeting that
had to happen. A radical left-wing Greek prime minister and a centre-right
German chancellor whose ministers have been urging her to throw Greece out of
the eurozone and impose “the rules”.
I was told last week
that the meeting itself is “a sideshow”: the Greeks feel progress has been made
in the back channels of the Eurogroup, and at the five-way meeting last
Thursday night, towards the politicians imposing a political solution on the
central banks and technocrats they see as applying “the rules” too rigidly.
But Mrs Merkel and Mr
Tsipras can do a lot this afternoon by aligning messages. Since they have both
seen ministers taunting the other’s electorate with their own determination to
win this face off, aligning messages is a big ask.
Effectively Mrs Merkel
will need to say there is progress, that flexibility for Greece is emerging and
that Germany believes the Greek government is acting in good faith a it slowly
puts flesh on the bones on its domestic plans. Mr Tsipras will have to indicate
he accepts she’s speaking with good faith.
But make no mistake:
if things don’t come to a speedy conclusion in this first round of Greek debt
renegotiation, they will spiral out of control. Mr Tsipras wrote to Mr Merkel,
and other leaders, last Thursday warning that if Europe did not release monies
due to Greece, it would be forced to choose between repaying IMF debt and
paying the salaries of civil servants (and would choose the latter).
Geopolitics
Mr Tsipras has only
two cards to play: the first is geopolitics. The US State Department has been
forcefully warning the Germans not to destroy Greece - which is the easternmost
historic NATO power. It is 500km away as the missile flies from Sebastopol and
one border away from Islamic State militants.
The second is the rise
of the far left and right in Europe’s bigger, heartland countries. In Spain,
Podemos - a party much more radically “Horizontalist” than Syriza, and drawn
from devotees of direct action - won 15 seats in the Andalusian regional
assembly, and will hold the balance of power there. In France the Front
National beat the ruling socialists into second place on Sunday, in nationwide
local elections.
Though the mainstream
parties have held back the far left and right insurgencies so far, any
demonstrative crushing of Greece by the European centre would boost the
narrative they feed on: that European centrist politics represents an
unflinching elite. In the end, what happens in this phase of the Greek crisis
is just the prelude. The real negotiation will be about debt relief for Greece -
which €320bn has a mountain of largely unpayable debt.
Greek economy
Extend and pretend
only works on a problem like that if you get growth: extend the repayment times,
pretend Greece is solvent, and eventually growth erodes the debt pile. But the
Greek economy is being hammered by lack of cash: businesses that cannot borrow
to invest or cover bills; banks whose deposits have shrunk as savers anticipate
a Cyprus style seizure of their money at the behest of the ECB.
So while the substance
of today’s meeting may be slight - any slip into confrontational rhetoric would
be a disaster. It is entirely possible that the Greek state runs out of money
in April, and has to default unwillingly on debts it is committed to pay.
That would not equal
the “hard default” advocated by those who want Greece to leave the Euro, but it
would destabilize the entire continent’s finance system.
For in the end, the
very institutions that are driving Greece to the edge of bankruptcy are the
ones formally charged with overseeing its banks and its continued solvency.
Ultimately it comes down to whether the German political elite is prepared to
go further than it has already to create space for Greece within the single
currency. Mr Tsipras has the right at least, in private, to ask for Ms Merkel’s
frank assessment as to whether it does.
(Πηγή: blogs.channel4.com)
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου