Alexis
Tsipras has snatched resounding victory from the jaws of July’s humiliating
surrender to the troika of Greece’s lenders. Defying opposition parties,
opinion pollsters and critics within his ranks (including this writer), he held
on to government with a reduced, albeit workable, majority. The question is
whether he can combine remaining in office with being in power.
The greatest winner is the troika itself.
During the past five years, troika-authored bills made it through Parliament on
ultra slim majorities, giving their authors sleepless nights. Now, the bills
necessary to prop up the third ‘bailout’ will pass with comfortable majorities,
as SYRIZA is committed to them. Almost every opposition MP (with the exception
of the communists of KKE and the Nazis of Golden Dawn) is also on board.
Of course, to get to this point Greek
democracy has had to be deeply wounded (1.6 million Greeks who voted in the
July referendum did not bother to turn
up at the polling stations on Sunday) - no great loss to bureaucrats in
Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington DC for whom democracy appears, in any case,
a nuisance.
Alexis Tsipras must now implement a fiscal
consolidation and reform programme that was designed to fail. Illiquid small
businesses, with no access to capital markets, have to now pre-pay next year’s
tax on their projected 2016 profits. Households will need to fork out
outrageous property taxes on non-performing apartments and shops, which they
cannot even sell. Substantial VAT rate hikes will boost VAT evasion. Week in
week out, the troika will be demanding more recessionary, anti-social policies:
pension cuts, lower child benefits, more foreclosures.
The Prime Minister’s plan for weathering
this storm is founded on three pledges. 1. The agreement with the troika is
unfinished business, leaving room for further negotiation of important details;
2. debt relief will follow soon and 3. Greece’s oligarchs will be tackled. Voters supported Tsipras because he appeared
the most likely candidate to deliver on these promises. The trouble is, his
capacity to do so is severely circumscribed by the agreement he has already
signed.
Regarding the first promise, his power to
negotiate is negligible given the agreement’s clear condition that the Greek
government must “…agree with the [troika] on all actions relevant for the
achievement of the objectives of the Memorandum of Understanding…” (Notice the
absence of any commitment by the troika to agree with the Greek government!)
On the second issue, debt relief will
undoubtedly come, in some form, but not in a therapeutic manner. Debt relief is
important in that it allows for less austerity (i.e. lower primary surplus
targets) to boost demand and stir up investors’ ‘animal spirits’. However,
harsh austerity has already been agreed (absurd primary surpluses of 3.5% of
GDP from 2018 onwards), deterring sensible investors.
The third promise is key to Tsipras’
success. Having accepted a new extend-and-pretend loan that limits the
government’s capacity to reduce austerity and look after the weak, the
surviving raison d’ être of a left-wing administration is to tackle noxious
vested interests. However, the troika is the oligarchs’ best friend, and vice
versa. During the first six months of 2015, when we were challenging the
troika’s monopoly over policy-making powers in Greece, its greatest domestic
supporters were the oligarch-owned media and their political agents. The same
people and interests who have now embraced Tsipras! Can he turn against them? I
think he wants to but the troika has already ensured that his main weapons have
been disabled (with for example the disbandment of the economic crime fighting
unit, SDOE).
In 2014 the conservative Prime Minister,
Antonis Samaras, found himself in the same conundrum of having to implement a
failed troika program. He resorted to a strategy of feigning allegiance to the
troika while stonewalling and petitioning the troika for laxity, lest SYRIZA
wins government.
Will Tsipras have more success in faking
commitment to another failed troika programme? The prospects are not looking
bright but we should not write Alexis off. Samaras’ fiasco was due to the
ultra-right-wing company he kept and his hobnobbing with the oligarchs.
Tsipras’ fate will depend on whether his new government remains connected with
the victims of its troika agreement, implements genuine reforms to give bona
fide business some confidence to invest, and uses the intensification of the
crisis to demand real concessions from Brussels. It is a tall order. But then
again victory, however sweet, is not the point. The point is to make a
difference.
Speaking of difference, the conservative
opposition party tried its best to project a softer, calmer image during the
campaign. Alas, they could not help themselves as the refugee crisis forced
their misanthropy to the surface. A comparison between the welcome afforded to
the thousands of ship-wrecked people in recent weeks with the concentration
camps built by the Samaras government explains why disappointed progressives
swung back to SYRIZA in the polling stations.
In rare moments of inexplicable optimism I
like to imagine that kindness to strangers in trouble may just be the harbinger
of a renewed Greek government campaign against the troika’s dystopian vision of
Europe.
Πηγή:
yanisvaroufakis.eu
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