After an historic victory in Greece one week ago, the leftist Syriza party’s finance minister has begun a tour of Europe to push an anti-austerity message. The former economist, Yanis Varoufakis, has promised radical change as his government seeks to renegotiate Greece’s huge debt obligations and to roll back key parts of its international bailout. After talks in France this weekend, he’s set to meet with his counterparts in London today and in Rome later this week.
Varoufakis said Greece was, quote, “desperate” for money. But he insisted it would not seek a seven billion [euro] installment on its 240 billion euro bailout package, because that would require the country to adhere to austerity measures. This comes as the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said he was confident Greece could reach a deal with creditors.
Costas Panayotakis talking:
in Greece, this is a big deal, because Greece has had a civil war just, you know, after World War II, and the fact that many mainstream people, who traditionally have nothing to do with the left, actually voted for the first time for the left shows how dire the situation has become and how desperate the people have become for change.
people said enough is enough. And the policies that have been followed made the conservative party, mainly, and the socialist party, lose the people in the middle class, which has been decimated by these policies, so they lost much of their base.
Syriza is an acronym, which in Greek means “coalition of the radical left.” So, it’s a coalition that grew out of the anti-globalization movement in the late ’90s. The sort of—the most important component of the party goes back to the sort Eurocommunist movement of the 1970s. And over the time, it has become the voice against austerity in Greece. And in a matter of just, you know, three years, it rose meteorically from a small party that barely made it into Parliament to getting 36 percent of the vote in the recent election.
what they want to do is basically to stop the austerity program that was imposed on Greece in 2010 and to roll back many of the structural changes that came with that, because this austerity program is not just about budget cuts and, you know, eliminating the budget deficit, it’s also about restructuring Greek society and Greek economy towards a sort of free-market, neoliberal model that basically has led to the crashes of 2008 around the world and that has led to, you know, increasing inequalities around the world and in Greece.
May 2012 election. Already people had expressed their dismay, their sort of anger with austerity at that time. But what happened in the election that followed immediately in June, basically, the conservative party managed to get power through scare tactics, by basically threatening people that if the left won, Greece would be thrown out of the eurozone. And they tried the same tactic in this recent election, but it didn’t work as well for them this time around.
Greece’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has promised radical change as his government begins to roll back key parts of Greece’s international bailout. The government has put off the planned sale of the country’s biggest power utility, while pledging to raise pensions for those on low incomes and reinstate some fired public-sector workers.
Alexis Tsipras is a young, very charismatic politician. And he has been able to unite the party. This was a party that in the past had sort of suffered from a lot of infighting. And it has managed to basically steer the party towards a credible alternative to the policies of austerity that have devastated Greek society.
There’s a growing recognition within Europe and in the U.S. that the austerity strategy preferred by the German political class is not working, and in fact it is threatening to drag down the global economy. So, there are growing rifts within Europe. There is rift between Germany and France and Italy, which are also trying to resist the prioritization of deficit reduction above all else. So, this—and, of course, there’s the rift between the political elites and people around Europe, who are sort of getting inspiration from Syriza. And we have other movements—the rise of the left in Spain, in Ireland. So, I think there is an opening that has been created, and it’s up to the European left and the social movements there to take advantage of it.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said, “We did not come here to take over institutions and to enjoy the trappings of power. We have come to radically change the way in which politics and governance is carried out in this country.”
the rise of Syriza signifies the bankruptcy of the political class in Greece, which has been—for very long, it has been very close to the Greek oligarchy, which has contributed to the crisis by not basically paying its fair share when it comes to taxes. So, what he wants to signify is that he wants to do things differently and to counter the cynicism that exists among many Greek voters, who have seen progressive parties in the past win elections—for example, the socialists back in ’81—and then they saw these parties basically disappoint, become corrupt, and corrupted by power.
Last week, Greece’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, visited a World War II National Resistance Memorial in his first outing as the country’s new leader. The memorial is located at the site where the Nazis executed 200 Greek communist resistance fighters in May 1944. During the recent campaign, Tsipras called on Germany to pay Greece reparations for damages incurred during the Nazi occupation. A 2013 governmental study determined Germany owed Greece an estimated $200 billion.
One of the proposals that Tsipras and Syriza have made is that what is needed is a conference, a European-wide conference, that would deal with European-wide debt and allow countries to basically stand on their feet by basically writing off debt, much as Europe and the U.S. did to Germany in 1953. So I think it’s a way of signaling, pointing to the history that exists behind the rise of Germany and the way that Germany was able to stand on its feet after the World War II by basically the rest of the world being generous towards it. And, you know, I think the feeling in Greece and Syriza is that, you know, something similar has to be done on a European-wide scale if this ongoing crisis is to be overcome.
at the beginning of the crisis, the creditors were mainly—you know, it was the private sector, European banks. In many ways, the bailout, even though it was presented at the time as a bailout of profligate and lazy Greeks, it was really a bailout of European banks. Now, there has been already a restructuring of the Greek debt. And by now, most of the debt is held by the different European countries, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. So, basically, one of the complications is, there is a lot of resistance to writing off the Greek debt, because, of course, the governments of European countries would have to deal with, you know, the discontent by their voters if money was to be lost. But at the same time, basically, what Syriza and other powers of—rising powers of the left in Europe are saying is that, ultimately, when you have debt that is not sustainable, this will hobble your economic performance forever, and you will not be able to grow. And if you don’t grow, you will not be able to repay your debt.
the media coverage in Greece was interesting because there was a lot of fearmongering by the media that was controlled by the oligarchs. I think there was a lot of fearmongering in the 2012 election. The Financial Times at the time had an article in its first page in Greek to try to dissuade voters from voting for Syriza. I think this time around there was some fearmongering by international media, but it was a little more balanced. I think people had come to accept the fact that Syriza was going to probably win. And Syriza has and Tsipras had tried to sort of tone down his rhetoric as a way of reassuring people outside Greece that he was not an enemy of Europe, but was trying to try a different strategy so as to—that would be more effective than the strategies that have been attempted so far.
— source democracynow.org
Costas Panayotakis, professor of sociology at the New York City College of Technology at CUNY. He is the author of Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy.