Desperate suffering awaits a people who have chosen easy lies over uncomfortable truths
The image that best captures what has happened in Greece in the last week is not the young Greeks dancing in Athens fountains, celebrating their defiance,
or the stirring words of their hero and prime minister, Alexis Tsipras.
It is Zoe Konstantopoulou, the speaker of the Greek parliament, her
face a mask of fanaticism, as she gave a raised fist salute to her
ground troops, the ranks of the young and unemployed, in Syntagma Square
last Thursday.
Greece’s
populist coalition of radical leftists, Syriza and hard-Right
nationalists, the Independent Greeks, have turned the 40 per cent they
won in January’s elections into a more than 60 perccent landslide of a
referendum victory. They have done this without delivering any of the
programme of minimum wage hikes, taxes on the tycoons or social justice
they promised. They now have a vague popular mandate that will be wielded like a bludgeon against their remaining critics inside the country.
More
than, Tsipras, the charming demagogue, Konstantopoulou reveals Syriza’s
real intentions. She has undermined the independence of Greece’s central
bank, publicly hectoring its sober Governor Yannis Stournaras;
she has openly bullied the private media. When it appeared that her
colleagues might lose their nerve last week and backtrack on the
referendum, she closed parliament to prevent the vote that would have
enabled this.
Konstantopoulou,
along with the orthodox Marxist wing of Syriza led by Panagiotis
Lafazanis, the energy minister, do not envisage a Greece of structural
reforms in return for soft loans from the foreign creditors. Their
vision, which one businessman dubbed “Lafazanistan”, is a fully
nationalised economy in which all key institutions can be made
subordinate to their extremist political narrative.
There is no majority in Greece for their programme, which means a hard default on Greece’s debt pile and a return to the Drachma, so the referendum was framed as a question of national pride. Will you vote for humiliation and surrender, or defiance and a better deal? The last part of that is a cruel deception that will start to unravel with nationalisation of Greece’s systemic banks as early as next week.
Tsipras, left with a choice of
breaking up Syriza in order to secure a deal with Greece’s creditors or
gambling Greece’s entire economy, chose to sacrifice the national
interest. The Greeks have been taken as willing hostages by a government
which has disguised its own incompetence and extremist ideology as
heroism.
The buffoonish defence minister, Panos Kammenos, whose Right-wing rabble, the Independent Greeks, have for years insisted that Greeks are being sprayed with mind-altering chemicals, can now make veiled threats that the armed forces stand ready to guarantee internal security.
Bold promises evaporate, assurances that capital controls will not be imposed prove unfounded. Syriza immunised itself against the consequences of its own lies and miscalculations by invoking foreign stooges, who are to blame for everything that happens. Desperate suffering awaits a people who have chosen easy lies over uncomfortable truths. Their Balkan neighbours are queuing up to warn them where the populists are leading them but for now their voices are not being heard.
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Creditors will gain nothing from toppling Varoufakis
There is no majority in Greece for their programme, which means a hard default on Greece’s debt pile and a return to the Drachma, so the referendum was framed as a question of national pride. Will you vote for humiliation and surrender, or defiance and a better deal? The last part of that is a cruel deception that will start to unravel with nationalisation of Greece’s systemic banks as early as next week.
The buffoonish defence minister, Panos Kammenos, whose Right-wing rabble, the Independent Greeks, have for years insisted that Greeks are being sprayed with mind-altering chemicals, can now make veiled threats that the armed forces stand ready to guarantee internal security.
Bold promises evaporate, assurances that capital controls will not be imposed prove unfounded. Syriza immunised itself against the consequences of its own lies and miscalculations by invoking foreign stooges, who are to blame for everything that happens. Desperate suffering awaits a people who have chosen easy lies over uncomfortable truths. Their Balkan neighbours are queuing up to warn them where the populists are leading them but for now their voices are not being heard.
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Creditors will gain nothing from toppling Varoufakis
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