Vicky Pryce, author of Greekonomics: The Euro Crisis and Why Politicians Don't Get It, believes that the recent elections across Europe will embolden the Greeks, and send a message that austerity alone is not enough.
On a beautiful sunny Sunday on May 6 , just two days ago, where the weather called for the Greeks to hit the beaches, over 65% of eligible voters opted to go to exercise their voting rights. Locking up the elders at home to prevent them from casting votes in favour of the two traditional parties, as a recent joke suggested, did little to avert the catastrophic result for the incumbent socialists of PASOK, who earned 13% of the popular vote, translating into 48 seats, and the opposition conservatives of New Democracy with 19% of the vote and 101 seats. The two together are 2 seats short of a fragile Parliamentary majority.
In between them lays SYRIZA, the coalition of leftists and communists, with 17% of the vote, now officially the Opposition. Its leader, Alex Tsipras, is the only political leader under 40 years old. His party spoke to the unemployed youth, the working class and the public servants, easily prevailing in the district of Attica (Athens and Piraeus), home to 40% of the registered voters. The Far Right and the Neo-Nazis together gathered 17.5% of the popular votes, with the hard line Communists earning 8.5% and the splinter socialists another 6%, thus shaping the 300 seat new Parliament. The real winner of this election, however, with a cumulative 20%, are the myriad of parties that didn’t make the 3% cut to enter Parliament.
In this schizophrenic environment of austerity and risk of default, earlier polls showed that 70% of Greeks want to be part of the EU and remain in the Eurozone, while 70%, again, object to the austerity measures and 5 consecutive years of recession that has brought down the nation’s GDP by 25% and raised unemployment to 25% (50% among the youth).With real poverty suffered by many and at the doorstep for others, the Greeks expressed themselves at the polls.
As I witnessed at the Athens coastal suburb where I took my 18 year old niece Afroditi to vote for the first time in her life, the noisy crowd gathered, caring little about Greece’s ability to meet the deadlines of the bailout conditions in order to receive the next tranche of €29 billion due this June. They all, whatever their political persuasion, just wanted one thing: “allaghi”, meaning “change”! They now have to see it through.
With their vote on Sunday, the Greeks ended 38 years of two-party dominance. It was a vote of protest against those who brought them to this state of misery and disregard. They denied them their unequivocal claim to rule them through nepotism, favouritism and corruption. They shouted what they don’t want: The austerity package imposed on Greece by the ‘troika' of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. But they are not ready yet to call for what they want, other than the obvious need to restructure the bailout, to lighten the pain and provide for job-creating growth. The transition from a culture nurtured for decades of, ‘I exist therefore I get paid’ to the ethic of, ‘I produce, therefore I earn’, will take a lot of undoing and redoing.
So where does Greece go from here?
The process to try and form a government started on Monday. Samaras, the leader of the conservative New Democracy , the largest party ,was given three days to do so and 5 hours later gave up! The baton is now with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the rather left wing Syriza, who is expected to take his allotted time to see what he can negotiate with the other left of centre parties. But this is unlikely to get him anywhere. Finally Venizelos, the leader of Pasok, will also be asked to see what he can do and if he is serious about it he will try and form a pro- Europe alliance but with the mandate to renegotiate some of the terms of the austerity package.
But arguably no party leader would really want to risk his and his party’s political future as part of a Government subservient to the Troika, and responsible for the implementation of unpopular measures. So new elections could happen soon, which may prove equally inconclusive, thus plunging Greece further into crisis. But would it not be much better if they all deferred again instead to a National Unity government under the technocrat economist outgoing PM, Loukas Papademos, who enjoys the respect of the Greeks, its creditors and the international political establishment. He could have – and should have had, like in Italy – a one year mandate to conclude the fiscal and structural reforms, albeit lightened by a renewed sensitivity for its failures, and deliver the country to a new era of politicians cured of most of the diseases that brought it to the verge of catastrophe.
Inevitably Greece’s position in the Euro will be, once again, a hotly debated issue. But the Greeks don’t want to leave and most Eurozone countries and institutions want them to stay. Most likely, therefore, is that something else will give: the bailout package and its conditions will be re-examined and the Greeks will feel emboldened by the election of Francois Hollande in France and the change in the tone of others in Europe in favour of growth policies, particularly Draghi, the head of the ECB, the European Commission in the shape of Olli Rehn and Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF. The recent elections across Europe, and in Greece in particular, have given a clear warning that austerity alone will not do.