On Friday, February 20th Greece signed a joint statement with the Eurogroup of Finance Ministers which amounts to an abandonment of the programme on which Syriza won the election on January 25, as well as government policy statements made since then. What are the details of the deal?
On January 25th Greece will vote in a general election. Syriza is likely to be the party voted to power. This poses a dilemma for the European capitalists as one part of their machine, bourgeois democracy, risks colliding with another, their programme of austerity, which has been visited upon the Greek people for the past five years. This is seen as a serious threat to the plans of the rulers of Europe to solve the economic crisis by an all-out attack on the living standards of the working class.
The Greek and international bourgeois media orchestrated a huge terror campaign, painting a picture of economic chaos and collapse if Syriza were to win the elections. Thus, by a small margin, New Democracy (ND) scraped into first place. However, the rise of Syriza, despite all this, indicates the continuing shift to the left in Greek society. Now ND will attempt to form a coalition government with the PASOK, which will be one of continued austerity. Nothing has been solved; the problem has only been postponed. All the conditions are being prepared for a victory of Syriza in the near future. Here we publish a comment on the elections, written by the Greek Marxists in the course of today.
As we write these lines the Papandreou government is staggering towards collapse. In a matter of days the whole situation has been thrown into turmoil. Only last week, eurozone leaders were congratulating each other on agreeing a €100bn loan to Athens and a 50% write-off of its mountain of debt. Governments cheered. Stock exchanges rose on the announcement of the deal. And politicians breathed a sigh of relief. A few days later and everything turned into its opposite. The Greek deal was rapidly unravelling. Markets were tumbling. Governments were cursing. And politicians were predicting imminent disaster for the euro.
Since the crisis in Greece has hit the headlines there have appeared in the bourgeois media many stories about how Greece has too many civil servants, how the working week is very short, how people retire early on fat pensions, and so on, as if this were the cause of the crisis. Facts and figures, however, can be very stubborn things and they tell a completely different story.
