Greeks are a proud people with powerful unions and a history of street protests. It is a volatile mix for a nation that is in dire economic straits and that has plunged the eurozone into its worst crisis. Worse still for the EU’s political and economic elite, they are also among the continent’s poorest citizens.
But on the streets of Athens on Monday, as striking customs officials led the backlash against EU-backed public-sector cuts, Greeks were in agreement about one thing: austerity measures, they said, had to be imposed if the debt-ridden country was to get out of its fiscal mess.
“Most now accept that making sacrifices has become a necessary evil,” said Vangelis Paleologos, working in a city centre café. “After all the bad news, all this talk about bankruptcy and debts and deficits, it’s clear such measures should have been taken years ago.”
For the government the key to success was “social justice”. “Our economy is on the verge of catastrophe and we’re all ready to give what we have to give as long as the burden is shared out equally,” said Andreas Tsintselis, the owner of a jewellery shop. “The spending cuts and tax increases should not only affect the poor. The rich have got to contribute too.”
After ousting the conservatives with a landslide election victory last October, the ruling socialists inherited a crisis, discovering that at 12,7% of GDP the public deficit was nearly twice as large as originally thought.
The tough belt-tightening measures they have since been forced to announce — freezing state jobs, raising the pension age, slashing bonuses and broadening tax revenues with hikes and clampdowns — have rolled back all of their pre-election pledges.
But with public support for the policies also reflected in polls — approval ratings for the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou have not dipped below 70% — the government appears to have the backing to enforce them. Socialist MPs this week spoke of the “surprising maturity” Greeks have shown in the face of the crisis.
On Tuesday the government received another good omen when farmers who had barricaded roads and border crossings for the past month to press demands for €1-billion in extra subsidies, finally bowed down. The last blockades were removed from the frontier Greece shares with Bulgaria after the agriculture minister again refused to give in to their demands, insisting there was “simply no money to give them”.
But the spectre of social unrest still looms. Tuesday’s crippling walk-out by customs officials was the first in a series of a wave of strikes that will test the government’s resolve to implement its deficit-cutting plan.
Although the severity of the crisis appears to be hitting home — amid relentless media coverage of the state’s near-empty public coffers — analysts said it was still too early to gauge the reaction Greeks might have to further drastic cuts that EU finance ministers warned might have to be made if the measures failed.
“Greeks realise that they have to make sacrifices to overcome the crisis and that in itself is unprecedented,” said pollster Kostas Panagopoulos. “But the question is how many are they willing to make when every day we hear of the need for new measures to be taken.” – guardian.co.uk