The banner flapped in the wind for almost a week, surviving the rigours of sun and sudden downpour. But on Tuesday night, as thousands of Greeks flooded into Constitution Square, Athens’s main meeting point, the slogan summed up the mood of the nation at the centre of Europe’s debt crisis.
“We want our life, we want our happiness, we want our dignity,” it declared. “So out with the thieves and out with the IMF [International Monetary Fund].”
A year after it was forced to accept the biggest bailout in Western history, a new, fearless spirit is stalking Greece. In Athens the spirit takes hold just before the sun has set. It is then that Greeks, young and old, married and single, employed and unemployed, flood the square in a wave of protest against the austerity and recession that has brought their country to the brink of despair.
“We say openly that we have been inspired by the demonstrators in Spain,” said Simos Adamopoulos, an organiser who has spent three nights sleeping in a tent on the square. “Our motto is ‘the battle that is never waged is never won’. We will stay here and in squares up and down the country, for as long as it takes.”
While even protesters admit their endgame remains unclear, their motivation beyond the realms of party or political creed has surprised even the most cynical.
On Tuesday night, the sixth day of protest, the rage looked poised to intensify as Greece’s international creditors put pressure on its squabbling political leaders to find a consensus over the need for yet more belt-tightening measures.
“If consensus is possible in Portugal and Ireland, how come it is not in Greece?” asked Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic affairs. “This is not a matter of political games but national destiny.”
Political agreement over additional spending cuts — and what will be one of the biggest privatisation programmes — is now seen as key to the European Union and IMF throwing Athens a second financial lifeline.
This week the main opposition conservative leader, Antonis Samaras, reiterated that he would refuse to throw his weight behind the “memorandum” outlining the terms of bailout until taxes were drastically reduced to restart the recession-hit economy and spur growth.
Barely 12 months after securing €110-billion of emergency loans to prop up their economy, Athens recently accepted that it would be unable to return to capital markets to service its borrowing needs.
Concerns over the looming credit crunch were heightened last week when the IMF warned it would withhold the next instalment of aid unless the EU guaranteed Athens’s funding needs for the year ahead.
A new aid package, worth about €65-billion, was believed to be the focus of behind-the-scenes talks on Wednesday, with EU sources saying it could involve a mixture of collateralised loans from the EU and IMF, additional revenue measures and outside supervision of Greece’s privatisation process, a step that is bound to stoke further tensions. —