While Violence was raging in the streets of Athens and Syndagma square in front of the Greek Parliament was being destroyed for the 3rd or 4th time in 2 years by angry protesters wearing hoods, the Greek MPs voted with a slight majority 155 (out of 300) in favour of asking for the new loan by the IMF and the EU and in favour of a series of new frugality measures including a tax reform, privatising public entreprises, reducing the size of the public sector, cutting down the costs of the state, introducing an unemployment fund for freelance professionals, and other measures (to be voted in detail today 30 June 2011 in Parliament)
While most blogs and the left wing parties accuse the police for excessive brutality (indeed the videos above are eloquent) a well known columnist (Pashos Mandravelis) in the major centre right wing Athens daily Kathimerini praises the 155 MPs who voted yesterday in favour of the government’s plan and did not let the country go bankrupt with facile promises of easy solutions that are not there. Mandravelis notes that it is neither pleasant nor easy to take such decisions like the 155 MPs did while it is easier to abstain or to vote no, without however proposing a viable alternative.
While I outrightly condemn police violence which together with extreme left and right wing violence by small groupings of ‘koukouloforoi’ has become endemic in the last few years in Greece (when did it start actually ? and why? in 2008? or earlier? there is room for a serious sociological analysis here), I believe that Mandravelis is right.
We Greeks can no longer be free riders in wonderland, as Constantine Tsoukalas (a well known, also internationally, Greek sociologist) was writing in 1993 already! What some of the ‘aganaktismenoi’ (the fed up citizens camping in Syndagma square in the past weeks) shout: Den plirono Den plirono (I won’t pay, I won’t pay) just does not… PAY any more! we cannot go on accusing others – each individual citizen accusing the other citizens, the elites, the MPs, the party rank and file, the fonctionnaires (even if s/he is a fonctionnaire her/himself) while all together accusing the … Europeans who knew our statistics was fake but did not stop us earlier, the banks that make profit, the Euro for being tough, capitalism for being unfair, and life for being a.. bitch!
Certainly there are issues that need to be addressed: the Euro system needs institutional reform!
Also: Greece has been taking loans for 20-30 years now which it has largely reinvested back in buying armaments from Germany and France (and the USA) – including defective armaments – buying industrial products from the strong exporting EU economies, allowing multinational companies to invest in the major public works in the country without striking interesting deals with them. But at the same time the public money embezzlement and the lack of reforms so far is of our own making.
Indeed we needed a threat to bankruptcy to reform our pension system. Everybody knew it was not viable but each individual hoped that s/he would still be able to go to pension with favourable terms – the reform would start after them. But this ‘after’ was never coming!
The threat of bankruptcy is still not enough to help us build an efficient tax collection system. No matter how hard the government tries, tax offices personnel resists. They have been used to easy (illicit) money – the system is hard to change.
The horizontal cuts of the government make the honest tax payer feel two times stupid: We paid and still pay the largest share while the free riders enjoy the wonderland.
The only good reason in my view for voting in favour of the new austerity AND reforms programme is a hope that THERE WILL BE REFORMS and that these reforms will willy nilly impose to the majority of civically disobedient and fed up Greeks a change in direction and a change in mentality.
Euroland is no wonderland unfortunately. And a Marshall Plan for Greece should not bring just money but also ideas, and a change in civic culture!