“A week is a long time in politics” said former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s and, never was it truer than this week!
Last Sunday the majority of Greeks were feeling proud and ecstatic that they had stood up to Berlin and said a loud OXI (no) to proposals for more austerity.
Those with empathy for the plight of ordinary Greeks were delighted and believed that with this resounding mandate Athens would go to Brussels and demand a fairer deal. Left-leaning commentators and economists drew parallels with Germany’s enormous debt write-off after the Second World War when their debt to GDP ratio went from 200% to 20% providing a huge boost to the German economy driving it to the status of economic super power. The IMF even admitted that a write off of Greek debt is inevitable.
Sadly Brussels wasn’t having any of it.
Schäuble of Germany and finance ministers of other smaller, northern and eastern members of the Eurozone block, like Finland, are going for the Greek jugular.
First they made it clear to Tsipras that there would be no negotiations at all unless Finance Minister Varoufakis was removed. So on Monday he left, proving once more that in the battle between democracy and money, money wins every time.
Then talking openly of Grexit and to the shock of everyone watching the story unfold, they intimidated Tsipras into capitulating and agreeing to a more or less duplicate copy of Brussels’ original demands which he even managed to convince the Greek parliament to accept, including most of his own MPs, somehow ignoring the NO vote just days before.
Now it seems that even this is no longer good enough for Schäuble, and his preference is to push Greece out of the Euro.
Varoufakis, commenting on the Guardian website, said, “To exit, we would have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the US military’s might, three printing firms and hundreds of trucks.”
There are 2 choices facing Greece now:
- Accept austerity for at least one generation, maybe two, and do exactly what Schäuble and his banking friends say, turning Greece into a third world country in the process.
- Announce a default on their debt repayments, adopt a new currency, get the hell out of the Eurozone and rebuild the economy like Argentina did while learning from their mistakes.
For the sake of the Greeks, let’s hope that it’s option 2 and let’s hope that this has been Tsipras’s and Varoufakis’s game all along and that the subject of recent trips to Russia and regular conversations with Putin have been about checking on the progress of the three clandestine printing firms producing lorries full of beautiful new drachma.
