Description
The Greek adjustment program was initiated in 2009 after statistics on budget deficit and public debt were found to have been subjected to prolonged and excessive creative accounting. No doubt the two parties (the conservative New Democracy and Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party) that had dominated politics since the restoration of democracy in 1974 have had a fair share in overspending and falsifying public accounts. As it is not uncommon, these two parties that had created the crisis were asked to solve it. They did so forming a coalition though the reasons for the failure to create a government of national unity can be debated – partly because the opposition took the non-cooperative populist attitude of “no to everything” that could have been a more sensible alternative. Frequent elections, one can argue some were not really needed, gave democratic legitimacy to the hastily put together adjustment program (rather successive programs) that was designed sporadically and implemented spasmodically defying the lessons of international experience, admittedly under pressure from the EU and the international lenders. The coalition’s attempt to combine austerity economics with political promises that paled those put forward by the opposition led to losing the elections in 2015 to another coalition between a self-proclaimed radical left party (SYRIZA), and a far right, albeit not Nazi, party (ANEL). Economic realities hit this opportunistic symbiosis that pursued and intensified the austerity measures already in place that resulted in convincingly losing the elections in 2019 to its perennial nemesis, the New Democracy party. This paper (a) briefly summarizes the policies and politics pursued till 2015; (b) traces the 2015-2019 measures that combined austerity economics with populist claims that all was done “with the weak in mind”; (c) identifies the economic inconsistencies and ideological contradictions of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition; (d) argues that it is still debatable whether the deepest and longest recession in modern history was the result of economic incompetence or the self-serving personal interests bordering treason of Greek politicians that, according to the IMF, succeeded at ring-fencing the euro against a sovereign Greek default at costs that fell almost exclusively on Greek citizens; and (e) concludes that, as SYRIZA has failed to bring the change it promised, what the future of left leaning policies can be.
