by PRAPHAT PATNAIK
Logo of the Greek political party SYRIZA IMAGE/Wikipedia
The victory of a Left Alliance, Syriza, in the Greek elections on January 25, was a matter of great significance, especially because that victory was based on a promise that Syriza would get rid of the memoranda imposing austerity on Greece by the “Troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF). Syriza’s victory was thus expressive of a popular revolt against neo-liberalism.
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In short, the basic premise upon which Syriza had been elected, namely getting rid of the domination of the “troika” has not been fulfilled; what has been achieved by the Syriza government however is a degree of leeway in carrying out its fiscal consolidation. In return for retaining their overall supervision of the Greek economy, the “troika” or the “institutions” as they have now started being called, have given the Syriza government a degree of freedom to have its own way of achieving fiscal consolidation, but subject to their approval.
The February 20 agreement, needless to say, has been widely debated. The Greek Communists and large segments of the Syriza itself have been opposed to it and termed it a climb down from Syriza’s election promise. The 92-year-old hero of the Greek resistance against Nazi occupation, Manolis Glezos, who had climbed atop the Acropolis in 1941 and torn down the Swastika and had been sentenced to death for it, in whose honour the Soviet government had issued a special postage stamp, and who is now a Syriza member of the European parliament, has gone to the extent of apologising to the Greek people for creating the illusion that the Syriza government would bring in a new dispensation devoid of the hegemony of the “troika”. On the other hand, several progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, have seen the agreement as a positive development, a step forward by the new Syriza government.
There can be no gainsaying that the Syriza government was facing an extremely difficult situation. Capital flight from Greece had started and unless there was a measure of reassurance, such as what the agreement has brought, there could well have been a run on the banks. True, the Syriza government, it could be argued, should have imposed capital controls to prevent capital flight and a run on the banks, but this might have meant an end to Greece’s Eurozone membership, which the bulk of the Greek people apparently do not want. Syriza’s real dilemma in other words arises from a contradiction in the attitudes of the Greek people themselves: on the one hand they want an end to “austerity”, but on the other hand they want to stay on in the Eurozone. And if the Syriza government has to operate, keeping these two constraints in mind, then, at least in the immediate context, it would be argued, it has succeeded in having a “truce” that gives it some breathing space to work out its longer-term strategy. The February 20 agreement between Greece and the “institutions” can then be seen as a “truce” that represents the best of a bad job for Syriza, and, despite falling woefully short of its electoral promises, at least keeps alive the possibility of Greece’s engaging its creditors in a fight four months down the line (for that is the length of this period of transition).
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