Greece emerges from bailouts relieved, but not euphoric
ATHENS: The youngest Greeks may not be able to remember what life was like beforehand: the third and last of the country’s international bailouts comes to an end today and while Greece is faring better, it still bears the scars of eight years of austerity.
After Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus, Greece was the last eurozone member to benefit from an international bailout program in the fallout from the eurozone crisis.
In three successive programs — 2010, 2012 and 2015 — the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund loaned debt-wracked Greece a total 289 billion euros ($330 billion). But the economic reforms its creditors demanded in return almost brought the country to its knees, with a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP) evaporating over eight years and unemployment soaring to more than 27 percent. The economy is now expanding and the jobless rate in May was back below 20 percent for the first time since 2011.
But “it would be arrogant to say that we did everything right in Greece”, said Klaus Regling, head of the European Stability Mechanism, which is in charge of the current program, in a German magazine interview last week.
Regling told the online edition of the weekly Der Spiegel that he felt “tremendous respect” for the Greeks, whose salaries and pensions had been cut by as much as a third during the crisis. Nevertheless, many economists, such as Theodoros Stamatiou of Eurobank, argued that while bailout programs were “unavoidable” in a country lagging far behind in reforms, they were also too harsh.
No new collapse
Leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his then Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis tried to soften the terms of the second program when they came into power in January 2015. But despite the resounding “No” of the Greek population to the international creditors in a public referendum, Tsipras-faced with a possible ejection of Greece from the single currency area-was compelled to sign a third bailout program the following July. Nonetheless, all of Greece’s major political parties, including Tsipras’s Syriza, are convinced of the need for serious reforms. Economics professor Nikos Vettas regards this as a favorable development and says that “nobody really thinks any more that Greece will collapse”, a view that appears to be widely shared.