Austerity bites in Greece
Residents sink deeper into poverty as leaders prepare for more bailout negotiations
Greek pensioner Dimitra says she never imagined a life reduced to food handouts: some rice, two bags of pasta, a packet of chickpeas, some dates and a tin of milk for the month.
At 73, Dimitra — who herself once helped the hard-up as a Red Cross food server — is among a growing number of Greeks barely getting by. After seven years of bailouts that poured billions of euros into their country, poverty isn’t getting any better; it’s getting worse like nowhere else in the European Union.
“It had never even crossed my mind,” she said, declining to give her last name because of the stigma still attached to accepting handouts in Greece. “I lived frugally. I’ve never even been on holiday. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Now more than half of her 332 ($491) monthly income goes to renting a tiny Athens apartment. The rest: bills.
The global financial crisis and its fallout forced four eurozone countries to turn to international lenders. Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus all went through rescues and are back out, their economies growing again. But Greece, the first into a bailout in 2010, has needed three.
Rescue funds from the European Union and International Monetary Fund saved Greece from bankruptcy, but the austerity and reform policies the lenders attached as conditions have helped to turn recession into a depression.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose leftist-led Government is lagging in opinion polls, has tried to make the plight of Greeks a rallying cry in the latest round of drawn-out negotiations with the lenders blocking the release of more aid.
“We must all be careful towards a country that has been pillaged and people who have made, and are continuing to make, so many sacrifices in the name of Europe,” he said this month.
Much of the vast sums in aid money has simply been in the form of new debt used to repay old borrowings. But regardless of who is to blame for the collapse in living standards, poverty figures from the EU statistics agency are startling.
Greece isn’t the poorest member of the EU; poverty rates are higher in Bulgaria and Romania. But Greece isn’t far behind in third place, with Eurostat data showing 22.2 per cent of the population were “severely materially deprived” in 2015.
And whereas the figures have dropped sharply in the postcommunist Balkan states — by almost a third in Romania’s case — the Greek rate has almost doubled since 2008, the year the global crisis erupted. The reality of such statistics becomes clear at places like the food bank run by the Athens municipality where Dimitra collects her monthly handouts. “The needs are huge,” said Eleni Katsouli, a municipal official in charge of the centre.
International organisations, including the Organisation for Econom- ic Co-operation and Development, have urged the government to prioritise tackling poverty and inequality.
Unemployment has slipped from a peak of 28 per cent of the workforce to 23 per cent but the rate remains the highest in the EU.
Yesterday, Greece and its European creditors agreed to resume talks on what economic reforms the country must make next in order to get the money it needs to avoid bankruptcy and a potential exit from the euro this year.
The creditors also hinted that they would temper their demands for budget cuts — a welcome thought for austerity-weary Greeks.