Euphoria meets disbelief
Germany not amused at No vote in Greece
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called Sunday’s referendum outcome, which robustly repudiated the European Union’s bailout offer, a “triumph for democracy.”
It was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory.
Tsipras’s Hail Mary pass may have given the country a feel-good moment, but it left Greece’s long list of creditors and the continent’s leading political players unamused and unmoved. Greece will still have to accept the conditions of its erstwhile partners or it will surely soon be kicked out of the eurozone and into far deeper quicksand than the mud it wallows in today.
The first sign that Sunday’s referendum will likely be nothing more than a balm for Greece’s wounded pride came early Monday. Tsipras’s abrasive finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, resigned. In character to the end, the English and Australian-educated economist left office shouting, “I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.”
Varoufakis’s successor, Euclid Tsakalotos, who was named after the father of geometry, will need all his namesake’s brilliance and then some to keep Greece from drowning in a sea of red ink.
Varoufakis’s sudden departure added another dimension to the perverse schizophrenia that prevailed across Greece on Monday. Queues at the few ATMs that still have euros left to dispense were longer than they had been when panic first began to set in last week. With the country’s banks all still closed for the foreseeable future, those anxious souls waiting grimly for their daily stipend of 60 euros ($84) exchanged dark rumours about exactly when the machines that they have come to regard as a lifeline would run out of treasure. Most of the guessing was that that moment would arrive some time on Tuesday or Wednesday.
At the same time, a party atmosphere continued to reign throughout much of the centre of the capital as those who voted No in the referendum proudly told each other and anyone else who could bear to listen that the cradle of democracy had told the Europeans to get stuffed.
The view elsewhere in Europe was total disbelief, if not outright derision at Greece’s euphoria at a moment when financial collapse appeared imminent. The dominant opinion outside the country was that the ballot result was an affront to the 18 European democracies that share the euro with Greece and have been fronting it tens of billions of euros for years and that Greece was dancing on the way to its own grave.
The mood was particularly sour in Germany, which is on the hook for 89 billion euros of Greece’s still mushrooming debt. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s notoriously thrifty centre-left coalition could shatter if she bends, as France and a few other southern European countries would like her to, and tosses Greece a few more euros.
With Greece in urgent need of further emergency assist- ance to avoid a liquidity crisis that even Tsipras’s government finally admitted Monday would close all the ATMs by the end of the week if urgent help was not immediately forthcoming, the chancellor’s spokesman dryly noted that there was “no basis” yet for any fresh talks with Greece.
The German commentariat was rife with scathing commentaries that attacked Merkel for having done too much to help Greece or not enough to punish it. Their second theme was that she had badly mismanaged and squandered Germany’s undeclared leadership of the European Union.
Der Spiegel magazine ran a picture on its cover of a sheepish-looking Merkel photoshopped in front of the ruins of the Parthenon.
It also carried a photograph of the chancellor walking alone under the headline, “Angela’s ashes.”
Not to be outdone, Stern, the glossy magazine that still follows in the tradition of Life and Look magazines, ran a tattered European Union flag unfurled above the Acropolis with the stark caption: “End-spiel um Europa.”
The Damoclean Sword hanging over Merkel’s head is Alexis Tsipras. The hard left prime minister, who was once again talking mischief with Russia’s Vladimir Putin Monday, apparently is scheming to get Greece another six billion or so euros of what the European Central Bank calls Emergency Liquidity Assistance to get the country through the next week or two and then 100 billion euros in debt relief that can only come directly out of the pockets of other European taxpayers. In return for this staggering amount of debt forgiveness, Tsipras will once again pledge to implement the tough reforms that he and his predecessors have been cavalierly dodging for years.
The mystery is why at this juncture any European leader would even consider believing Greece, when its leaders have been cooking the country’s books forever and have allowed their citizens to turn tax evasion into an Olympic sport.
With Spain, Italy and Portugal now pondering why they bothered to follow the EU’s rules in order to get bailouts, what hangs in the balance is not only Greece’s economic future and the future of the euro but quite possibly the hallowed European project that Merkel and others have held so dear for decades.
Allowed their citizens to turn tax evasion into an Olympic sport