Greece on brink as voters to choose to stay or Grexit
Catastrophe looms as deadline to pay creditors set for Tuesday at midnight
“Our business survived the Turks and Hitler. We can survive this,” Kostas Mitropolous said Monday outside the hardware shop his family has run since 1889.
He was referring to the financial catastrophe that looms over Greece because at midnight Tuesday it will fail to pay international creditors some of the hundreds of billions of euros they are owed.
This will send the country into an economic purgatory that will have dire consequences for its people and will whipsaw the European economy — already, just the news of the likely default has roiled stock markets around the world.
Like most Greeks, Mitropolous said the referendum called for this Sunday was not really about whether to accept or reject the demands of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for more cuts. It was only about whether Greece should try to stay in the eurozone or revert to the drachma — the Grexit.
“For me it is clear — it is the euro and Europe or bankruptcy,” the 55-year-old merchant said as he looked out across a bleak urban landscape, where most of the neighbouring shops were covered in graffiti and many had been shuttered for several years.
As Mitropolous confided revenues for his business had dropped by two-thirds over the past 10 years, a crowd of Athenians lined up 50 metres away in front of an automated teller machine. They were there to withdraw the 60 euros a day they are now restricted to since stringent capital controls were introduced on the weekend by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government.
The hardware store owner joked everyone must have withdrawn most of their money from the banks the week before because his business had been surprisingly good Monday. Still, he fretted, “I cannot pay my employees from what I have in the bank. I can only pay them cash.”
Although they were stoic, those lining up for the ATM admitted they were in a bit of a mental panic about what comes next.