Interesting article in the New Statesman on the recent Greek election and the Tsipras term in general. Obviously, he is party to the whole mess by being Tsipras’ first Finance Minister and having lead the talks with the “Troika” in 2015 and being just recently re-elected into the Greek parliament as part of the Greek MeRa25 “chapter of” his Democracy in Europe 2025 movement.
The way in which the Greek electorate – within 4 years – basically reached to the left to avoid rigorous and – most probably ineffective – austerity measures to swing back into the direction of Nea Dimokratia is astounding and his perspective is very interesting.
He outlines that the end of Syriza government was already sealed by the time that his Prime Minister called him into his office to tell him, he would cave in.
“The moment I walked into the office of Alexis Tsipras, he told me he had decided to fold, to ignore the people’s No, and to side with New Democracy in order to pass through parliament the bills by which Greece would, again, surrender to the troika.”
This also ended Mr. Varoufakis’ involvement in the Tsipras government.
After this, the Tsipras government and the Troika – with additional loans instead of debt relieve – agreed to austerity until 2060 and Greece was to sell off what lucrative holdings it still had, therefore worsening – by a lot – the issue of print unbelievable amounts of money because the assets to make the money that is needed to repay are reduced.
Also, the fourth agreement with the Troika, mostly giving “““aid””” by pushing payments back (while still incurring interest) will – according to Mr. Varoufakis now create an absurd scenario in which Mr. Tsipras basically created a situation in which the new Nea Dimokratia Prime Minister Mitsotakis does not need to worry about huge tranches of loan- repayments, because they have just been pushed further into the future.
This new government will, according to him, start an all-out war on small businesses and tax-payers by
“dealing with under-employment via the emigration of even more young people; subjecting the remaining workers to medieval terms and conditions; devastating small businesses whose market share will be taken over by troika-supported multinational oligopolies; using the banking system to launder dark money; surrendering public assets and the property of indebted households to assorted vultures;”
At this moment he does not fail to remind us that he and his 8 fellow new members of parliament of MeRa25 are the only ray of hope in this, because everything ND now will do – and he paints a grim, draconic, authoritarian and exploitative picture – will only be a logical follow through from what Syriza started, so Syriza as the biggest party of parliamentary opposition has no way to credibly mount any kind of believable resistance. The latter might actually be true, while I am generally a bit dubious about scenarios in which Messianic properties are self-proclaimed.