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Greece finally got a deal on Monday, albeit a worse one than initially offered, to reschedule its debt repayments and gain additional liquidity for its banks. A bridge facility means that when babies born today will reach retirement age, they will still be paying for their grandparent’s mistakes when they elected Alexis Tsipras’ catastrophic Syriza into government who delayed talks for six months and the only concession he won, was a strict programme where austerity will continue for at least another three years.
Worse still, the initial plan to force others to push Greece out of the Eurozone (thinking this would solve all problems) backfired and as a result, whereby northern Europeans initially saw the Hellenes as a burden to the single currency area, they realised that the referendum was a wake-up call for European solidarity, especially in the face of extremism that would jeopardise the future of the currency union.
Whereas the boyish PM claimed a “great success” on Monday, it was nothing more than the Eurozone getting on a path of political unity for once. In an attempt to emulate the gifted orator Andreas Papandreou, who had a somewhat misguided vision for post-dictatorship Greece, Tsipras has ended up looking more like the heartthrob Sakis Rouvas of modern-day Greek politics – a beaming smile, great voice and ready to please his millions of fans.
Many had looked up to Tsipras as a breath of fresh air after decades of clientelism nurtured by the establishment of political parties and trade unions that control them. Instead, he has disappointed millions who, although voted ‘no’ in the vague referendum, in fact voted ‘yes’ to staying in the European Union and hanging on to the euro, with all the benefits that it could offer.
If young Alexis wants to have a political future beyond the current administration, whose days are numbered in its present form, then he should do the wise thing and appeal to other more moderate and pro-EU parties for a ‘national unity government’. After all, this is what the EU partners and lenders are telling Greece: “Get your act together… on your own”.
The dream of firing up a revolution that would sweep across the Union and transform it into a neo-Marxist federation, has, thankfully, died. Tsipras has only succeeded to unify his ideological opponents, who have now realised that true democracy comes at a cost, but also that democratic respect goes both ways.
