It doesn’t matter the language they’re spoken in, campaign promises have an expiration date of the day after the election.
Syriza told some beautiful fables to the Greek voters before the election and promised them the sun and the moon and the stars—reversal of privatizations, pension increases, minimum wage hikes, and fatting up the government bureaucracy again with more lifetime civil service jobs.
The trouble is, Syriza doesn’t have the money to deliver any of this. No problem, said the party chiefs: once we get into office we force all those evil Germans and nasty international institutions to give us the money.
Once elected, Syriza officials have been touring Europe, meeting serially with all the people they denounced as cruel, stupid, and wicked during the campaign, and discovering what an intelligent 10-year-old could have told them: nobody wants to give or lend them any more money because people distrust them and don’t see how the promises they have made to the voters can possibly be reconciled with any of the agreements Greece has made in the past. More, no private lender wants to lend Greece a single euro except at extremely high interest rates.
It’s not clear what happens now. The ECB is cracking down. The Germans are refusing to budge. The Greek banking system is beginning to crack under the strain as more and more Greeks decide to get their money out of this crumbling edifice.
One good side to President Obama’s massive bungling of our nation’s international affairs: No one is looking at us to negotiate on behalf of Greece.
I wonder what would happen if Germany decided to say ‘screw the EU’ and withdraw. And that’s the GOOD scenario.
The bad one involves Germany repossessing chunks of Greece to pay for their debt.