Next Up, Spain

As events unfold over the next few weeks following today's No victory in Greece there'll be plenty of people watching in Spain.  That country's Podemos movement promotes a similar sort of anti-austerity platform to that of Greece's Syrzia.  It's hard to imagine today's defiant events in Greece not having a knock on effect in Spain and perhaps Italy also.

I've spent some time this afternoon prowling the web for online European newspapers, stopping to look at their photos of street celebrations across Greece. What struck me is how generational this seems.  Unlike the earlier protest marches where the crowds were of all ages, today seems to be a day for young Greeks to rejoice.

Greek youth, after all, had the most to lose.  Just coming into adulthood they faced the prospect of either having to emigrate or face a future of perpetual penury.  They grew up with five years of punitive austerity, saw what it did to their parents.  They understood that a Yes win would be "game over" for their future.  They fought and they won even if it victory only means the right to fight again another day.

By contrast it was the wealthiest Greeks who were the most outspoken proponents of the Yes side.  The austerity measures the Euro Bank and IMF were using to crush ordinary Greeks really didn't matter to the oligarchs who, in many cases, were the real tax dodgers contributing to the debt crisis.  The shipping magnates remain unscathed, still venerated as de facto nobility.

The Spanish go to the polls in a general election some time before 20 December. Podemos has gone up and down in the polls but today's events might give a much needed boost to anti-austerity supporters.

Why Syrzia Matters. It's About a Good Deal More than Austerity. It's About Salvaging Democracy.

Le Monde reminds all of us why Syrzia matters not just in Greece, but across Europe and even on our side of the North Atlantic.

The Greeks don’t need to have the meaning of the word “democracy” explained to them. Even so, they have been given countless lectures since voting in a leftwing government determined to end the austerity policies that have made their lives a misery for six years. The schoolmasterly reprimands have come from people who know what they are talking about: they are people who imposed treaties their electorates had voted against and reneged on campaign promises as soon as they came to power. They are now in a trial of strength with Syriza, which has been trying, against terrible odds, to stick to its promises and beliefs. That trial was all the tougher since those beliefs may spread thoughts of resistance to those hitherto resigned to powerlessness. This confrontation has been about more than just the fate of Greece: the future of European democracy is at stake.

...Though Syriza is isolated in the EU, hounded by its creditors and faced with capital flight, it is in fact trying to rehabilitate concepts that have become alien to democratic life, such as “sovereignty”, “dignity”, “pride” and “hope”. But how could it do so in a state of permanent financial crisis when it is forced to back down in each successive negotiation? And do so all the more painfully as the means designed to throttle the will of a restive populace were shown publicly, while the tormentors chuckled as they recounted the most recent confrontations.

...As its finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has made clear, Greece is “determined not to be treated like a debt colony that should suffer”. What is at stake goes beyond the right of a people to choose their destiny, even when a judge of democratic niceties as fine as German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble reckons that they have “elected a government which is acting somewhat irresponsibly”. Because the question also concerns the possibility of a state extricating itself from destructive policies, rather than having to further toughen those policies each time they fail.

....Greece’s economic collapse, which has now lasted six years, is comparable to the damage that four years of military destruction and foreign occupation inflicted on France in the first world war.  Which explains why Tsiprias's government gets enormous pupular support — even from the right — every time it refuses to prolong such a destructive policy, and why it is unwilling to survive “like a junkie waiting for his next fix”. But Syriza has few friends outside Greece. As in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, to investigate the potential killers of Greece’s hopes would mean interviewing every EU government, and the chief suspect would be Germany: the failed disciplinary strictures are German, and it intends to squeeze those — especially in Mediterranean countries — who refuse to endure them indefinitely. In Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the governments’ motive for the crime is more sordid. Their citizens would benefit if the iron fist of austerity stopped pounding them. But their governments are afraid, especially when they feel threatened by a domestic challenge from the left, that Greece will demonstrate that it is possible to refuse to follow “a well-marked path, a known path, a path that the markets and the institutions and all the European authorities know,” the path that French finance minister Michel Sapin claims must be “explored right to the end”. The prospect of Greece breaking free would show that all these governments were gravely mistaken to make their people suffer needlessly.

Everyone knows that getting Greece’s debt repaid would be like “extracting blood from a stone” (Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 29 January). So why isn’t it equally clear that Syriza’s economic strategy to finance urgent social expenditure through a determined fight against tax fraud could draw on a young, determined, popular, political force, originating in social movements and free of the compromises and corruption of the past? Even if not marked out, the path is discernible. The uncertain future brings to mind what the philosopher Simone Weil wrote about workers’ strikes in France in June 1936: “No one knows how things will turn out. There is reason to fear a range of disasters. ... But no fear can erase the joy of seeing those who have always had to bow their heads, by definition, standing up for themselves. ... Whatever may happen next, we will always have had this. For the first time, and forever, there will be other memories floating around these heavy machines than silence, coercion and submissiveness”. The Greeks’ struggle is universal. Our good wishes no longer suffice. The solidarity it deserves calls for action. Time is still, as always, running out.

People Power in the Birthplace of Democracy

Syrzia, the radical leftist government of Greece has rocked the Eurozone on its heels by rejecting the German-driven austerity programme that brought the Greek people to their knees.  The Euros have rallied and are pushing back, in no small part out of fear that the public in other EU countries, including Spain, Italy and Ireland, could follow suit and tell their foreign masters to shove off.  After that what would stop an upstart movement arising out of nowhere in Britain, like Syrzia in Greece or Podemos in Spain, to break the shackles of austerity?

Syrzia is playing hardball with its EU and IMF bankers and, to show them how futile their push back is, the Greek government is threatening to either call another election or put the issue to a referendum.  Why?  Because barely a month in power, Syrzia has rocketed in Greek polls by 12%.  One month.  Twelve per cent.  Those are people who aren't looking for their government to make many concessions to Brussels.  They're standing with their government and Syrzia is standing with them.

The Spanish people go to the polls this year and, at the moment, Podemos has a healthy lead in the polls.  A lot of Spaniards are looking to Syrzia for inspiration and hope.  The ECB and IMF really need to break Syrzia before Spain also falls to a defiant leftist government which could trigger a domino effect.

They'll Nip This in the Bud

It's enough to give an oligarch chest pain.  Barely a month in power, popular support for the left-wing, anti-austerity government in Greece is soaring.  Syrzia won the January polls with 36% of the votes.  A few weeks later and there's no sign of buyers' remorse.  Instead the party's support has climbed to almost 48%. Not bad for a movement that came out of nowhere just three years ago.

It's not so much the Greek government digging in its heels on debt repayment and austerity demands that will be infuriating the Euro bankers.  It's the attitude of the Greek people that they'll find unnerving.

On the street, optimism has returned. People worn down by gruelling austerity, on the back of unprecedented recession, are smiling. Government officials have taken to walking through central Athens, instead of ducking into chauffeur-driven cars to avoid protesters. Last week, finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – a maverick to many of his counterparts – was mobbed by appreciative voters as he ambled across Syntagma square.

“They’ve given us our voice back,” said Dimitris Stathokostopoulos, a prominent entrepreneur. “For the first time there’s a feeling that we have a government that is defending our interests. Germany needs to calm down. Austerity hasn’t worked. Wherever it has been applied it has spawned poverty, unemployment, absolute catastrophe.”

If there's one thing the ECB and IMF realize it's that this sort of thing can be contagious.  It can spread.  In other countries those populations are also feeling "worn down by austerity" and saddled with governments that are not defending their interests.

It's already taking hold in Spain.  Italy, Ireland, France and even Britain could be susceptible.  I expect the conservative lenders won't sit by idle.  They need the Greek people back in harness to austerity or, before long, everyone will be kicking over the traces.  Optimism, left unchecked, can be a very, very dangerous thing.

Could Greece Become the Salvation of Western Democracy?

Greece is revered as the nation that gave mankind democracy.  Could it now become the nation that restored democracy to mankind?

Around the world, democracy has taken a pounding from the fist of neoliberalism.  Market fundamentalism and democracy are simply incompatible over time.  Neoliberalism promotes illiberal democracy, ultimately leading to political capture and the rise of plutocracy as the populace is steadily reduced economically and politically, their power quietly transferred to a select minority.

The Guardian's George Monbiot writes that we're witnessing "the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus."  This he sees in the triumph of the Syriza movement in the recent Greek elections.

The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Foreign Policy's Philippe LeGrain agrees with Monbiot and foresees Syriza's win spreading to Spain and beyond.

"Yes we can" may be a stale slogan in Obama's America but in crisis-hit Spain it is the rallying cry of a year-old radical-left party that is taking the country by storm. In a show of strength, more than 100,000 supporters of Podemos (the party’s name means “We Can” in Spanish) filled the streets of Madrid on Jan. 31 to protest against austerity, crushing debts, and the country’s corrupt political system — and demand change. The demonstrators don’t represent a fringe group, either. Podemos is leading in the polls, ahead of both the mainstream center-left and center-right parties in elections that will be held by the end of the year.

The election of a radical-left Syriza-led government in Greece on Jan. 25 has electrified European politics. After years of being told that there is no alternative to bowing to German demands for crushing austerity and wage cuts, the plucky Greeks have dared to stand up to Angela Merkel’s government in Berlin — and other Europeans have stood up and noticed. While the immediate focus is on the showdown between the new Greek government and eurozone authorities over demands for debt relief — and the (unlikely) possibility that Greece could end up ejected from the currency union — Athenian defiance is already having wider political repercussions.

...Debtor-country governments that have obediently complied with the German diktat — notably, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland — suddenly feel very exposed politically. Governments that have mounted a mild challenge to Merkel (think France and Italy) are in a delicate position: They spy an opportunity to advance their own agenda, while fearing that they may be outflanked by those with a more radical one. And not without reason; anti-establishment parties of various stripes have the wind in their sails.

Whenever voters throw out a government, as they have done in nearly every election since the crisis began in 2008, officials from Berlin, Brussels, and Frankfurt — whom they did not elect and cannot hold to account — loudly insist that the incoming administration must stick to the failed policies of the outgoing one. Since voting for establishment parties of the center-left or center-right makes little difference, it’s hardly surprising that voters are seeking a genuine alternative. And for the moment this exists only on the extremes.

Sometimes, as in Greece and Spain, the insurgents are on the radical left. In Ireland, which is not due to vote until next year, Sinn Féin, a left-wing party that was formerly the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, has a narrow lead in the polls. In other cases, the upstarts are on the far-right. In France, Marine Le Pen’s racist National Front is out in front,winning by-elections and pulling ahead in polls for the 2017 presidential election. In Italy, where reformist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi remains popular, all three main opposition parties — the far-right Northern League, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia — are now anti-euro.

Meanwhile, The Tyee's Crawford Killian ponders whether Canada's politically disaffected could provide the core for our own version of Syrzia or Podemos.

Radical or not, Syriza and Podemos pose a powerful challenge to the narrow centre-right spectrum of acceptable thought. That could encourage some of our cautious Liberals and New Democrats to try out some ideas that are radical only by comparison with the dull orthodoxy of Stephen Harper. If they do, they might find that many Canadians are way ahead of them -- including the two out of five who didn't even bother to vote in the last election.

I agree.  The Liberals and the New Democrats too easily threw in the towel to embrace market fundamentalism and an unhealthy degree of neoliberalism as though these were inevitabilities.  In their unseemly quest for power (NDP) and redemption (LPC) both have abandoned the progressive Left.  They might both do well to lift their eyes, take a look around, and mend their ways.