By NIKOS KONSTANDARAS
Athens
 |
Jonathon Rosen |
MY country is hurtling toward an election that will decide its fate —
whether Greeks will fight on to remain part of Europe’s core or succumb
to their own weaknesses and turn inward, choosing isolation, anger and
uncertainty greater than that from which they wish to flee.
The vote on Sunday will change our lives — determining not only whether
we remain in the euro zone but also the nature of our society and the
fate of the democracy that was re-established just 38 years ago after a
dictatorship. We are bitterly divided between those who want to carry on
with the reform process and those who want to turn back the clock. Our
partners in the European Union are frightened of the consequences of our
vote, but seem otherwise indifferent to our fate.
At a moment when the choices should be as clear as possible — between
reform and stagnation, between Europe and isolation, between painful
progress and the deceptive comfort of surrender — the issues are
hopelessly confused by false expectations, by false choices and by the
total failure of a political class that can’t propose solutions to the
country’s problems and can’t forge a minimal national consensus on what
is at stake and what needs to be done.
We face a choice between two deeply flawed alternatives. On one hand,
there is New Democracy, a center-right party that has done much to
undermine Greece’s economic reform and revival over the past two years.
It refused to support the bailout agreement signed by the Greek
government, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund on
the grounds that it would stifle growth and so it undermined initiatives
like tax reform that would have helped combat tax evasion by
self-employed professionals and businesses. Yet it is now presenting
itself as the responsible force that will stick to austerity and keep
Greece in the euro zone.
On the other hand there is Syriza, a fractious coalition of 12 radical
groups that has anointed itself the herald of leftist change throughout
Europe and declares that it will immediately annul the bailout agreement
while demanding that our partners continue to lend us money. The latter
course could lead to the country’s swift exit from the euro and a
chaotic and unpredictable future.
Since last October, after the first suggestion that Greece might be
forced out of the euro zone, we have lived with desperate uncertainty.
Suicides, once few, are on the rise as the pressure becomes too much for
some. Meanwhile, families and the disorganized and underfunded social
security system can no longer cope. In a country of fewer than 11
million people, more than a million are jobless. Everyone else lives in
fear that he or she may be next as companies close or lay off workers.
Migrants are leaving and Greeks are emigrating. A recent study conducted
on behalf of Panteion University in Athens suggests that 7 out of 10
Greeks between the ages of 18 and 24 hope to seek their fortune
elsewhere.
This uncertainty has inspired radical choices. A cousin of mine, and his
wife, left with their young child a few weeks after she was offered a
job in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They reasoned that one job in
Dubai was more secure than two in Greece. In villages around the
country, the unemployed and pensioners from cities and towns are
returning to the land to clear fields and grow crops that they feel they
and their extended families will need if the economy gets even worse. A
friend, a successful lawyer, is thinking of going into farming as he
sees his clients falling by the wayside. My elderly parents follow the
news carefully, anxious about possible shortages of medicines. Having
lived through many ups and downs, they are more sanguine than most:
“Whatever happens to the many will happen to us as well,” my mother
says.
The insecurity shakes us to our core. When I go to the A.T.M., I hold my
breath until I hear the reassuring whirring sound that says the machine
will give me what I’ve asked for. I wonder whether I will be so lucky
next time. My wife and I have been working for more than 25 years,
saving for our children’s education, because even though about half our
salaries go to taxes and social security, we know that we must pay for
private schools, that we cannot count on state hospitals, and that our
pensions are not guaranteed. (All this because others do not pay taxes,
and because successive governments did not do their work.)
Every day we wonder whether we have done the right thing, jeopardizing
our savings in a stubborn statement of confidence in a country that,
since its founding, has declared bankruptcy several times. How will we
tell the children that their lives would have been better if we had been
less inert, less idealistic, more adaptable to circumstances? In a few
years’ time, will they be able to travel and study abroad as easily as
we once did? We don’t know.
The choice Greeks face on Sunday might appear simple — between
tightening our belts and remaining in the euro or leaving it and facing
an economic meltdown. But politics is never simple here.
The discredited New Democracy party, which governed Greece from 2004 to
2009, represents the failed political system that allowed Greece to fall
so deeply into debt in the first place and then signed on to harsh
austerity measures.
And a coalition led by the left-wing coalition Syriza wouldn’t be the
breath of fresh air that its 37-year-old leader, Alexis Tsipras, would
like us to believe. Its platform is populist to the point of nihilism as
it tries to suck up the support of those who’ve abandoned the
mainstream parties and their failed policies: it promises to annul the
reforms and austerity measures of the past two years, nationalize banks,
block privatization plans and even take back some of the state
companies that were recently sold off.
Meanwhile Pasok, the socialist party that until May had been Greece’s
other major political faction, alongside New Democracy, has withered to
near irrelevance because it is blamed both for policies that stacked the
public sector with political clients and bloated state spending, and
for implementing the austerity and reforms demanded by our creditors.
None of these parties have advanced a serious agenda to avoid disaster.
Those who are deeply in debt — or who aspire to gain at the expense of
others — hope that the economy’s slate will simply be wiped clean. Those
who have stashed their money abroad will be able to buy assets on the
cheap if Greece leaves the euro zone. But the people who work hard and
pay taxes, who have a stake in reform and progress, who carry the burden
of every mistake, have no credible representative to vote for. Those
who want a better Greece have to look for the least bad option.
The widespread feeling of loss is worsened by the understanding that we
wasted most of the past four decades — the longest period of peace and
prosperity that the country has known. Greece made great strides toward
achieving the standards of its European partners, with major
infrastructure projects, hospitals and schools, and with European Union
subsidies and markets helping to create a booming economy and a new
middle class. But we allowed development to become a bubble. We lost the
self-discipline, moderation and inventiveness that once helped the
Greeks achieve great things, and we succumbed to political expediency,
delusions of grandeur and a fatal sense of entitlement.
EVER since the Greeks began their war of independence against the Turks
in 1821, these different aspects of the national character have been in
perpetual conflict, resulting in breathtaking swings between glorious
heights and desperate depths. The heroic resistance to the German
occupation in World War II was followed by a terrible civil war between
left and right that still cripples our politics; the inspiration of the
Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 was followed by the economic, social and
political ineptitude that brought us to today’s collapse of the main
political parties, and what is turning out to be the destruction of the
country’s backbone: small businesses and the middle class.
We hear that about 80 billion euros has been pulled from bank accounts
and that 500 million to 800 million euros is being withdrawn each day.
Some of this goes toward paying bills, while the rest is being hidden or
moved abroad. And yet, last month there was still about 170 billion
euros in Greek banks, despite the growing chorus of economists declaring
that Greece will leave the euro. Why? Maybe when the volcano rumbles,
when the thugs come for our neighbor, when a society gives up the fight
for progress, the familiarity of our routines numbs us to the dust and
roar of the coming stampede. Maybe we do not think bad things will
happen to us.
Maybe that’s what the people of Constantinople felt before it fell to
the Ottomans in 1453, or the Greeks who were swept out of Asia Minor in
1922, or the innocents sucked into the civil war of 1946-49.
What I want to remember from Greece in 2012 is how laziness and years of
intellectual sloppiness can waste the gift of freedom and leave open
the gates of the city — how we allowed our leaders to pander to us until
we had no one capable of leading us, no one next to us at the
barricades.
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