Return to Greece’s past, a radical mistake

The Great Leap Backwards

By Joshua Chaffin

It has become accepted wisdom that Alexis Tsipras, the leftwing Greek politician vying to become the country’s next prime minister, is a radical.

With good reason. Mr Tsipras’ party, Syriza, is formally known as the Coalition of the Radical Left. His campaign appearances feature homages to the revolutionary icon Che Guevara, and fiery speeches that rail against crooked bankers, corrupt politicians, the International Monetary Fund and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

But what if the chief appeal of Syriza is not so much the promise of radical change but rather a return to the status quo – the days before Greece ran aground on the rocks of a debt crisis and became entangled with the EU and the IMF?There are signs that Syriza may be just that. Take the campaign rhetoric. The message feathered beneath the accusations is one of comfort for a citizenry whose feelings of humiliation and embarrassment should not be underestimated: It was not your fault – it was theirs.

More telling was the much-touted presentation last Friday of the party’s plan to cure five years of recession and reshape the economy.

It would be foolish to read coherence into an economic plan presented in the heat of campaign season by a party comprised of 12 competing leftwing factions – from Marxists to Euro-communists – that boasts four chief economists. For Mr Tsipras, merely presenting a plan was a way to counter criticism that his party offered little beyond a megaphone for public rage.

But what stands out is the intention to repudiate the far-reaching reforms demanded by Greece’s creditors – changes the IMF believes are essential to inject some competitiveness into a moribund economy and place the public finances on a stable footing.

Specifically, Syriza called for a suspension of monthly interest payments and the indefinite delay of €11bn in fresh budget cuts. It also said it would repeal a law that has reduced the minimum wage to less than €600 a month, and return collective bargaining rights to trade unions.

The latter should go down particularly well with the public sector workers who are jumping into the Syriza lifeboat as the socialist Pasok party sinks. They were among the chief beneficiaries of the clientelist system that prevailed in Greece over the past three decades, and are now locked in a life-or-death struggle to protect their benefits.

They are men such as Nikos Fotopoulos, the leader of the powerful electricity workers’ union, who gave an inadvertent glimpse into the dysfunction of modern Greece with a recent video posted to YouTube in which he upbraided the utility’s executives for daring to hold a meeting without him. He has migrated to Syriza.

Their chief threat is Greece’s €174bn bailout, which will be the pivotal issue in the June 17 election. Mr Tsipras placed a surprise second in last month’s contest by promising to tear it up, sending shivers through Europe that a Syriza victory would mean a chaotic Greek debt default and departure from the eurozone.

Here, though, language matters. Like other Greeks, Mr Tsipras tends to draw a distinction between the billions of euros supplied by the EU and IMF and the mnimonio, or memorandum, of conditions attached. Greeks, it seems, like the money; they hate the mnimonio.

So Mr Tsipras’ pledge to tear up the mnimonio yet still remain in the eurozone has been interpreted by many Greeks as a plan to negotiate another, less onerous loan agreement while the money continues to flow.

In that case, his policy may differ only by degrees from that of his centre-right opponent, Antonis Samaras, the leader of New Democracy, who has also promised a renegotiation with Greece’s creditors.

It was Mr Samaras who opposed the first bailout, arguing its austere terms would strangle the economy. His campaign has been hobbled by his reluctant decision to back it as well as the belief that he is a holdover from a corrupt era.

In Mr Tsipras, Greek voters have found a fresh face unburdened by time in office, who claims to represent a break from that era. Yet his populist tendencies suggest he was a keen student of it.

Whoever prevails on June 17, there is sure be a tug from elements of Greek society to return to the past. Given all that those policies have wrought, indulging them would prove a radical mistake.