Thursday, March 19, 2015

They are cornering Greece

It makes me angry that they are cornering the new Greek government. It may be that it was not tactical and not according the agreement with its creditors (the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) that the Greek government presented yesterday in the Greek parliament a bill to help the poorest Greeks, and it may be that, according to the rules (who set the rules?), it should have consulted the Troika before adopting this bill, because of their budgetary costs, but I perfectly understand why the Greek government has not done that. 

The Greeks are tired of being humiliated and not being allowed to fulfill the electoral promise of helping the poorest. But the technocrats of the Troika, who were accustomed to commanding and being obeyed, are upset that the new Greek government does not behave like previous governments. And the technocrats know they have a lot of power.

Do they want the attempt of the new Greek government to conduct non-neoliberal politics becomes a failure? Do they want to warn the new Spanish party Podemos and those who intend to vote for it, that a government of Podemos would be a failure?


It may be that the new Greek government has committed diplomatic and tactical mistakes, but my esteem for it is much larger than for the Troika.


Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in Parliament, where he presented the bill to help the poorest, that it was the first bill in five years that was adopted in Athens rather than ordered by technocrats of the European Union. He criticized a senior EU official who had written a letter to the Greek government saying that it should not adopt the law before consulting its international creditors. The EU official said that the bill should be discussed first to see if it were in accordance with the agreed reforms. "Doing otherwise would be proceeding unilaterally". 


According to a BBC article Tsipras told the Greek parliament: "If they're doing it to frighten us, the answer is: we will not be frightened. What else can one say to those who have the audacity to say that dealing with a humanitarian crisis is a 'unilateral action'?"

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