Maria Margaronis

We Are All Thatcherites Now

Maria Margaronis on April 8, 2013 - 3:28 PM ET

Margaret Thatcher leaves a Westminster polling station with her husband, Dennis, after voting in the 1983 general election. (AP Photo/Peter Kemp)

Margaret Thatcher’s dead at last, and the pictures that crowd in speak of war and confrontation: riot police on horseback bringing their batons down on the heads of striking miners; cars in flames in Trafalgar Square during the poll tax riots; riots in Brixton and Toxteth against racist policing; US cruise missiles nestled behind the fence at Greenham Common; the infamous Sun headline—GOTCHA—when the Argentine cruiser Belgrano was sunk outside the Falklands exclusion zone; the ten IRA hunger strikers for political status dead in the Maze prison; the IRA bomb that almost killed Thatcher herself in Brighton. Hard on their heels come images of polished domestic smoothness: the handkerchief disapprovingly dropped on the tail of a model plane that bore no Union flag; the helmet of bright hair; the handbag, sign of female thrift and household management, of the grocer’s shop at Grantham gone terrifyingly global.

Why Cyprus Matters: The Eurozone Strikes Again

Maria Margaronis on March 18, 2013 - 3:14 PM ET

Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, Europe's only militarily divided city. (Flickr/Jorge Láscar)

The kaleidoscope spins again; the shards are rearranged; this time, the fragment at the centre is Cyprus. Faced with yet another country needing an urgent bailout (and with the German election looming in September), Eurozone leaders and the IMF have come up with a new wheeze: make savers pay to rescue the banks that were meant to look after their money, in exchange for a bailout of 10 billion euros.

Greece: The Spectacle of Violence

Maria Margaronis on January 21, 2013 - 2:20 PM ET

A Golden Dawn demonstration in Athens, June 27, 2012. (Flickr/Steve Jurvetson)

There’s a shadow play going on in Athens, a symbolic political war that also involves real actors and real bombs. The one that went off on Sunday in a suburban shopping mall owned by oligarch Spiros Latsis peppered the front pages of this morning’s papers with shrapnel—“Security cameras show four hooded men”; “Police speak of new terrorist generation”—and made The New York Times: “Bomb Attacks in Greece Raise Fear of Radicalism.” Over the last ten days there have been small explosions outside the homes of pro-government journalists, at banks and local party headquarters and in the building where the brother of the government spokesman lives; someone shot a Kalashnikov into the empty office of the prime minister. So far the only casualty has been people’s sense of security and sanity, the feeling that they can grasp what’s happening around them—but that’s been in intensive care now for some time.

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Greece: Democracy Comes Home to Die

Maria Margaronis on October 30, 2012 - 11:09 AM ET

There’s a chant that used to irritate me when I heard it on Greek protests against austerity last year: “Bread, Education, Freedom, the Junta didn’t end in 1973.” (It’s a bit better in Greek; it rhymes, at least.) If you call an elected government a junta, I thought, however catastrophic its policies, what will you call a real junta when you see one? And if you conflate disparate historical moments—the military dictatorship that ruled Greece for seven years from 1967, say, with the collapse that began in 2010, when the socialist government declared the coffers empty and signed up to the EU and IMF’s disastrous austerity program—how will you make sense of what’s actually happening?

I still don’t like that chant. But it is also true that Greece can no longer be called a functioning democracy. (Some might say it never could; but that’s another story.) Here, very briefly, are three reasons why:

One: A significant part of the police, elements of the judiciary and some sections of the coastguard have been infiltrated by supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, which won eighteen seats in parliament in June and has been soaring ever since. Police not only turn a blind eye to increasing far-right violence against immigrants and leftists: they sometimes participate in it. (For more about the rise of Golden Dawn and its penetration of the police, see my long report for The Guardian, Paul Mason’s for the BBC and this from Borderline Reports.)

Greece Gets Government, Germany Relieved

Maria Margaronis on June 20, 2012 - 5:35 PM ET

“I’m telling you, we’ll go bankrupt inside the memorandum. Blood will be spilled in Greece, out of hunger if not anything else. But since this government’s been elected, until that happens there’ll be funds for that job—the question is, Will they be released this week or next? I hope it works out for you, because there’s money there. There are no salaries anymore, for me it’s just what I can sell in the souvlaki shop…” The heavy-set, white-haired man shouting into his mobile phone on the overground in Athens summed it up perfectly: a temporary reprieve of sorts, a postponement, followed by—what?

There’s always a sense of let-down after an election: all those promises, all those fantasies and fears giving way overnight to hard reality. The Greek vote on Sunday came with more than its share of dramatic expectations. Athens was crawling with foreign hacks waiting for “drachmageddon,” if Syriza should win and scrap the bailout memorandum. The German Financial Times published a piece in Greek telling voters to “resist the demagoguery of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza” as if they were the Luftwaffe dropping leaflets on occupied Athens; Die Bild followed suit in a more demotic vein: “If you didn’t want our billions, it would be fine with us if you voted for any leftist or rightist clown you liked.” Meanwhile, Alexis Tsipras was promising a new dawn of dignity and hope, change and renewal, liberty for Europe’s peoples, free gifts with every purchase. And New Democracy’s Antonis Samaras—who has twisted 180 degrees with the political wind on the bailout agreement, and whose party is co-responsible for the state of Greece’s finances and up to its eyes in corruption—was playing the national savior, warning of disaster if the “drachma lobby” should triumph.

Whatever else the Greeks may be, they weren’t born yesterday. Most people I spoke to on election day didn’t think much would change whichever party won: the economic and social breakdown is now so profound that it will take many years to swim up to the surface. Many still weren’t sure which way they were going to vote because “no party expresses me”—or because they were afraid they might get what they wished for. Those who have little left to lose went for Syriza in droves, unfazed by the fear-mongering, pushing up its share of the vote from 4 percent two years ago to 17 percent in May to 27 percent on Sunday. But even Syriza’s leaders, or so the rumour went, were hoping to come second. A friend involved in their campaign put it to me like this: “If we lose, I’ll be disappointed and relieved. If we win, I’ll be worried.” Until a few weeks ago Syriza was a small oppositional left coalition; it isn’t ready (yet?) to nail its various banners to a single flagpole and become the state. And if Syriza won and failed,as it was almost bound to do given the situation, its inexperience and the guns of Berlin and Brussels all lined up against it like a firing squad? Then where would the dispossessed of the memorandum turn?

Greece's Knife-Edge Election

Maria Margaronis on June 14, 2012 - 10:30 AM ET

The sea at Katounia is a million shades of blue, ripples and shivers moving, changing all the time, pushed by the tides and currents of the Euboean Gulf. This place is a touchstone: rock and light and water, nothing that isn’t true. But last week it felt as if the sea was full of knives.

The Greek crisis has been a bonanza for journalists like me. Besides the speculation about a Greek exit from the euro, containment and contagion, we’ve had endless stories about corrupt Greeks, lazy Greeks, suffering Greeks and hungry Greeks, heroically resisting Greeks, reckless and feckless Greeks. In these last days before the election that’s supposed to determine the fate not only of Greece but of the whole Eurozone, the media feeding frenzy has reached piranha proportions.

For those who live here, though, the breakdown goes much deeper than the visible currents of economics and politics. What does a country mean for those who belong to it, beyond everyday life and home? Some alchemy, perhaps, of human connection and history; a language and a landscape; things that go without saying. The pain of what’s been happening here touches on all of that. It’s changed people’s connection to the past as well as the present, their intimate relationships, their sense of who they are. It’s taken apart the story they’ve believed about their lives for the last forty years. Rage and betrayal are mixed with a toxic sense of shame.

The Day After: Europe Rejects Austerity

Maria Margaronis on May 7, 2012 - 1:50 PM ET

Supporters of France’s newly elected President François Hollande react after the early results during a victory rally at Place de la Bastille in Paris May 6, 2012. France voted in elections on Sunday and Hollande becomes the nation’s first Socialist president in seventeen years. Reuters/Charles Platiau

So the voters have voted—in Britain, in France, in Greece, in Schleswig-Holstein—and the markets are tumbling. In Britain, the Tories took a serious beating from Labour in local elections, though Ken Livingston lost in London to Mayor Boris Johnson; their Liberal Democrat coalition partners were more or less wiped out. France has elected a socialist president for the first time since 1981 (though, as I recall, that one didn’t turn out so well); François Hollande has pledged to challenge European austerity and renegotiate the German-driven fiscal treaty that has effectively outlawed Keynesianism on the continent. Schleswig-Holstein dealt a blow to Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU and elected members of the Pirate Party to its regional assembly. And Greece has voted loudly, if incoherently, against the austerity program imposed by the EU and IMF. Across Europe, it’s no to austerity, and yes to—what?

Voting in the Dark: Greece Goes to the Polls

Maria Margaronis on May 4, 2012 - 4:47 PM ET

How do you hold an election in a country that has lost its sovereignty, its sense of its own past and its imagined future? What promises can discredited politicians sell, in the fifth year of recession, to people whose wages have vanished or plummeted by a third, pensioners living on less than 300 euros a month, a younger generation facing one job between two?

Greece goes to the polls on Sunday, the same day as France, which is predicted to elect a Socialist president who has vowed to renegotiate the German austerity-driven European fiscal compact. If Hollande, in partnership with Spain and Italy, can add weight to the growing consensus against austerity, the French election may turn out to matter more for Greeks than their own. The economic crisis has exposed a crisis of representation: even the control nation states used to imagine they had over their own affairs has been sacrificed to the power of the financial markets. At the same time, in Greece, the collapse has completely discredited the two mainstream parties that have alternated in power since the colonels’ dictatorship fell in 1974—the center-left Pasok and the center-right New Democracy—laying bare the corruption and stagnation of the whole clientelist system. In Greek, “thief” is almost a synonym now for “politician.”

This is partly a local phenomenon, a consequence of the particular deformations of Greek politics, but it’s also part of a wider European pattern. From the Netherlands to France to Portugal people are losing faith in the old political elites, who have failed to protect democracy, hard-won rights and basic solvency from the financial markets and the impact of globalization. In the strange, shifting landscape of the Greek election campaign, in which thirty-two parties are running and nine or ten are expected to enter parliament, the deepest rift has opened not between left and right but between pro- and anti-Memorandum forces—between those committed to the EU/IMF bailout program and the Eurozone at any cost, and those prepared to take a leap of faith into an uncertain future, betting against the continuation of austerity politics and perhaps of the euro itself.

Athens Burning

Maria Margaronis on February 13, 2012 - 1:26 PM ET

When I was in Athens last week many people I talked to wondered aloud why there hadn’t yet been an uprising against the austerity measures that are devastating the country. There was anger everywhere, but sullen and suppressed. Maybe there’s still some fat left in the system, they said. Maybe they’ve just brainwashed us, put us all to sleep. I took a taxi one day when the subway wasn’t working because of a suicide; the driver opined that the deceased was clearly an idiot. “He should have killed himself in Parliament,” he scoffed, “and taken five or six of those idiots down with him.”

Well, now there has been an uprising of sorts, but it doesn’t feel any better. More—perhaps many more—than 100,000 people turned out on Sunday afternoon to protest the new austerity package being voted through parliament to secure a further 130 billion euro loan; the riot police used tear gas to clear them from Syntagma Square, out of sight of the TV cameras perched on the balconies of the grand hotels. In the side streets there were running battles between police and hooded protesters, tear gas and truncheons and boots against firebombs and Molotov cocktails and flying marble shards. Some forty-five buildings blazed, not only banks but some of the neoclassical beauties that have stood through fifty years of rampant development. Better buildings than people. Amazingly, no one died and only 100 (officially) were injured. But a weapons shop on Omonoia Square was broken into and looted. I passed it last week and wondered at the racks of guns and scimitars openly on display.

Following the Twitter feeds from Syntagma last night, I read that 20,000 people were singing all together and wished that I could be there, in spite of the flames and tear gas, to feel the lift of the crowd. But this morning I spoke to a friend in Athens who was out on the streets last night and reality returned. She told me she’d met many people she knew and all of them felt alone. “We don’t know what to believe in, what to think any more,” she said. “It’s as if the violence is meant to make us feel more defeated and more powerless, to warn us that we can’t even begin to lift our heads.”

European Summit: German Austerity Blues

Maria Margaronis on January 30, 2012 - 2:46 PM ET

“Nein! Nein! Nein!” roars today’s headline on Ta Nea, Greece’s largest circulation daily, over a caricature of Angela Merkel controlling a map of Greece with puppet strings. This is not just the usual Greek rage against the EU’s austerity measures: Last Friday the Financial Times made public a German proposal to take over Greece’s finances so extreme as to look like parody. In order to receive the next tranche of its bailout, the document explains, Greece would have to agree a “transfer of national budgetary sovereignty” to a European commissar, “preferably through constitutional amendment,” making an absolute commitment to service its debt before spending public funds on anything else

Merkel has since backed off from the document, but whoever leaked it obviously wasn’t aiming at a warm, candle-lit atmostphere between Greece and Germany at the ongoing negotiations for a write-down of Greece’s private sector debt, or at today’s European summit in Brussels (where there’s also a general strike in progress against austerity measures). Once again, the Greek crisis is at the heart of the talks, though it’s not on the published agenda. The official business on the table includes the new European fiscal compact, due to be signed in March, which would punish states that exceed fixed deficit and debt levels and has been described by one official as a plan to outlaw Keynesianism; and measures to promote growth and create jobs, especially for the young, who are now being tagged as a “lost generation.”

If that sounds a bit schizophrenic, that’s because it is: the tensions at the heart of the Eurozone, between German-style take-no-prisoners fiscal discipline and a more growth-oriented Gallic approach, are being pulled to breaking point. Germany, as Europe’s engine, still holds most of the cards. But with all the southern countries now in crisis (the bond markets are dropping Portugal; Spanish unemployment is at 22 percent, and 51 percent for the young; Italy will be in recession at least until the end of 2013 even though Mario Monti’s cuts have made him the darling of the Eurocrats; Greece’s economy is in meltdown), it’s become obvious to almost everyone else that austerity isn’t working. Financiers tend to speak softly: when IMF chief Christine Lagarde acknowledged earlier this month that austerity “could strangle growth prospects”, and when the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s pointed out that reform “based on…fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating,” what they really meant was, Wake up and smell the coffee, we’re heading for the cliff.