Maria Margaronis | The Nation

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.

In Greece, as elsewhere (France, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, even Britain) the anti-austerity camp includes the nationalist far right. This Sunday the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn—which escorts old ladies to cash machine and beats up immigrants, which sells protection to shopkeepers and harbours Holocaust deniers, whose symbol is the ancient Greek meander, shaped rather like a swastika, in black on a red ground—is almost certain to win seats, for the first time, in parliament. New Democracy’s leader, Antonis Samaras, has pandered shamelessly to the far right’s supporters: if he can’t win their votes, he may well need their parties (Golden Dawn, the Popular Orthodox Rally and the new Independent Greeks, led by a former New Democracy politican who thinks Greece should look to Vladimir Putin for salvation) to prop up a minority government. His rallies have been a sea of blue and white Greek flags (the same flags that were waved by some of the aganaktismenoi in Syntagma last summer before the anti-austerity movement started to fragment); he has vowed to protect the church and religious education as the core of Greek identity and to repeal a law giving citizenship rights to the children of legal immigrants. One of his campaign ads features Aghia Sophia in Istanbul, the lost heart of Byzantium and symbol of Greek irredentism, with its Ottoman minarets conveniently cropped away.

But populist nationalism is not confined to the right. At least since the rule of the first Pasok prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, in the 1980s, parts of the Greek left have had a strong nationalist streak, rooted in the anti-imperialist opposition to the CIA-backed junta and to decades of cold war meddling in Greek politics. Now, with Greece’s sovereignty once again hemmed in by foreign powers, those buttons are easy to push, and make for strange bedfellows. Politicians of all stripes reach for ugly metaphors of disease and war. In April Pasok ministers called the migrants in Athens a “hygenic time bomb” and began turning military bases into detention centers. A Russian prostitute who tested HIV-positive was locked up on criminal charges and had her picture plastered all over the media; when several Greek hookers were also found to be carriers, the immigration panic morphed into a moral one. Half the worried johns who called a public helpline turned out to be—shock, horror—married men, carrying infection into the heart of the “Greek family.”

Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, also plays the nationalist card (though he has never stooped to anti-immigrant rhetoric) and explicitly claims the mantle of the old populist PASOK—which is why, despite his recent embrace by the US media as a possible king-maker, I can’t bring myself to trust him. Together the three left parties in Greece—the neo-Stalinist KKE, the social democratic DIMAR and the hybrid Syriza—have polled at 37 percent. (There is also the Green Ecology party, perhaps the only one to take a truly global view, which is also likely to win its first seats in parliament.) Though pigs would fly before the KKE cooperates with any other party, and Dimar split from Syriza in 2007, Tsipras has made repeated overtures towards a coalition; some on the left have hailed this as the promise of a new dawn. Pasok leader Evangelos Venizelos launched a full frontal attack on him today, a sure sign he’s becoming a significant threat.

Tsipras has said that his first act if elected would be to cancel the EU/IMF memorandum and, “with the people backing us on the streets,” tell the European Commission that the Greeks demand a policy of redistribution and growth; otherwise Spain and Italy will follow Greece into despair, leading to the inevitable breakup of the Eurozone. The old liberal politicians are horrified by his nods to Chávez and Allende and his cheerful embrace of the masses on the streets, as are the reformers gathered in Dimar and in one or two small pro-European “modernizing” parties. I admire his chutzpah—someone should have taken such a stand many moons ago—and envy his certainty, but I can’t help feeling that it’s not going to be that simple. Without a wider European shift away from austerity and democratic reform of Greece’s political culture and economy (along lines which have hardly begun to be discussed), there’s no way out of this labyrinth for many years to come.

For Europe as a whole though, perhaps the most important fact about the Greek election is that almost all the candidates see support for austerity as political suicide. Samaras has promised to renegotiate some of the terms of the bailout and to halve unemployment in three years; even Venizelos has vowed to bring Greece “out of the memorandum” in the same period while slowing the pace of reform. The old parties reach deep and will die hard, but the air is crackling with rage against the politicians who drove the country’s economy into the ground, called in the IMF and let the heaviest blows fall on the most vulnerable. How Greeks will vote on Sunday remains an open question. The likeliest outcome is an inconclusive vote, followed by days or weeks of tortuous negotiations. What happens after that depends to some extent on what happens elsewhere Europe. But the opposite is also true: coupled with the election of Hollande in France, a strong anti-austerity vote in Greece may well push the Eurocrisis round another corner. There is no way to know what’s waiting for us there: the maiden or the minotaur, a new commitment to growth, solidarity and investment or a convulsive break-up of the Eurozone.

“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.

Will the Germans bend? According to the International Herald Tribune, the hope is that a treaty on fiscal discipline will make it possible for them to countenance “far reaching efforts to end the debt crisis,” whatever those might be. But such bargaining is worryingly reminiscent of the trade-offs made to keep Germany happy in the early days of the Eurozone, which left economic “convergence” between richer and poorer countries in the lap of market forces. Nor is it clear how Europe’s poorer countries would ever be able to meet Germany’s fiscal targets, or how such restrictions might coexist with democracy and national sovereignty.

Which brings us back to the leaked Greek document, a veritable goldmine for Internet theorists. One blog claims that Germany has now decided that European banks are sufficiently protected against the consequences of a Greek default that Greece can now be dropped—the “soft landing” (for Europe, not for Greece) that’s been in preparation for some time. Another suggests that the proposal is meant as a warning to Portugal, Spain and Ireland against seeking their own debt “haircut”: try to renegotiate, and we take you over. A third points out that Germany’s Minister of Economics, Philipp Roesler of the Free Democrats, has openly endorsed the proposal—which suggests it might have been a shot across Merkel’s bows from her coalition partners before the Euro summit.

Whether all or none of these turn out to be correct, the Greek economist Yannis Varoufakis is surely right to argue that the proposal is the logical consequence (for Germany) of piling loans on an insolvent nation while imposing an austerity program that has shattered the economy and (for Greece) of accepting both the loans and the conditions. Time for Greece in this game appears to be running out (more on that on another occasion); for the rest of Europe, much depends on whether the leaders at the summit can make a real commitment, even at this late date, to job creation and growth over rigid fiscal discipline, and to democracy over the rule of the financial markets.

London
 
Perhaps the whole point of a riot is to defy explanation: it’s an eruption of the irrational, a shattering of glass and boundaries, a testosterone-fueled roar that briefly flips anger and emptiness into something like ecstasy. What’s in the minds of the young men (and women, too) in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool who’ve sent great sheets of flame rising into the August night, devouring local businesses that it took years to build; who’ve turned plate glass to spiderwebs with one crack of a brick; who’ve gone home with their backpacks stuffed with cell phones, Nike trainers, X-boxes and Wiis? Well, wouldn’t we like to know, we middle-class types with access to a blog and an analysis, a “network” and a future?

Today Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson returned reluctantly from their  vacations to confront the arson and looting that have spread through Britain's cities over the last three nights, like a pair of Eton prefects summoned to contain the fifth form. Parliament has been recalled for the second time this summer (the first was over phone hacking by Murdoch’s News International); 450 people have already been arrested; Cameron has promised 6,000 more police on London’s streets this evening. But will it be enough?

Missy, who works at a small shop selling jeans and sneakers down the road from where I live, shrugs when I ask her what she’s going to do tonight. The metal grille was down and properly locked yesterday; "they" trashed the place anyway. “They know the shop,” she says. “They went straight upstairs where we keep the expensive stuff, the £300 jeans.” A few blocks on, outside a smashed-up cycle shop where twisted bikes lie like skeletons on the pavement, a forensic expert carefully dusts glass with fingerprint powder. Does she think she’ll find anything? Another shrug. In Dalston, next to Hackney which saw some of the worst rioting, the Turkish Kurdish community have taken charge themselves, standing guard outside their shops, some of them with baseball bats.

The blue touchpaper that lit the conflagration was the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black father of four, by armed police in Tottenham, one of London's poorest boroughs, as he rode in a minicab; he had a handgun but there’s been no claim that he made a move to fire it. A small crowd of local residents gathered at the police station to demand explanations; though the protesters were peaceful, the police were not forthcoming. By nightfall, against the wishes of Duggan’s relatives, rioting had broken out in Tottenham and elsewhere. Police cars and a double decker bus were set on fire and shop windows were smashed, mostly by teenage boys.

What began as an outburst of anger against police violence soon morphed into an orgy of nocturnal “shopping” as kids broke into sports and electronics shops, cellphone stores and supermarkets. A brave woman in Hackney gave a streetcorner sermon amid heaps of litter, excoriating the rioters for turning grief to greed: “This is about a fucking man who got shot in Tottenham. This isn’t about having fun on a riot and busting up the place. Get real, black people, get real. If we’re fighting for a cause let’s fight for a fucking cause.” But in the deprived neighbourhoods of Britain’s crumbling cities, consumerism is a more accessible dream than commitment or community.

And so it has gone on, night after night since then, frightening, unpredictable and uncontainable. The police are overwhelmed; the politicians nervously continue to plough their furrows. “Sheer criminality,” says Home Secretary Teresa May, as if any attempt to understand what’s at the root of all this rage would imply condoning it. Labour politicians flirt with the temptation to blame government spending cuts, as if such fury could build up in a matter of mere months. Of course the cuts don’t help: they are the final straw, the irrefutable evidence that the poor are now dispensable, outside society. Nor does the larger sense that nobody’s in charge, that the economy’s in freefall, that bankers have been looting the public purse for years, and that our leaders have no idea what to do about any of it. There is a doomsday feeling on the streets of London: time to grab what you can, burn it down and live for now, because who knows what’s coming for us all tomorrow.

But it’s taken years to brew the toxic mix of hopelessness, frustration and disenfranchisement, envy, anger and boredom, greed and selfishness, humiliation and recklessness that’s erupted in Britain this week--years in which the gap between rich and poor grew wider, racism was allowed to fester, consumerism and celebrity culture replaced community. While we in the middle classes got on with our oh-so-busy lives, averting our eyes from the poverty just a few blocks away, sending our kids to schools where there are other “motivated parents,” talking politics, we allowed the rifts in our own neighbourhoods to deepen until they became almost unbridgeable.

This morning, down the road, people stared at the broken shops, shaking their heads in disbelief. “It’s mad,” they said. “Just mad.” Small groups of women set out with brooms and dustpans to sweep up the broken glass. There is a kind of solidarity taking shape, a wish to protect what we have, now that it’s under threat. People are talking to each other, asking if everything's all right. The challenge, when all this dies down, will be to stay awake, to keep on doing that, until solidarity spreads.

The Greek parliament has just passed the package of savage austerity measures and privatizations required to get the last tranche of a 110 billion euro loan from the EU and IMF; without it, the country would have been broke by mid-July. Outside in Syntagma Square, protesters in cycling masks are running from clouds of teargas. Since yesterday, the square has been filled with surging crowds pushed back by riot police; Greek TV reports that 500 people aged between 15 and 65 have been treated in the metro station for respiratory problems and injuries.

Ambulances can’t get anywhere near the scene. The Twitter feeds give the flavor: “Fog of chemicals around #Syntagma they keep gas bombing us situation getting worse again”—“People are trapped at the sqr gas bombed from all sides”—“More doctors and supplies needed urgently at Syntagma Square in Greece. Please help”—“Police just hit directly to us. We were running, I saw a man spitting blood, 3 more fainted 3 steps away from me. Its really bad”—“Greek ministry of finance is on fire.”

By the skin of its teeth, Greece has escaped imminent bankruptcy; the Eurozone is safe for another week or two as the EU and IMF try to hammer out a second rescue package. Jose Manuel Barroso and Herbert von Rompuy, the presidents of the European Commission and Council, have hailed an “important step forward along the path of fiscal consolidation and growth-enhancing structural reform.” But the long-term prognosis is far from positive. First, the cuts and privatizations will not be easy to implement, leaving plenty of wiggle room for lenders later on. Second, this year’s austerity program has only plunged the country deeper into recession; even the EU and the IMF project that the debt and the interest on it are likely to keep rising, and the consensus is that Greece will have to default sooner or later anyway. Third, it isn’t clear how much more austerity the Greeks are willing or able to take. Almost a quarter already live below the poverty line; 50,000 businesses have closed in the last year; youth unemployment is at 42 percent; people are at breaking point.

It’s very hard to predict what is likely to happen next. The government still has to pass an enabling law on Thursday to speed up the pace of reform; after that, it has to put the austerity measures into practice. If it stumbles and is forced to call elections, Antonis Samaras, the leader of the opposition conservative party New Democracy, is most likely to win. He has no substantive alternative solution to the crisis, but has made populist hay by promising to “renegotiate” Greece’s loan agreement and to rescind a law granting citizenship to children born in Greece to legally settled immigrants.

The “aganaktismenoi” who have occupied Syntagma since the end of May are a new force in Greece—a popular movement that embraces leftists, centrists, nationalists, radical democrats and the apolitical, united by a collective allergy to traditional politics, with its cronyism and self-interest, its petty-mindedness and parochial machismo, its corruption and dishonesty. Some of them have been camped in the square for weeks, engaged in an experiment in direct democracy; whether that will survive today’s cataclysm of violence remains to be seen. Yesterday, peaceful protesters tried to stop the black clad agitators who were ripping up marble slabs and setting fire to vans and rubbish bins; today’s indiscriminate assault by the police has changed the atmosphere.

Classical analogies for modern Greek politics are always irritating. But today I can’t help thinking about tragedy, not in the tabloid sense of something terrible happening but as a clash between irreconcilable laws, or Free Will banging its head against Necessity. My heart is with the protesters, with their spirit and recklessness and energy and desire, but my head knows that parliament had to pass the appalling measures, because at this point the alternative would be worse, for Greece and also, perhaps, for the rest of Europe. Due to the long recalcitrance and rigidity of European leaders and their refusal to challenge the dominance of the markets; due to Greek politicians’ even longer failure to set their house in order; due to the absurd time pressure placed on this decision, there was, as EU commissioner Olli Rehn put it, “no Plan B.”

The tragic flaw is in Greece’s own responsibility for its problems, which has allowed Northern European pundits and politicians to demonize its people as incorrigibly lazy, feckless, criminal and corrupt: There simply wasn’t enough solidarity from outside the country to support a heroic last stand against austerity, the banks and the IMF. Perhaps political and economic pressure will soften the measures and ease the terms of Greece’s loans; perhaps, when default eventually comes, Greece will be better prepared to weather it. Perhaps the sight of a European country being forced to its knees might prompt a belated rethinking of the European project and the relationship between democracy and the markets. Perhaps. Otherwise, as one tweet coming out of Athens put it, “You are all in Syntagma Square. You just don’t know it yet.”