Ο συνταξιούχος Κωνσταντίνος Βασιλάκης, που σε ηλικία 16 ετών κατέβηκε από το
χωριό του από το Νομό Πρέβεζας στην Αθήνα, για να δουλέψει στις οικοδομές, ήταν
ο πρωταγωνιστής του ρεπορτάζ του κορυφαίου περιοδικού Politico, για τις
πολιτικές εξελίξεις στην Ελλάδα.
Δείτε παρακάτω το σχετικό δημοσίευμα, ενώ αξίζει να
τονίσουμε πως η Πρέβεζα λόγω Τσακαλώτου είχε την... τιμητική της σχεδόν στο
σύνολο του Παγκόσμιου Τύπο...
Will Greece’s government fall?
The mood in Athens is darkening as a make-or-break
referendum for the Syriza administration looms.
Greeks will have to decide this weekend who
they hate more: Europe or their own government.
The European powers, which
have imposed crippling austerity measures on the country for years, are not
winning any popularity contests in Athens. But voting No on Sunday’s referendum
over a now-defunct EU bailout package could spur an economically disastrous
Greek exit from the euro. Greece’s besieged Syriza administration, led by
uncompromising prime minister Alexis Tsipras, is holding out for a better deal
by urging Greeks to vote No. But it may be becoming the primary target of
Greeks’ ire in the process.
“No to Tsipras, yes to Europe.” That
is how Konstantinos Vasilakis, an IKA pensioner (the biggest insurance fund, for
the employees of the private sector), greets me as he enters a branch of the
National Bank of Greece. In a country with the third highest ratio of people
older than 65 in Europe (20.5 percent of the population) and a youth
unemployment rate above 50 percent, pensions are the main income for one out of
every two households. It is Wednesday morning — day three of capital controls —
in Athens, and anger at the government is beginning to grow.
The branch is
one of almost 1,000 that opened on Wednesday in order to serve people without
bank cards who want to draw part of their pension — €120 only this week. In most
banks, there are other restrictions, too: there is an alphabetical order that
has been set up to ration payments (surnames beginning starting with letters
from Α to Ι get paid on Wednesday, K to M on Thursday, the rest on Friday). In
some cases, pensioners, unaware of this (it was only announced at 1 am
Wednesday), went and sat outside bank branches as early as four in morning, only
to be told hours later that they couldn’t get their money.
Pensioners, who do not own an ATM card, wait to get
part of their pensions in front of a branch of National Bank of Greece in
Athens, Greece, July 2, 2015. EPA
At the branch I visited — near
Syntagma square — the queues were short, so the alphabetical restrictions were
ignored. There was an unflappable employee at the door politely asking new
arrivals if they were there for their pension, and allowing in also those who
wanted to issue new cards (“more than 50 percent have come for this,” he tells
me; “they have all suddenly rediscovered blocked cards, and others they’d
forgotten about.”)
As Mr. Vasilakis comes out a few minutes later, he wants
to talk some more. He tells me about how he came to Athens from the town of
Preveza in the northwest of the country at age 16, to work in construction. “I
am grateful to Athens, I became a man here, I worked, I bought a home, was able
to set a little money aside, got a pension. For what? So that they could crumple
me up in this way?” He explains how many people, in the years of plenty, would
mock him for going to work in his overalls. “They would call us Albanians. They
had all found a cozy position in the public sector, I could see them drinking
coffee downtown, already off work at 11 am! That’s not how you get ahead — you
need to work hard, to be frugal.”
They have all lied to us, and they are all looking out for themselves, taking their money out of the country and leaving the rest of us exposed.
Athanasia Trimandili, a middle-aged former beautician,
is more emotional. Her pension, from the badly under-capitalized fund for the
self-employed (OAEE), has not been credited to her account yet. “All 300 of them
should go to hell,” she says, referring to the membership of the Greek
parliament. “They have all lied to us, and they are all looking out for
themselves, taking their money out of the country and leaving the rest of us
exposed.” As she described her plight — widowed at the age of 45 raising two
children, 40 years of work, a pension that was cut from €1175 to €900 — she
broke down crying. “I worked for that. What gives them the right to take it from
me?”
On the previous night, Tuesday the 30th, a crowd of increasingly fervent
pro-Europeans gathered in Syntagma Square in front of parliament, along with
dark clouds in the sky. It was the third rally in less than two weeks of the
‘Menoume Europi’ (‘We Stay in Europe’) initiative, which began as a call to
voice pro-EU sentiments in an increasingly toxic domestic atmosphere and has
rapidly morphed into a movement to prevent Greece’s slide out of the eurozone.
The night before that (the 29th), Athens’ central square had been taken over by
a crowd almost as large, and equally passionate in its opposition to further
austerity and to the perpetuation of foreign control of Greek economic policy.
Polls place the two sides neck and neck, with the ‘yes’ vote having a tiny
advantage.
NO supporters demonstrate in central Syntagma
Square, in front of the Greek parliament building, in Athens, Greece, June 29,
2015. EPA
Tuesday was a twin deadline for Greece. Having bundled
its June payments to the IMF, it had to repay them all together — about €1.5
billion — at the end of the month. The same day was the expiration date of the
extension of its second bailout program, which meant that, absent a deal, more
than €15 billion of EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) and other funds
would no longer be available for the Greek government and the country’s battered
banks.
The pro-Europe crowd — about 20,000 in all, the largest such rally so
far — huddled under umbrellas to read the latest developments on their
smartphones. They talked about the referendum, the shut banks, the imminent
threat to their savings — and about those they considered responsible for the
catastrophe that has befallen the country. Throughout the evening, increasingly
thunderous cries of ‘Resign’ pierced the air. Sunday’s vote has focused minds,
and frayed tempers. This rally was a lot angrier than previous ones.
Demonstrators during a rally organized by supporters
of the ‘Yes’ vote for the
upcoming referendum in front of the Greek Parliament
on June 30, 2015 in
Athens, Greece. Photo by Milos
Bicanski/Getty.
On a low platform at the top of the square, a
series of speakers took to the podium to denounce the referendum, to call for
further negotiations between Greece and its creditors — and to support a Yes
vote. A key point of contention between the Yes and No camps relates to what the
real question is. According to the government and its supporters, the referendum
is on the proposal of the creditors as submitted at the end of last week, and
that it has no bearing on Greece’s euro membership. The Yes camp insists this is
absurd: they say these proposals have since changed, that once the program has
expired they are no longer on offer, and that the only question that makes sense
is a choice between the euro or the drachma.
There is no doubt that a ‘no’ vote will lead Greece out of the euro.
“There is no doubt that a No vote will lead Greece out of
the euro” Giorgos Kaminis, the mayor of Athens and a leading member of the
committee set up to support the Yes vote, tells POLITICO. “Only a Yes offers a
way out, so that we can stand on our two feet again. The damage already done is
massive. But on Sunday we can show that it is reversible.”
Speakers at
Syntagma on Tuesday night, though, also highlighted the need for national unity.
Pyrros Dimas, a former weightlifting Olympic gold medalist and former member of
parliament, said that “we are here tonight because we are Greeks concerned about
the future,” but that this was also true of the people who had assembled in
Syntagma on the previous night in support of a No vote.
Yannis Boutaris, the
tattooed septuagenarian mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city,
who, along with mayor Kaminis, has assumed a leading role in the Yes campaign,
said “there is nothing worse than national division.” Nikos Alivizatos, a
venerable constitutional law professor, got a warm round of applause when he
blasted the pro-government forces for calling supporters of the Yes vote “tools
of the creditors.” Alivizatos has been writing and speaking this week about the
many ways in which this referendum is constitutionally suspect.
Demonstrators during a rally organized by supporters
of the ‘Yes’ vote for the upcoming referendum in front of the Greek Parliament
on June 30, 2015 in Athens, Greece. Photo by Milos
Bicanski/Getty.
The sense of division is palpable in the country —
in TV and coffee-house debates, in offices, on social media and on the streets.
The police on Tuesday blocked a contingent of far-left protestors from reaching
Syntagma Square to hold a counter-demonstration against the pro-European one.
Last week, a group of extreme leftists had gathered in the square prior to the
arrival of the pro-Europe demonstrators, and greeted them with aggressive
slogans harking back to the Greek civil war.
The government has hardly been
an innocent party in all this. True to the methods they honed in their
opposition days, they have been quick to dub any domestic voice of criticism as
undermining the national interest and serving the plans of the other side. Terms
like ‘fifth columnists,’ ‘domestic troika’ and ‘employees of the creditors’ have
been thrown about freely — not (only) by Internet trolls, but by members of the
cabinet. In the heated parliamentary debate over the referendum, both the
speaker of parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, and the minister for Productive
Reconstruction, Panayotis Lafazanis, attacked the pro-Europe demonstrations as
fronts for reactionary interests.
Zoe Konstantopoulou, SYRIZA MP and elected President
of the Parliament. Photo by EPA
The prime minister himself, under
increasing pressure, has also sowed the seeds of discord. In a TV address
Wednesday afternoon, he implied that those who vote Yes on Sunday are
‘accomplices’ to the economic destruction of the country.
“It is
unacceptable” Kaminis tells POLITICO. “He should instead take
responsibility for the division the referendum has caused in Greek society, and
also for the collapse of economic activity. Isn’t he and his government to blame
for anything? Wasn’t he moved by the queues of the pensioners, the thousands of
businesses with no liquidity?”
Not everyone is blaming Mr. Tsipras for their
troubles. At the branch of the National Bank, one lady, whose pension had been
cut from €1,100 to €720, directed her anger the German finance minister,
Wolfgang Schäuble. Another elderly gentleman, on his way into the bank said he
would vote No in the referendum because “this is all the fault of the
foreigners.”
But the mood in the city and the country seems to be shifting.
As pensioners wait in queues, as importers make applications to a special
committee set up by the capital controls decree to make transfers abroad and
depositors who have lost access to their money wonder if it will be there after
July 5, the political climate is turning against the government. Given its
stance in favor of No, a Yes vote on Sunday will be a body blow to it. Perhaps a
fatal one.
Yannis Palaiologos is a features reporter for “Kathimerini”
newspaper and the author of “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules”
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου