Sunday’s elections in Greece have brought Tsipras and his Syriza party closerto power. In 2012, when Alexis Tsipras last ran to be prime minister of Greece, his compatriots were quite literally killing themselves in public squares because of the tough austerity measures that had strangled the country’s economy.
His alternative-left Syriza party, he said, may be the ticket out of the hell that Greece has become. Tsipras did well on the reent ballot, perhaps because Greece has gotten worse. More than 200,000 Greeks have left the country in the last five years, and austerity has forced many businesses to shutter up or go off the radar. Greece’s black market economy is now estimated to account for nearly half of the country’s GDP.
There are also signs that Europeans in other countries who once fought to keep the eurozone intact at any cost now feel they could get along pretty well without Greece. After all, it has a population of only 11 million in a European Union of 500 million and it represents only about 1.4 percent of the union’s GDP.
Tsipras has promised the Greeks that Europe needs them and has no choice but to renegotiate Greece’s bailout debt conditions. And Greeks like what they hear.
Tsipras argues that in order to stay in the eurozone, Greece’s ruling party has negotiated a foolhardy payment schedule for its $378 million bailout debt that makes it impossible for the country to grow. The current repayment plan is 175 percent of the gross domestic product, and Tsipras wants a better deal, starting with his demand that Europe should simply erase most of the Greek debt.
The lessons the young leader has learned since the last elections are apparent. He has traded what amounted to fear-mongering in his last electoral campaign for consensus building, starting with a promise to some of his former naysayer European leaders. Many of Europe’s struggling countries have launched their own versions of alternative leftist Syriza parties and Tsipras had made the rounds to Italy, Spain and Portugal in recent months.
In 2012, Tsipras gave wide ranging interviews to most people who cared enough to ask. This time around, he is writing op-eds in Europe’s largest newspapers to garner support not only for voting Greeks who have moved abroad, but to get Europe’s other austerity-suffering countries to back the debt reshuffling proposal with the idea that such a precedent could help them, too.
Tsipras has come a long way in just a few years, but not all of Europe is optimistic about a Tsipras-led Greece. In an interview ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, which owns a lot of the Greek debt, quashed Tsipras’s debt renegotiation promise and said there is very little wiggle room when it comes to renegotiating debt.
Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who heads the influential Eurogroup of European ministers agreed. “There’s no political support to write off Greek debt,” he said.
And in Germany, there was that Der Spiegel report that the German government would rather have a Greek-free euro than open the way for a trend that would be costly to the richer nations.
