Leader: People’s will could make Greece ungovernable

IT IS one thing for a country’s political leadership to announce emergency austerity measures to appease international creditors.

It is quite another to secure public compliance with the austerity regime. Greece is now in growing turmoil, with not only the public sector unions refusing to implement the plans, but local government officials now also urging people not to pay a deeply unpopular new property tax being charged through electricity bills. The officials believe that mass civil disobedience could derail the law. The backlash coincides with strikes so frequent that everyone from refuse collectors to bakers, dentists to taxi drivers and air traffic controllers, have taken industrial action at some point.

Greece’s problem is that its position is virtually hopeless. There is no forseeable prospect of an economic recovery as, being in the eurozone, it is unable to devalue. Its debt-to-GDP ratio will still be at 120 per cent in 2020. Unemployment is rising and while the austerity programme is sabotaged, the deficit and debt crisis gets worse. The country, as French president Nicolas Sarkozy asserted on Thursday, ought never to have joined the single currency (nor should half-competent eurozone officials have allowed it) and it is now reaping a whirlwind of its own profligate making. On this prospect, the alternative of leaving the eurozone may well come to look the less ruinous destructive endgame, for creditors and borrowers alike. On its present course, Greece, stripped of hope, is heading towards a political as well as financial breakdown.