Global Post
June 25, 2011
The Papandreous have dominated Greek politics for more than half a century. But last week, Prime Minister George Papandreou, whose father and grandfather had both been premiers before him, nearly walked away from it all.
Greece was at a breaking point. A year after narrowly avoiding a default on its massive national debt, the country was facing bankruptcy again, even after instituting a series of harsh austerity measures in exchange for international bailout loans.
The spending cuts and tax hikes had worsened the recession, and people had lost their jobs and seen their income shrink. Anti-austerity demonstrators have camped out in Syntagma, the square across the street from parliament, for weeks. Polls show that 87 percent of Greeks believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
To make matters worse, the Europeans were threatening to withhold the latest installment of bailout loans — which Greece needed by July to avoid a default — unless Greek politicians showed unity. But even deputies from Papandreou’s own Panhellenic Socialist Union (PASOK), which his mercurial father, Andreas, founded in 1974, were rebelling.
“It is an impossible position to be in,” said Stathis Kalyvas, a Greek professor of political science at Yale. “The debt crisis is so dire that there was never much room for negotiation in the first place. The government was tasked with making economic reforms in a year that should have been made over the course of 30.”
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