September 24, 2011
It is 11pm. A group of men and women, obviously foreign, descend from a bus that has dropped them off at the lower end of Syntagma Square, the plaza that faces the Greek parliament.
They walk past a man curled in a foetal position at the top of Ermou, a pedestrian street that leads off the square. They pass another slumped across a cardboard sheet, his head in his hands, then a tousle-haired immigrant, arms outstretched, as he murmurs: "Mr, Mr, euro, Mr." But the men and women don't look. They walk on cheerily chatting towards their hotel.
The group, a team of technical experts mostly from the EU, are in Greece to monitor the state of its debt-stricken economy – and after several days spent poring over ministerial figures they know how dire the situation is. They also know that on the ground things will get a lot worse when their bosses at the EU, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank (the "troika") fly into Athens on Tuesday to formally approve a new wave of recession-inducing austerity in return for aid.
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