Guardian
November 8, 2011
For days now, Greeks have been indoors glued to their television sets, following the political "thriller" (as the channels like to call it) unfolding on the cliff edge of the country's threatened ejection from the eurozone. In case Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy hadn't put it plainly enough when they called George Papandreou on the carpet in Cannes, EU commissioner, Olli Rehn, issued his ultimatum on Sunday: Greece had 24 hours to form a unity government or be plucked like a festering thorn from Europe's side. As the tortuous negotiations between the leaders of the two main parties wore on, yet another deadline appeared: the moment when the markets would open in Tokyo. The unity government was duly announced, but the wrangling continues: it still has neither a leader nor a cabinet.
Set up in such conditions, what legitimacy can Greece's new "transitional" administration have? Its authority will derive, essentially, from fear: the fear of bankruptcy, of a return to the drachma (which some 70% of Greeks oppose), of being thrown out of Europe and the "developed" world. It is the government of "there is no alternative", of absolute submission to the EU and the banks and to the politics of austerity. In order to secure the sixth tranche of Greece's loan and yet another bailout package, Greece must commit to implementing the European summit agreement of October 26, with further deep austerity measures which have yet to be made public, monitored by a permanent presence of the troika in Athens. The date of the promised election, which was yesterday forecast for February, now seems to be receding into the future conditional.
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