Financial Times
November 4, 2011
As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, George Papandreou liked to relax by munching pizza and strumming Bob Dylan songs on his guitar. If one of those songs was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, then the Greek prime minister chose this week to play a different tune.
On Monday, he stunned his government colleagues, fellow European leaders and financial markets by announcing a referendum on Greece’s future. The question to be put to voters was unclear: it might have been about the latest €130bn international rescue plan for Greece, or it might have been about Greece’s membership of the eurozone and the broader European Union. Either way, he appeared to be playing with fire and putting the euro in jeopardy.
In the event, it did not matter. On Thursday, he revealed that he had changed his mind and there would be no referendum after all. His political future rested instead on a parliamentary confidence vote due to be held at midnight on Friday.
What exactly was going through Mr Papandreou’s mind this week is unclear even to friends and advisers in his ruling Pasok socialist party. According to one school of thought, he was trying to manoeuvre the conservative opposition New Democracy party into supporting the €130bn rescue and its associated austerity measures. This achieved, he would have cross-party support for the plan, would be in firmer control of his government and able to honour his commitments to Greece’s international lenders.
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