Reuters
February 13, 2012
Europe's left is torn between outrage and anxiety over drastic cuts in living standards and working conditions being imposed on Greeks by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
Indignation at sweeping pay and pension reductions and public sector job cuts dictated by official creditors in return for a second bailout of the debt-ridden euro zone state is strongest in south European countries that fear a similar rod.
Yet there is scant sympathy from centre-left politicians and labor leaders in northern Europe, where voters are more worried at the potential cost of bailouts, nor in former communist central Europe, where people are more inured to hardship.
"What if we all became Greeks?" left-wing French daily Liberation asked on Monday. "Is what is being imposed today on this pressured and humiliated country a foretaste of what will one day be prescribed for Italy, Portugal, and why not France?"
A planned 22 percent cut in the Greek minimum wage, with a 32 percent cut for workers under age 25, is among the most radical steps backwards inflicted in peacetime in modern Europe. Only Latvia has endured a similar EU/IMF-mandated "internal devaluation" cutting living standards.
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