The Greeks Pass Austerity, but Are They Being Priced Out of Their Lives?

by Joanna Kakissis

Time
February 13, 2012

Nikolas Fallieras was overwhelmed. For hours, people had been streaming through the revolving door at Amalia Hotel, where he's the assistant manager. They had been outside, just a block away from Parliament, protesting the painful new austerity measures that lawmakers would pass in exchange for more bailout loans. They chanted and marched and sang along to old Greek protest songs. And then things got ugly.

Gangs in hoods and masks broke out of the peaceful crowd of nearly 100,000 and picked fights with riot police. The response was quick and brutal: rounds of tear gas so acrid that the protesters began to flee. They included grandmothers draped in Greek flags, teenagers tweeting on Androids and old men in suit jackets carrying handwritten banners that read "Hang them."

"Traitors!" the crowd screamed to the lawmakers inside Parliament. "Murderers and pigs!" they screamed to the riot police. They wore light blue surgical masks, their faces chalky white from the liquid Maalox stomach antacid that's supposed to counteract the effects of the tear gas. It didn't work. They gasped and coughed, their eyes watering.

"Please, stay calm!" pleaded Fallieras, a small, slight man with delicate glasses, as a panicked crush of protesters rushed through the hotel door. One was Angeliki Papandreou, 40, a bank employee from Athens. She had gone to the protest with a friend, Ioanna Stabeli, who was visiting from the Netherlands. They both coughed as the tear gas outside wafted into the hotel. "The bubble that is the broken Greek political system is about to burst," said Papandreou as she wiped her eyes. "I don't know what the solution is anymore — whether we should stick with the euro or return to the drachma — because both roads seem to lead to poverty. All I know is that what they're doing to us is terrorism."

She was referring to not only riot police, whom she despised for what she called the "chemical warfare" of tear gas, but also the lawmakers who were about to pass a new bailout deal that she believed no Greek supported. "We are despairing," she said, "and they don't care."

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