Editorial
May 2, 2012
Europe’s effort to rescue Greece has become all too like an episode of the TV hospital drama “House.”
If you’ve seen the show, you know the drill: An unreliable patient with alarming symptoms (Greece) is being treated by a chief doctor who has the bedside manner of a sociopath (the troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Near deaths and false recoveries ensue.
Sunday’s parliamentary elections should in theory offer a chance for a cure. Political parties, which since November have taken a back seat to a government of technocrats, now have the opportunity to secure a popular mandate for reform.
The prognosis isn’t great. That’s because the two main parties -- New Democracy and Pasok -- are part of the problem. In the years leading up to the crisis, they spent freely on pensions and health care, and a New Democracy government then lied about the resulting budget deficits. They also failed to reform a bloated and dysfunctional state bureaucracy.
Worse, neither party has taken full ownership of the austerity program they had to accept for Greece to get a 130 billion euro ($172 billion) bailout in March. They’ve spent too much of their election campaigns promising to find ways to ameliorate the deal, and too little explaining to Greeks the hard things they need to do and why.
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