Ode To Joy! Syriza supporters cheer as their party's victory is announced, But will the people of Greece be able to successfully reoccupy the democratic institutions emptied out by the twin evils of neoliberalism and austerity?
GREECE, the birthplace of democracy, is now the test of
whether democratic governments still possess the power to effect meaningful
change. If it passes the test, then the election of the left-wing Syriza Party,
on 26 January 2015, will mark the beginning of the end of the 30-year
neoliberal experiment. But, if it fails, then the growing perception that
democracy has become an empty shell, incapable of delivering anything more than
more of the same, will harden – not only in Greece, but across the whole world.
There are those who suggest that, when it comes to
democracy, the neoliberal doctrines of the political class have acted like a
neutron bomb. For those unfamiliar with the term, the neutron bomb was one of the
Cold War’s most abhorrent creations. It’s great “selling point” was that its
detonation, while killing human-beings by the million, would leave key
infrastructure intact. Ready and waiting, following a suitable interval, for
occupation and use by the “victors”.
According to the neutron bomb metaphor, neoliberalism has
eliminated the vital human elements of our democratic system. The mass
participation in political life for which New Zealand was justly famous
(roughly a tenth of our adult population once belonged to a political party and
the numbers voting frequently exceeded 90 percent of registered electors) has
dwindled dramatically, reducing our democratic institutions to empty, echoing
shells. The awful uniformity, both in terms of the political choices on offer,
and the politicians offering them, is thus explained.
The Syriza Party’s stunning victory in the Greek general
election is significant precisely because it has allowed the Greek people to
re-occupy their country’s democratic infrastructure. The resulting surge of
hope that has swept through the Greek population – evident in the highly
emotional responses of ordinary Greek citizens interviewed on the streets of
Athens by the world’s bemused media – is at once the new Prime Minister’s,
Alexis Tsipras’, greatest asset and the source of his greatest vulnerability.
The neoliberal financiers of the European Union are adamant
that the Greek people will not be released from the debt obligations imposed
upon them by the profligate borrowings of corrupt politicians more than a
decade ago. The devastating austerity programme overseen by the so-called
“Troika” (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the
International Monetary Fund) which has seen unemployment soar to 1 in 4 of the
workforce, and the incomes of those lucky enough to still have a job slashed by
as much as 40 percent, must, according to Greece’s unyielding European creditors,
remain in force.
The neoliberal elites’ assumption has always been that by
forcing savage reductions in the size and scope of Greece’s public sector, the
confidence of her private sector would soar, investment would surge, and before
you could say “Long live the Eurozone!”, the Greek economy would have grown its
way back to prosperity.
In the real world, however, events have unfolded very
differently. Health cuts left the chronically ill without medicine. Wage cuts led
to mortgage defaults and homeless families. Confidence collapsed. Investment
dried up. Emigration soared. And when the desperate victims of austerity
protested, their political representatives, pledged to defend the almighty
Euro, called out the Riot Police.
When the Greeks voted-out the politicians responsible, they
discovered to their horror that the replacements were just as committed to
implementing the Troika’s austerity programme as their predecessors. When
tested, political parties nominally of the Left turned out to be practically indistinguishable
from their supposed ideological rivals on the Right. In the end, politicians
from the traditional parties felt obliged to join forces against what they saw
as the unrealistic and unreasonable demands of the electors. Isolated and
vilified as traitors, the Greek political class would have struggled to detect
the irony in Berthold Brecht’s famous suggestion that it might be easier for
the Government “To dissolve the people and elect another.”
Greece’s electors have now delivered their emphatic reply to
the brutal economic absolutism of successive neoliberal governments. The halls
of the democratic Greek Republic, for long the exclusive preserve of neoliberal
technocrats and their local political collaborators, are now ringing with the
excited voices of the Greek People.
And the peoples of the European Union, themselves no
strangers to the brutalities of austerity, are listening. If Syriza is to
succeed, it is to this audience that it must appeal.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 January 2015.
