Lawmakers examining the future of the European Union were warned that the latest austerity package coming down the pike for Greece could lead to seismic disillusionment in the already-battered Mediterranean country.
The cautioning came during a Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing Tuesday, one day before Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras must either jam neoliberal reforms through parliament, entertain the possibility of a “Grexit,” or step down.
“He came in on a mandate of no austerity and yet in this agreement there is austerity,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said during the hearing, referring to the Greek leader. Tsipras’ party, Syriza, was elected in January on a platform of rejecting more sacrifices to foreign creditors.
The Greek peoples’ distaste for post-2008 austerity was reaffirmed earlier this month in a referendum. More than six in ten Greeks rejected an International Monetary Fund bailout that would have further squeezed pensioners, small businesses, and public sector assets.
Despite the mandate, Tsipras now appears willing to accept even more austere terms from Brussels than the ones rejected by voters, perhaps unprepared to handle the transition from the Euro back to the drachma.
“There is no debt relief in this package,” Dr. Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told the committee.
Unlike two of his fellow witnesses on the panel who approved of the latest bailout, Walt expressed concerns about the collateral damage it will do.
“What the Europeans are now asking Greece to do is suffer a little more with that prospect that things will improve at some point down the road,” he testified. “It is clearly politically difficult for the Greeks to do this.”
He added that the capitulation of the Syriza party will likely lead to “sharper political divisions in Greece.”
Similar foreshadowing, albeit of a darker and more specific nature, came Monday from the party’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis, who resigned immediately following the bailout referendum, said in a radio interview that the extreme rightwing Golden Dawn Party may now “inherit the mantle of the anti-austerity drive, tragically.”
“Our party Syriza, that has cultivated so much hope in Greece,” Varoufakis said, “if we betray this hope and if we bow our heads to this new form of postmodern occupation, then I cannot see any other possible outcome than the further strengthening of Golden Dawn.”
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has, along with Syriza, achieved electoral gains by campaigning against ongoing austerity. It currently holds 17 seats in Parliament.
