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Politics in Athens: Biker-chic and broke.

greek-bureaucratPETER COY [Bloomberg Businessweek] – The rest of Europe doesn’t want to hear what Greece has to say anymore. In vowing that he has the upper hand in negotiations, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sounds as detached from reality as the Iraqi information minister who promised Western reporters in 2003 that U.S. troops would be smashed by the forces of Saddam Hussein. Varoufakis is a bad-boy academic who likes showing up on a motorcycle and wagging his finger at the diplomats. Here’s Varoufakis again, this time from a Twitter message in April: “FDR, 1936: ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred.’ A quotation close to my heart (& reality) these days.” This needs to be about Greece, not Yanis.

It’s not just Germans who are tired of Greece. The leaders of Spain, Ireland, and Portugal, who might have been natural allies, have been some of the Greeks’ toughest critics. They argue that their countries swallowed the austerity medicine and that Greece should, too. Concessions to Greece now would embolden leftist critics in their own countries, such as the Podemos party in Spain. Even Bulgaria, which joined the European Union only in 2007 and is still trying to shape up its economy to accede to the euro, is fed up. “We are much poorer than the Greeks, but we have performed reforms,” Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev told the New York Times….

‘Europe may not even need to expel Greece from the common currency to be relieved of it. The country has already been cut off by the European Central Bank…’

Europe may not even need to expel Greece from the common currency to be relieved of it. The country has already been cut off by the European Central Bank from increases in emergency liquidity assistance and may soon lose access to other lending channels. “You can kind of leave Greece in this state of suspended animation in which the whole issue of Grexit becomes neutered,” says Huw Pill, a former European Central Bank official who is chief European economist for Goldman Sachs International.

If the euro zone is shorn of its most unreliable member, the other 18 countries could build trust with each other and band together more tightly….But it’s equally possible the euro zone will go in the other direction, away from unification. The cultural, historical, and linguistic differences between Greeks and Germans remain far deeper than those between, say, Texans and Floridians. An EU survey of citizens in 28 member nations last November found that 52 percent felt very attached to their cities, towns, or villages, and 54 percent felt very attached to their countries, but only 9 percent felt very attached to the EU itself. The bailouts triggered by the financial crisis didn’t help matters, feeding into ancient stereotypes by pitting mostly northern creditor nations against mostly southern borrowers (not just Greece). In 2011, European Parliament member Jussi Halla-aho of Finland suggested Greece needed a junta “to rein in the strikers and demonstrators … with tanks.”

In retrospect, Europe’s first mistake was letting Greece into the euro zone in 2001…


Continued at “Everybody Hates Greece” on Bloomberg Businessweek | More Chronicle & Notices.

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