In September 2008, the then Minister of Economy of Belgium, Didier Reyders, made an incredible statement. He said he wanted to reassure Belgian citizens that “whatever happens from now on, their bank deposits are not at risk.” Never before, since the end of the Second World War, had a minister of a country in the Western world dared to say such a thing.
A few days later, everyone understood why he said it. Since its collapse he had crossed the Atlantic and begun to sweep everything in front of him in Europe. The governments of Belgium, France and Luxembourg realized that Dexia Bank, which was completely exposed to the government bonds of these three countries, was so short of liquidity that to cover it, they had to find and give it almost 7 billion euros, within 24 hours. Opera and it happened. It was her beginning.
From Simitis’s warning, to Karamanlis’ “salary freeze”.
Two months later, Kostas Simitis, speaking in the Hellenic Parliament, warned that there was a serious risk that Greece would be forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund. No Greek politician had ever dared to say such a thing. In April 2009, however, the then Minister of Economy Yannis Papathanasiou realized, from what his counterparts at the Eurogroup in Luxembourg told him, that Simitis knew what he was talking about. And Kostas Karamanlis, whistling, at the Thessaloniki International Fair, something about freezing wages, hand over the country to Giorgos Papandreou. Much to the dismay of the European centre-right.
Schäuble’s basement and the plan for Grexit
At the end of 2009, when asked, off the record, a representative of the then Minister of Economy, Giorgos Papakonstantinou, what they told him the Europeans wanted to financially support Greece, he gave the following clear answer: “They asked me to kill my father, my mother and my two children. I told them to leave the one child to me and they said no.”
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A few months later, in 2010, the then head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, (before he was caught in the act), declared that political consensus within a country is a necessary condition for that country to emerge, an hour earlier, from an economic crisis. In Greece, the ND of Antonis Samaras then declared itself anti-memorandum and Prime Minister George Papandreou dreamed of referendums. It was the moment when Europeans realized that, unlike in other European countries, where the center-right and center-left more or less agreed on a common line towards the crisis, in Greece it was happening “come and see”.
Of course, when Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker directly threatened Samara, within the European People’s Party, to dissolve him, he – in November 2011 – backed down. Just as Giorgos Papandreou also did back in the same days, when he was badly carried to the G20 meeting in Cannes, where he found that he was alone with an opponent from the whole West, right and left. And all this happened just a few weeks after Evangelos Venizelos’ meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble, in an underground hotel, in Wroclaw, Poland, where the German minister, on the sidelines of an informal Eurogroup, explained in detail, to his Greek counterpart, the reasons why he firmly believed that Greece should leave the eurozone. Something that was certainly not a bolt from the blue, since the German Christian Democrats were never excited by Greece’s accession to the euro zone, and many of them voted against it in 2000, in the European Parliament. As for Schäuble, everyone in Brussels knew that he was the initiator and proponent of the so-called “Europe of many speeds”.
The arrival of Tsipras, the Varoufakis theories and the painful landing of 2015
Given this, with the ND being the black sheep of the European People’s Party and the PaSoK pariah among the European Socialists, the arrival of Alexis Tsipras in the limelight was nothing more than icing on an already moldy cake. Of course, with Yannis Varoufakis explaining to his counterparts at the Eurogroup why they are ugly, stupid and illiterate, while he is handsome, intelligent and educated, the case began to take on surreal dimensions.
But the landing came abruptly, with , where the “first-time Left” was confronted with its incoherence and forced to disregard the verdict of the Greek people, in whose name it was supposed to do what it did. As if he had been ready for a long time, Schäuble rehashed Tsipras’ political bluff that he supposedly has the ability to politically “disintegrate” Europe, saying that there is, allegedly, the legal possibility to “kick” Greece out of Europe. Those who know about poker, know of course that in bluffs and relenses, the one with the most money almost always wins. Opera and it happened.
The “adults in the room” and the pillow of the European centre-left
Since then, the European consultations on the “Greek crisis” did indeed include “adults in the room”, as Lagarde said. However, the composition of adults had changed compared to 2010. Merkel remained, but in the other two economically strongest countries of the eurozone, the far-right Sarkozy and Berlusconi had been replaced by the mildly socialist Hollande and Renji. The former was the political child of François Mitterrand and the latter the political descendant of Enrico Berliguer.
At the same time, Jeroen Dysseblum, one of the reformers of the Dutch Socialist Party, was elected to the presidency of the Eurogroup, while the Frenchman Pierre Moscovici, a Trotskyist in his youth and also a socialist, was responsible for economic affairs in the European Commission. Finally, the most left-wing, ever, right-wing politician in the history of Europe, Jean-Claude Juncker, was elected to the presidency of the European Commission.
So if we accept that people sometimes influence the course of history, then we should recognize that no Greek prime minister had a better “group of adults” than the one Alexis Tsipras had in Europe in 2015. After all, no Greek prime minister has seen his counterparts from countries such as Germany and France write and say (even after the fact) as many positive comments about him as Tsipras. Characteristic of the climate of the time is undoubtedly the fact that on the eve of the Referendum of 2015, the then Minister of Economy of France, Emmanuel Macron, took care to declare, mainly addressing Germany, that regardless of the result, “there should not be a new Treaty of Versailles for Greece”. It was the time when the European center-left, seeing that “the stringla became a lamb”, began to caress it.
The big “why”: Why did Greece alone need three memoranda?
From the facts, of course, it turned out that for Greece there was not one, not two, but three Treaties of Versailles. Which of the three was the worst is the minor question. The main thing is why was only Greece the country that “weighed the cannon” in the global economic crisis of 2008 and why was it the only one that needed not one, not two, but three memoranda to get out of the crisis? If it came out.
The answer is not easy, nor can it be simplistic and politically one-sided. After all, it is not easy to answer the questions why Greece was the only country in the West that experienced a civil war after the Second World War, nor why – some 2 years later – it was again the only country in Western Europe that became a junta?
