EU turns the screws on Greece

The European Union, sensing weakness is turning the screws on Greece. Finance ministers are now openly talking about the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), refusing even to pay lip service to Syriza’s hatred of the term.

It is now demanding that representatives of the troika go in to Greek ministries – they are talking about hundreds of officials – and pore through the accounts, rather than receive summaries from Greece. The EU wants the Greek government to go back on every pledge it made to the people when it was elected.

In the recent negotiations, the new Greek government failed to prepare for the European Central Bank’s bullying. It allowed Greek banks to rely on the Bank for liquidity, so the Bank inevitably tightened the screws on Greece by tightening the terms of liquidity provision. So the EU has now forced the Greek government to accept an extension of the “rescue package” which Syriza repeatedly pledged to end.

Syriza has now declared that it will meet all obligations to its creditors “fully and timely”, and there are huge debt payments to be made this month.

It has also promised the EU that it will achieve “appropriate” primary surpluses (that is, not spend more than it gets in), desist from actions that would “negatively impact fiscal targets”, and push through ‘reforms’ that break its pledges to cut taxes, raise the minimum wage, write off domestic debt, forbid house foreclosures, reverse privatisations, and reconnect families to the electricity network.

Even some Syriza MPs and MEPs can see that its strategy of hoping to achieve radical change within the institutional framework of the common currency has failed.