Tonight the radical left-wing party, Syriza, in a 95% turnout, has won the election in Greece with 36.5% of the vote – looking like finishing one seat short of an overall majority and possibly requiring some compromises in coalition.
Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, had built his massive surge of popularity in an austerity crippled country, on the promise that, under a Syriza government, Greece would dispense with austerity measures, negate its debt by the simple expedient of default and, in consequence, leave the eurozone.
In recent days, as the prospect of victory hardened, Mr Tsipras has markedly downgraded his rhetoric, talking instead of ‘renegotiating’ the Greek debt with the ‘Troika’ of the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – a renegotiation that appears to consist of having half of the Greek debt written off.
If the Troika agreed to this one, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France would have good reason to ask for the same facility. And if a deal is done to facilitate keeping Greece in the EU, it will give serious comfort to the Scottish and Catalonian nationalist separatists.
Apart from that difficulty, it is a condition of the delivery of the last tranche of the Troika’s 2010 €240Bn bail out of Greece that it adheres to the agreed austerity measures. Should it abandon those measures, the completion of the bail out deal would be at real risk.
Many Greeks are exultant tonight at the prospect of the end of austerity, with little care as to how that might come about or what the cost of it might be. But the sense of relief and of hope, however fragile, is palpable.
What may help is that the defeated Antonis Samaris and his New Democracy party had, under the `Troika’ imposed austerity, recovered the Greek economy to a degree. If one subtracts the impact of the Greek debt, with growth of around 4% in the past year the core Greek budget will show the first surplus for a very long time. But the debt is there. A lot will depend on what negotiations might be made to deal with it.
Parallels
Three days ago, on 22nd January, the mouthpiece of the SNP, journalist Iain McWhirter, writing in The Herald, drew an strong parallel between Syriza and this election and the SNP and indyref, in an article entitled: ‘A certain symmetry between Greek poll and the referendum’.
Saying that ‘many former Scottish independence activists would love to emulate the success of Syriza’, McWhirter looked at a range of interesting points of comparability between the two radical left wing nationalist movements, both experiencing a powerful surge in membership and in popular support.
Amusingly, he noted ‘a studied vagueness to the policies offered by Syriza’s charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, to deal with the debt crisis and costly public services’. Who could he have had in mind?
Talking of the similarities between the two campaigns, McWhirter sees the SNP as rather like Syriza in being ‘a self consciously neo-nationalist movement, which trades heavily on sovereignty and identity’.
He sees the risks to Syriza, identified by its opponents, as the flight of capital that could force even deeper cuts, leaving Greece, as claimed by the now defeated Antonis Samaras, ejected from the EU and becoming ‘a banana republic like Venezuela’.
The experience of Scotland in the run up to the September vote was that the flight of capital was pretty well unavoidable where the currency to be used was uncertain; the amount of the inherited share of the national debt unknown; and the ability of the SNP government could not be guaranteed to balance a budget whose greatest given detail was in its proposed spending on enhanced social benefits.
There is an unhealthily blinkered triumphalism in McWhirter’s crowing at the shock experienced by the Greek middle classes in finding that the budgetary crisis and the cut backs of the punitively severe austerity programme had left them ‘little better off than the urban poor’.
With the worrying demographic impact of Scotland’s ageing population outweighing its undersubscribed working population, this country cannot afford to alienate and drive out the middle classes who carry the work ethic that will be needed in any social re-engineering that may be attempted.
A much more nuanced political sophistication is needed, beyond the simplistic binary division that neither Mr McWhirter nor his political masters seems able to leave behind.
Any country aiming for the stable economic growth to support a civilised society’s due care for the vulnerable and the needy, has to balance social benefits against tax revenues and investment incentives.
Constantly staggering from a central bias towards one of these obligations to that of the other one, beggars belief as an acceptable execution of 21st century national government.
The United Kingdom came belatedly to realise the depth, breadth and complexity of the impact on the Union of any Scottish secession.
Tonight Europe is facing the same sense of ‘What next?’
- A default by Greece on its national debt would force its exit from the eurozone and possibly from the EU.
- That could destabilise an already fragile euro to the point where the eurozone was lost.
- And that could see the end of the emergent political union which has been the dream of Europe.
We cannot ourselves see – beyond trivilialities – parallels between Greece tonight and an indy Scotland. However, while underlining the difference between the economies of the two countries, Mr McWhirter got carried away last Thursday by the romance of the attraction of revolutionary change and welded the fortunes of a putative independent Scotland to those of what is now the reality of a Greece led by Syriza. This was not politically astute.
For Scotland, we will all now be watching Syriza’s direction of government, as a sort of safe rehearsal of what might have been – and might be – in a country responsible for its own debt, making decisions which may see its departure from a union that has brought it economic growth, facing a consequent currency crisis.
Alternatively, we may all be watching a triumphantly resurgent Greece, freed from debt in one bound and moving into growth.
Syriza, thanks to Iain McWhirter, is now the official talisman for indy, with a great deal of interest from this part of the world in its fortunes in the period ahead.
