Wolfgang Schauble and Yanis Varoufakis. Demotix/Bjorn Kietzmann. All rights reserved.Many believe that by resigning and asking for new elections to be held in September, Alexis Tsipras proved wrong those who considered him defeated. It’s a hasty and rather unrealistic conclusion to draw: nothing will fundamentally change in Greece, since everything was already written into the Memorandum of Understanding agreed between the Greek government and the European institutions on 12 July 2015: further and more severe austerity measures, the sell-off of valuable public assets to mostly German companies, the breakup of a political left that imagined it could replace the existing Europeanism with a new one, a Europe no longer German-led and no longer bound to neoliberal dogma.
Even if the Greek debt is restructured – as sooner or later must be the case, since it is unsustainable – the path has been mapped out. The Greeks had no say on it, and cannot change it. The remarks of Stefano Fassina, former deputy Finance Minister of Italy and former member of the Democratic Party, are uncompromising and incontrovertible: “To promise a ‘social’ interpretation of the Memorandum is pure propaganda. When you are committed to a primary surplus target of 3.5 percent and to heavy spending cuts from this year on, you can kiss goodbye to income support”.[1]
Was (or is) a different way out possible? Outside European institutions it was maybe possible, but unfeasible: neither the EU’s stronger states nor the ECB would today allow an orderly, managed Grexit. As for the proposal made by Yanis Varoufakis (rejecting the memorandum, preparing a parallel currency to provide liquidity in order to face the closure of banks), it was voted down during a restricted cabinet meeting. This being said, Tsipras seems convinced that internal reforms are possible, in the shadow of the Memorandum: for instance, by fully and directly involving the European Parliament, “the only European institution with a direct popular mandate”, in a regular evaluation procedure for the implementation of the loan agreement between Greece and the European Stability Mechanism, as the fifth body in the so-called ‘quartet of creditors’ which replaced the Troika. It’s difficult to believe that Greek voters will be excited by the prospect of their power being hollowed out and transferred to a European Parliament firmly controlled by radically different coalitions of forces. The outgoing Prime Minister is surely aware that in the present circumstances failure awaits him: otherwise he would not have admitted to having been “blackmailed” into capitulation.
