Eurogroup meeting 2015. Flickr/EU Council Eurozone. Some rights reserved.
As the Eurogroup meeting of 16 February focused again on the Greek crisis, further wrangling over deadlines, bridging programmes and the notorious ‘Eurozone rules’ were to be expected. The elephant in the room, however, is the failed structural readjustment programme which was implemented in Greece since its first bailout in 2010. Five years on, the country’s economy has contracted by 25 percent, unemployment has risen to 27 percent and national debt, seen by many as the root cause of the Greek crisis, instead of contracting has soared from 124 to 180 percent of GDP. Thanks to the migration of 2 percent of the population and the increase in suicides and deaths linked to cuts in electricity and healthcare, unemployment did not rise further.
