Pro-government rally in Syntagma Square, February 2015. Demotix/Soultana Kabouridou.All rights reserved. The announcement of the decision of the prime minister of Greece in the early hours of last Saturday, to hold a referendum on whether Greece should accept the draft agreement of a new debt relief programme or not, took me by surprise.
Having been active in the Eurocommunist Left of the 1980s I was aware that the claims that SYRIZA saw itself as an upholder of that pro-European Left tradition were largely exaggerated, but despite my private doubts on this issue, I did not expect the agenda of the party to include the possibility of an exit from the Eurozone and, more importantly, a profound clash with Greece’s European partners.
So, last Saturday morning, as I was frantically going through news stories about the Greek debt crisis and what appeared to be the collapse of the negotiations between Greece and its creditors I came across various explanations about what had transpired.
