So, when the moment came for the players to turn over their cards, the Greek Prime Minister declared: “I have the complete trust of a huge majority of the people I represent. What have you all got?” They have nothing.
Had the EU accepted the single most repeated request of the Greek side, which was to negotiate at the political level, they would not have found themselves bust like this. Tsipras would be sitting at the table with other elected leaders. They would be holding the same democratic trump card. But they didn’t. Instead, they insisted he negotiate with the technocrats of the Troika. Insisted on relegating him to the kids’ table.
They have numbers, he has people. They give figures and graphs, he replies with real stories of real people suffering. He has a breezy smile and an open white shirt, they have grave frowns and grave ties. An increasingly Eurosceptic population across the continent looks on with interest. What will they do? Concede defeat or overturn the table and refuse to play? If they do the former he wins, if they do the latter they lose.
Their responses are garbled, incomprehensible, comical even. Commissioner Dombrovskis gave a press conference on Monday morning. This referendum was pointless, he protested. The offer it concerned is no longer on the table. This referendum had no legal basis, he added. People didn’t understand the question. A journalist asked: “Wasn’t it here, in this very room, only days ago that President Juncker was urging people to vote yes?”
But all this is atmosphere. Does the referendum “OXI” response change anything at the negotiating level? One view is that it changes nothing. Another is that it changes everything.
It changes nothing in the sense that it is unlikely to make countries facing increasing political difficulties in their domestic parliaments suddenly offer a much improved deal. Their reticence was never rational – it was dictated by political realities. Had the matter been dealt with logically, one would have calculated the financial damage each day of uncertainty causes, the billions lost in markets around the world, the years of lost growth for Europe and restructured the Greek debt immediately, decisively and finally.
But the result also changes everything because it has forced all the bureaucratic operators, who like to stay within the shadows, out in the open. It has shone a light on the EU’s democratic deficit that, up to a few months ago, was in the gloom of conspiracy theory. It has created, singlehandedly, a cogent case for left-of-center Euroscepticism. It has created an iconic battle between faceless grey bureaucracy and Alexis Tsipras, man of the people.
The European Central Bank on Monday declared its hand. Instead of relaxing liquidity provisions it decided to tighten the screw, to choke the Greek economy further. A woman queuing in front of an ATM, interviewed on Greek TV gave her reaction: “We’re not stupid. We knew what was happening. We knew there was worse to come. We voted, knowing. We are ready.”
French President Hollande is already making noises of a conciliatory nature. Will others listen? Merkel’s statement on Monday evening was harsh. But was she speaking primarily to a domestic audience? Someone needs to take charge of the situation and resolve it. It is, actually, easy. Let us start by admitting that the medicine given to Greece for five years was poison and that Greece’s economic recovery is as critical to the whole union as it is to Greece. Because it is the right thing to do. Because it is absolutely true.
This has been Tsipras’s achievement and the referendum’s true result. It has transformed a crisis which was desperately disguised as economic into what it really is: a crisis of values. It has reframed the search for Greece’s salvation to a search for a savior of the entire European project. What will it be? People or numbers?
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