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Is SYRIZA just another Greek party that does not know what to do?

Moumoutzis, K. (2015) “Is SYRIZA just another Greek party that does not know what to do?“, Europe on the Strand Blog, 01 February.

 

Less than a week after SYRIZA’s (Coalition of the Radical Left) electoral victory, uncertainty regarding the newly formed Greek government’s economic policy has increased. In a statement emailed to Bloomberg News, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said: ‘we need time to breathe and create our own medium-term recovery programme’. Mr. Tsipras’ statement followed his Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ interview with BBC’s Newsnight, during which he criticised the two Economic Adjustment Programmes (the so-called ‘bailout programmes’) that Greece had previously negotiated with its creditors. He referred to them as ‘unenforceable’ programmes, which for five years have been ‘steadfastly refusing to produce any tangible benefits’.

Mr. Varoufakis, however, also conceded that ‘time limitations’ are ‘severe’. Indeed, the Parliamentary Budget Office’s latest quarterly report emphasised that ‘the new government’s decisions must be made with the utmost speed’, so as to stem the costs that the Greek economy has already incurred as a result of the uncertainty associated with the elections. Given that they seem to be aware of the economic costs of prolonged uncertainty, it remains unclear why SYRIZA has been so unprepared as to require ‘breathing time’ to formulate its economic policy.

This lack of preparation is not specific to SYRIZA. The last time that a newly elected Greek government was required to formulate its economic policy without having to meet the conditions attached to financial assistance, it was equally unprepared. It was in January 2010, a few months before the first bailout programme was agreed, when Finance Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou of PASOK’s (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement) newly formed government submitted an update of Greece’s Stability Programme (these are the programmes, which all European Union member states submit to the European Commission for assessment and in which they report on their fiscal policies).

 

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