Whatever your opinion of Syriza or Podemos or their respective leaders, Alexis Tspiras and Pablo Iglesias, it is clear that an electoral victory for either party would represent a significant blow against the raggedy status quo. According to Yanis Varoufakis, a university professor of economics hotly tipped to be Syriza’s first ever finance minister, a Syriza government’s first task would be to “destroy the Greek oligarchy system.”
If Syriza wins enough votes to control parliament and its leadership honors its electoral pledges – granted, a massive if! – then perhaps, just perhaps, the country might have a slim chance of getting off rock-bottom as well as setting a more socially inclusive standard of economic governance.
As for those shrieking about Greece’s sacred duty to pay off all its debts, I present Michael Hudson’s mantra of perfect logic: “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.”
It is the overriding dilemma of our times. As Australian economist Steve Keen says, the only sane and effective response to this dilemma is to ask ourselves “not whether we should or should not repay this debt, but how we are going to go about not repaying it.”
If the Syriza bloc does win a landslide victory it will be placed under almost unbearable pressure to toe the Brussels line. The ECB’s choice of timing for its virgin round of Quantitative Easing, just four days before the Greek elections, was surely no coincidence. Nor was the central bank’s decision not to extend its QE program to Greece unless, that is, it concludes the pending Troika review.
As if that were not enough, the ever-dependable U.S. rating agency Standard & Poor’s just issued a statement that it may downgrade the rating of European countries where Eurosceptic parties may assume power. According to the rating agency, the most “credit negative” parties are SYRIZA and Podemos, since they both favor increasing public spending and restructuring their debts.
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