Georgios Papandreou's new party in Greece

Georgios Papandreou, former Greek Prime Minister for PASOK, the Greek social-democratic party, has just announced the formation of a new party to compete in the January 25 elections. (Papandreou sorgt mit Parteigründung für Ärger Rheinische Post 03.01.2015)

Papandreou's forced resignation as Prime Minister in 2011 was one of the most dramatic signs of how far Angela Merkel is willing to go to impose her brutal austerity policies on the eurozone. Papandreou accepted a new round of draconian austerity "reforms." But he insisted on having a referendum to allow the Greek public to vote on them.

While Merkel's ousting him was an outrageous act, that doesn't mean I have a high opinion of him. As I wrote in Greece and the politics of austerity 11/30/2012:

Georgios Papandreou was the social-democratic Prime Minister of Greece for the PASOK party from 2009-2011. By caving in to German Prime Minister Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel's demands for destructive austerity policies in response to the Greek debt crisis, Papandreou put his party on the fast track to non-existence. PASOK is a junior member of the current conservative-led Greek government. But polls show it now polling around the 5% range. The Syriza coalition has emerged as the main left party now, and polls are showing it as having the largest support of any party at the moment.

So, for putting his country under Frau Fritz' economic jackboot and ruining his own political party, he now gets to appear as statesman-at-large.

And as Kevin Hope writes in Papandreou set to lead ‘wild card’ party Financial Times 01/01/2015:

Few analysts would have predicted a political comeback for Mr Papandreou, given his abrupt departure. He left office in November 2011 after his controversial proposal for a referendum on the country’s European future was rubbished by fellow European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, who threatened to let Greece drop out of the eurozone.

Greece accepted an international bailout in 2010, six months after Mr Papandreou took office. Yet he shrugged off responsibility for the country’s financial collapse, instead accusing the previous centre-right government of borrowing recklessly to finance its policies, while claiming that Greek interest groups had undermined his own attempts at reform.

Since his resignation, the ex-premier has spent much of his time lecturing on crisis management and the politics of austerity at US and Scandinavian universities and addressing gatherings of fund managers and bankers. [my emphasis]

But Papandreou is part of a social-democratic dynastic family in Greece and will be able to make his presence visible in the election. If it takes even more votes away from the now-tiny PASOK that Papandreou himself ruined, that could be a good thing. Politics doesn't work on the neat right-left spectrum of which pundits are so fond. But if the new party winds up opening up a "political space" for a left-leaning party advocating resistance to austerity policies that could attract PASOK voters fearful of aligning with the "radical-left" SYRIZA, that could help Alexis Tsipras build an anti-austerity coalition if SYRIZA wins the election. It's a new factor in a turbulent situation. And Papandreou presumably harbors no love for Merkel.

Jamie Galbraith wrote just after Papandreou was forced out in 2011 (The crisis in the eurozone Salon 11/10/2012):

Political fragility also explains the fury in France and Germany when George Papandreou [the calmest man in Europe, by the way, having been born and raised in Minnesota] sought to cut the knot of his rebellious ministers, irresponsible opposition and angry public by putting the latest austerity package to a vote. God help the bankers! The move was fatal to Papandreou in short order, and Greece will now be turned over to a junta of creditors’ deputies if such can be found willing to take the job. It won’t be anyone who wants to continue to live in Greece afterward.

Greece and Ireland are being destroyed. Portugal and Spain are in limbo, and the crisis shifts to Italy – truly too big to fail – which is being put into an IMF-dictated receivership as I write. Meanwhile France struggles to delay the (inevitable) downgrade of its AAA rating by cutting every social and investment program. [italics in original]

But the possible implications of the new Papandreou party that I sketched out above is an optimistic case. Kevin Hope describes another possibility:

One opinion poll published last week suggested Mr Papandreou’s group could win 4-5 per cent of the vote, taking a small but critical percentage from the current frontrunner, the hard-left Syriza party. If so, that could hand victory to the centre-right New Democracy party of premier Antonis Samaras.

The prospect of a Syriza victory has rattled investors in recent weeks, with concerns the party would cancel the country’s international bailout and halt payment on its foreign debt.

Mr Papandreou could also take votes from Pasok itself and To Potami (the River), a moderate left party formed last year.

Greece and the politics of austerity

Georgios Papandreou was the social-democratic Prime Minister of Greece for the PASOK party from 2009-2011. By caving in to German Prime Minister Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel's demands for destructive austerity policies in response to the Greek debt crisis, Papandreou put his party on the fast track to non-existence. PASOK is a junior member of the current conservative-led Greek government. But polls show it now polling around the 5% range. The Syriza coalition has emerged as the main left party now, and polls are showing it as having the largest support of any party at the moment.

So, for putting his country under Frau Fritz' economic jackboot and ruining his own political party, he now gets to appear as statesman-at-large.

He provides a vapid statement of why it would be nice if the eurozone and the European Union The Politics of Fear Huffington Post 11/29/2012:

Like ghosts from the past, we see political violence, xenophobia, migrants being scapegoated and extreme nationalism creeping into our public debates -- even into our parliaments. This is a Europe diverging from its founding principles. Principles that rendered nationalistic hatreds an anathema.

But it is these politics of fear that seem to have incapacitated Europe. A Europe seemingly incapable of ending this crisis, a fractious Europe. This has undermined a sense of trust between us and in our European institutions. This climate does not inspire confidence either in our citizens or the markets. Nor will our retreat into a renationalization of Europe be the solution.

My recent experience in dealing with the financial crisis in Greece and in Europe has confirmed my belief that this is a political crisis more than a financial one.

I am convinced that, with the political will, we could have avoided much pain, squelched market fears and stabilized the euro, while at the same time reformed ailing, unsustainable economies such as ours in Greece.

Despite media hype to the contrary, it is the Greek people who first and foremost have wanted this change.

There's additional blather about "real, necessary reform and fiscal responsibility."

But it's all more than a bit disgusting from a leader who was democratically elected to represent the people of Greece and tossed his responsibilities onto the funeral pyre of a destructive neoliberal notion of "Europe." And thereby contributed mightily to the likely disintegration of the EU, both its neoliberal reality and the democratic hope that remains.

Here is a video of him, sounding like one of the American CEOs who we hear lobbying for austerity economics from a presentation of 10/31/2012, Is Europe a straitjacket or is it empowering us? - Giorgos Andrea Papandreou Berggruen Governance:

New Poll Confirms Rise of Extremes in Greece The New Athenian 11/29/2012 reports on poll results he sources to Δημοσκόπηση VPRC για τα "Επίκαιρα": Πάνω από 30% ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ Επίκαιρα Online 28.11.2012:

The poll, which appears in the weekly magazine Epikaira, gives conservative New Democracy 26.5 percent of the popular vote, and Syriza 31.5 percent. It also confirms the oft-predicted rise of the far-right Golden Dawn party to third place with 12.5 percent.

Beyond these three, the field is flat, with a clutch of four small parties claiming between five and 6.5 percent. This is important for three reasons. First, it sinks New Democracy's main coalition partner, the socialist Pasok, to the order of five percent, even lower than its lowest ever election showing of 12 percent last June, and indistinguishable from the likes of other small fry. Pasok had already been cast down from the ranks of potential ruling parties; now it is also on death row. This now should mean that both Pasok and the third coalition partner, the Democratic Left, ought to be more deeply invested in the ruling coalition, for the wilderness awaits them after a Syriza victory ...

Second, the poll implies that, unless something radical happens, the next parliament will also have seven parties, making it almost impossible for one of the two big players to secure single-party rule. New Democracy has picked its friends. Syriza has taken a step towards doing so. In a press conference two weeks ago its leader, Alexis Tsipras, opened the door a crack to a possible collaboration with the anti-austerity Independent Greeks. The party's main obsessions since it entered parliament in May have been charging the Germans reparations for illegal wartime loans, drilling for mineral resources and hauling off socialist and conservative politicians to the gallows for bringing the country to this pass. The two parties may come from opposite sides of the ideological divide, but they are both reactionary and possibly vindictive.

Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras was pointing this week to the leadership failures of Papandreou and his PASOK party, as Andy Dabilis reports in SYRIZA Bid for Greek Bailout Probe Nixed Greek Reporter 11/30/2012:

To no surprise, a request by the major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) to investigate the decisions that led to Greece seeking bailouts from international lenders was easily defeated in the Parliament controlled by the ruling coalition government.

The three ruling parties, the New Democracy Conservatives of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, the PASOK Socialists and Democratic Left [the three governing parties] all voted against the proposal, which got only 119 votes in the 300-member body. Before the June elections, New Democracy and the Democratic Left said it would support the investigation but reversed themselves. ...

SYRIZA wanted to know how the government in 2010, then led by former PASOK head George Papandreou, came to ask the IMF initially for aid after the prime minister said repeatedly that there was plenty of money to run the country. The leftists had wanted former Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou and Papandreou to be questioned. SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras lambasted the government for refusing an inquiry.

“It may be the case that those responsible will not sit in court, but they will sit – some are already sitting – in the margins of history,” said Tsipras, who accused the coalition of maintaining an "omerta," or code of silence, on the issue. Earlier the rapporteur for the proposal, SYRIZA’s Yiannis Dragasakis, had described the coalition as being the product of a "business relationship."

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, georgios papandreou, greece

Greek crisis rolls on

Greece's PASOK (Socialist) Party Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou is leaving office, stepping down when a new coalition government of PASOK and the conservative New Democratic Party takes office: Lefteris Papadimas and Harry Papachristou, Greece seals sketchy coalition deal Reuters 11/06/2011. Presumably the vote in Parliament to establish the new government will take place in the next few days.

The two new coalition parties have agreed on new elections of February 18. Papandreou has been saying that new elections would be catastrophic, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. Whether he still thinks that remains to be seen. As we know from last week, a categorical statement from him can be drastically revised within a few days time.

Reuters has a bio of the American-born Papandreou: Dina Kyriakidou, Greece's Papandreou, Socialist scion, felled by debt 11/06/2011.

An Athens News editorial observes, "the policies of confusion and inconsistency that have marked so much of our existence as a bailed-out nation look set to continue." (Confusion and inconsistency 11/06/2011)

Pablo Rodríguez Suanzes in El Mundo looks at Greece's situation in ¿Hay vida después de la quita? 06.11.2011. His article points out that the writedown of Greek debt in the current EU proposal will give insufficient debt relief to Greece, even if the banks agree to it. That deals offers a writedown of only about a fourth of it. They need a writedown ("haircut") of 50-60%. He quotes Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Global Economics as saying flatly that Greece should get out of the euro. And he cites Paul Krugman's use of the example of Argentina, which strongly suggests that Greece would do much better following their example in 2001 of uncoupling their peso from the US dollar - an analogous situation to Greece not controlling its own currency - and defaulting on their unpayable debt.

Tags: georgios papandreou, greece

Papandreou's week

From Eurozone crisis: the revenge of politics Guardian editorial 11/03/2011:

What had appeared to Mr Papandreou to be good Greek politics – playing hardball with an unruly party – turned out to be a lousy European strategy. He failed to take account of the fragility of the deal that had been hammered out in Brussels: if its components failed to hang together, each vulnerable state would hang apart. Sky-high spreads on Italian debt yesterday confirmed that it is next in line. It is the third-largest debt market in the world, an economy with the sheer heft to shake the eurozone to its foundations. This reality never entered Mr Papandreou's calculations, but for Germany and France it was bound to be decisive – and so it proved. While Silvio Berlusconi fights a desperate battle for his own survival after his failure to win agreement for urgent reforms in Rome, the minds of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were already being distracted from the Greek farce by the question of how to salvage the solvency of an Italian state which is too big to bail out. At the G20 in Cannes, the German chancellor and French president broke the last great taboo of the crisis and referred to the possibility of Greece being cut loose from the single-currency club.

Should that happen, as it may, the consequences for Greece are wildly unpredictable, and could be dire indeed. But so too could be the consequences for Europe more widely, as the entire periphery of the continent scrambled to avoid going the same way. The doomed Papandreou plan for a referendum was always both messy and risky, but it at least had an intelligible aim – injecting some desperately needed democratic legitimacy into the resolution of Europe's crisis. The prospective parliamentary elections could prove an even messier way to do the same. For all the talk of vast, impersonal forces, financial markets must exist in a social context, and their functioning relies on a measure of acquiescence. In administering ever more austerity, Europe's ruling powers have forgotten this simple truth – and now the continent is paying the price. European economics ignored politics for too long, and now European politics is wreaking its revenge. [my emphasis]

Tags: eu, euro, european union, greece, italy