Greece may now explode at any time [ANALYSIS]
With Greek society dazed and the country's economy in ruins, finance ministers representing the member states in the Eurogroup, who met on 9 February to examine the Athens austerity programme, could not make a positive statement for a population that has been betrayed by its own politicians, such as the previous Papandreou government that collectively accused their compatriots of corruption and said that the country was bankrupt.
These are the same Greek politicians who cheerfully borrowed hundreds of billions of euro and spent them to secure their positions in government; setting the paradigm that only affiliation with political parties pays dividends. Now, tens of millions of citizens are being told that they have to forego their rights, even if they have been duly paying their taxes and social-security contributions for decades.
Politicians assert that it is impossible to identify the culpable within Greek society, namely those who have led very successful lives or have made fortunes by surrendering their votes to political parties' wholesalers.
In such an economic, social and political environment, the average Greek who has nowhere to hide still witnesses the apparatchiks of the system doing well, either from still-affluent state entities and utility monopolies, or being almost exonerated from taxation like the many hundreds of thousands of professionals who have always been protected from competition as their fees are set in law.
The people who sweat in the private sector as workers or small- and medium-sized enterprise businessmen are also stupefied by bureaucrats from the European Commission and IMF not imposing the correct long-term structural measures, but instead suggesting horizontal cuts to wages and pensions and increasing taxation.
All this has created an explosive social climate that may set the country on fire if, say, a cornered policeman shoots a protester. Then Greece’s economic problems will be the least thing of the rest of the Eurogroup’s worries, despite the fact that it has been Eurogroup's dictum that Greece has tried unsuccessfully to apply over the past two years.
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