At the moment that a new package of austerity measures is being tabled in parliament – with auctions of seized properties, benefits cuts, and making it harder to call a strike – the prime minister gave one more celebratory speech to his cabinet, as if he were addressing citizens of another planet.
He said his government managed to negotiate in 2015 the best memorandum that the country had signed until then, that he completed the fiscal adjustment, and that in a few months fiscal oversight by lenders will be a thing of the past.
In other words, we may not be living in a paradise, but we are not far from it.
To prove his left-wing credentials, he said that soon he will make “even clearer our own class-based imprint and our political orientation”. This he defined as, “bolstering a large social alliance with the strata that we want to express and represent in a privileged manner”.
It is indeed a major achievement of the Syriza-Independent Greeeks government that it leveled Greek society, downward of course.
The class-based policy of Mr. Tsipras is impoverishing ever larger swathes of society.
What he calls the super-performance of the Greek economy is in fact milking professionals, salaried employees, and businesses through over-taxation, and he boasts that super-surpluses allow him to hand out some crumbs, as a consolation prize for the poor, so that he can tout a class-based policy.
When over four million citizens find it impossible to pay their taxes and insurance contributions, and see their bank accounts being seized, Mr. Tsipras insists on seeing only his own artificial reality.
A government that each day keeps lowering the standard of living of Greeks, and which has broken all the promises that it generously handed out in order to come to power, now has the audacity to speak of a class-based policy.
This kind of class-based policy only leads to general impoverishment, to the collapse of the social welfare net, and to the degradation of the health and education systems.
Instead of looking to the future, instead of limiting the gap that separates us from other European countries, we are moving backward and transforming into a country where more and more people will look to a paltry state benefit, simply in order to survive.
Indeed, we do have a class-based policy, which has resulted in a huge chasm, between the few and select, on the one hand, and on the other the large majority that is struggling to survive at the poverty line.