On July 5, 2015, the Greeks voted “no” to the reform and austerity demands of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the troika. The evening before the vote, the then Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was having dinner at a restaurant in Athens with his wife Danae Stratou, an artist and photographer, and with economist James Galbraith, who was then teaching at the University of Texas where Varoufakis had also taught until a few months earlier: they were convinced that the Greeks would vote “yes” in the referendum called just two weeks before, the minister was certain he would resign, he had some doubts about the others in the government, particularly about Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister. Their alliance, made of motorcycles, allergy to ties and resistance to European impositions, particularly German ones, had begun in January of that year, when Tsipras and his party Syriza had won the elections, freezing the blood in the veins of several European leaders and of the entire Greek establishment, particularly the left-wing one. The last weeks, with banks closed, foreign investors merciless in the face of imminent Greek default, brutal letters from the troika, that word, Grexit, bouncing around in newspaper headlines, in think tank papers, in commentators’ irony, had been terrible, even for the relationship between Varoufakis and Tsipras: defeat in the referendum would have been the end: finding each other again, after such a storm, would have been impossible. At that dinner, Galbraith told Varoufakis: you’re underestimating the Greeks, who have nothing left to lose and will save their pride by voting “no.” Danae said: maybe James is right, look here: she showed him on her phone a poll that gave the “no” the lead. The following day, 62 percent of Greeks voted “no,” an unimaginable victory, a white and blue celebration, Greece’s colors, while in Brussels \u2013 and in Berlin \u2013 the response was being prepared. On July 6, after the surprise, after the victory, after the celebration, Varoufakis resigned. My work is finished, he wrote in a post on his blog entitled “Minister no more!”, the creditors want my head, “I shall wear their contempt with pride,” but I’m leaving: it wasn’t just about the troika’s baleful anger, government bonds in free fall, Grexit threats, it was about the fact that Varoufakis knew that Tsipras, his boss, wouldn’t withstand that pressure, wouldn’t be the pied piper who led the Greeks out of the Euro. Tsipras would give in, he wouldn’t. The most picaresque political story of the century was over, a bit tacky, brazen and naive, which had endangered not only Greece but the stability of the entire European project. Thanks to Tsipras’s kolotoumba, the somersault, a new story began, that of salvation: today, ten years later, the world reads this second part of the story and finds it beautiful, edifying, promising, as only rebirths can be.<\/p>\n
In February 2015, the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave the newly elected Tsipras a tie. The Greek premier smiled and replied: when our debt problems are resolved, I’ll put on the tie. This cheeky and informal forty-year-old was shaking up European politics and the tie became the thermometer of his transformation. That’s why, when on June 21, 2018, three years after the gift, the referendum, the somersault, the victory in the snap elections of September 2015, Tsipras appeared in Athens to announce the agreement reached with European creditors, the only thing people talked about was his red tie (which he took off after half an hour). The eurozone finance ministers had offered Greece a ten-year deferment and an extension of deadlines on a large chunk of past loans, as well as 15 billion euros in new credit to ensure that Athens could stand on its own feet after exiting the bailout plan. Greece would be saved, amid many sacrifices, and the credit went to Tsipras who had won over the Greeks by telling them he would never bow to European dictates and that he would defend them from the Germans who wanted to sink the EU’s spendthrift south, and who had done the exact opposite. Within a year, the premier would pay all at once the debt of trust he had incurred in those years: he lost the 2019 elections, today he is no longer the leader of Syriza.<\/p>\n
Jacket, tie, Bible, meritocracy, reforms, free market, Europe, lots of Europe, the polyglot Kyriakos Mitsotakis won the 2019 elections, brought a moderate right to power (a type that has meanwhile half-disappeared from the rest of the continent), made the most of the agreement Tsipras found with the Europeans and determined the story of Greek success. Cut off from markets after the 2010 financial crisis, with a public deficit five times higher than the 3 percent of GDP limit set by the EU, Greece, which had also tampered with its accounts, had not been able to restore order since then: the first bailout of 2010, modeled by the IMF on South American defaults, didn’t consider the fact that Greece was part of a monetary union, therefore without room for maneuver in that sense. The economy contracted by 26 percent from 2008 to 2013, the unemployment rate rose to 28 percent. When Tsipras came to power, growth had recovered a little, but there was a second bailout to negotiate, something the new prime minister refused to do and then, as we know, did anyway \u2013 seven months behind the already disastrous planned schedule. The third bailout finally negotiated was a little different from the one initially imposed or at least so said the Greek government to make a very bitter pill digestible to an exhausted and fleeing people: thousands of young people and workers left the country. Tsipras made the agreement work, indeed tried to do better than expected to rebuild trust with the rest of Europe, but the fiscal turnaround, also for reasons of time not just political determination, came with the Mitsotakis government. Interviewed by the Financial Times for the tenth anniversary of the 2015 crisis, the premier said that “we’re talking about a completely different economy from that of 2009 in terms of fiscal health and competitiveness”: the banking system has been restructured, public administration waste has been cut, tax evasion has been reduced, investments have gone into the technology sector (even though the Microsoft database that Mitsotakis has been boasting about for at least five years still hasn’t been completed), reforms of justice, pensions and education have begun, growth has returned. “There’s still much to do,” says the premier, because while it’s true that compared to 2015 Greece is a transformed country, it’s also true that Greece should grow 1 percent more than other European countries for the next 15 years to return to 2007 prosperity levels.<\/p>\n
The Greeks, like the Europeans, don’t like to set as their goal something that has to do with the past, even more so if in the meantime the world has changed at the supersonic speed of this last decade. Greece emerged changed from its great crisis, it emerged with a story that Europeans also love to tell, because they too \u2013 the rules, the controls, the trust pacts \u2013 are no longer what they were. While Athens becomes one of the bastions of the fortress that Europe is building to keep migrants out, Labor Minister Niki Kerameus has started touring European capitals (including London, and in autumn she’ll be in New York) together with a delegation of entrepreneurs to convince those who had fled during the dark period to return to “rebuild” Greece. From 2010 to 2021, according to statistics, 600,000 people left, mainly highly educated students. In 2023, for the first time, there was a reversal: more people arrived than left, something that hadn’t happened since 2009. And 60 percent of these returnees are between 20 and 44 years old, a workforce that was perhaps wooed by the 50 percent income tax reduction for seven years for those who worked abroad for at least five years. And also by the fact that wages have grown, in some sectors up to 25 percent. There are many young people who remain skeptical, saying that rather than on the emotionality of returning home, the Mitsotakis government should invest in structural changes, but in other parts of Europe people have been saying for a few years now without jokes: if only we could make it like Greece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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