The Economist: Greece - The sorry saga of Syriza
In its first hundred days Greece’s government has failed dismally.
A crunch looms
[…]
Perhaps it was naive to expect anything else. A few years
ago many of the men now in charge spent their time discussing the
contradictions of capitalism over coffee and cigarettes. Few had ever run
anything, let alone a government. Their European contacts were limited. Syriza,
their party, typically won only 3-4% of the vote. But Greece’s economic
calamity transformed its prospects. In 2012 it came within a whisker of power.
And after January’s election it went one better, forming a governing coalition.
Syriza, under the leadership of the new prime minister,
Alexis Tsipras, offered an attractive promise to a country battered by
recession and humiliated by years of tutelage at the hands of foreign
bureaucrats. Mr Tsipras promised to tear up the bail-outs, restore Greek
dignity and keep the euro (as the vast majority of Greeks want). Greece might
also, ministers mused, change the rules of euro-zone governance, to the benefit
of all Europeans.
Three months on, the first two of these pledges are in
tatters, the third looks shaky and the fourth is a bad joke. Less than a month
after the election, Greece agreed to extend its second bail-out until the end
of June, in the hope of securing the €7.2 billion ($8.1 billion) left in the
kitty. The abrasive approach of Mr Tsipras and Mr Varoufakis since then may
have played well at home, but abroad it has won Greece nothing but mistrust and
scorn.
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