THESE are tense days in Greece. There’s a stifling humidity in the air that compounds the dark sense of foreboding among Greeks at what the latest round in their country’s 20-month debt saga will mean for themselves and their families in the coming days, weeks and months.
Greeks are already feeling the pressure of existing austerity measures. And this week, the country’s lenders are saying that even more measures are necessary and must be implemented without delay.
Top of the agenda is a programme of mass layoffs from the civil service.
Only this month, citizens began receiving demands in the post for the first of a host of new special taxes that the government insists are essential to saving the country from default. The solidarity tax, for example, places a 2 per cent levy on a couple earning €40,000 per annum – amounting to almost €900 – payable by the end of September.
A property tax has also been declared, which even the unemployed – but not the Orthodox Church, one of the country’s largest property owners – will be required to pay. As the tax will be raised through electricity bills, those who will not or cannot pay will have their power cut. Even before the new tax was announced – it was an overnight emergency decision – over three-quarters of Greek taxpayers claimed that they simply did not have the money to pay for extra taxes. The planned ending of subsidies on heating oil will undoubtedly exacerbate the situation and will mean that a warm home will be unthinkable for the poor this winter.
Across society, austerity will be felt like never before this winter. Last week it was announced that funding for third-level education has been slashed by 90 per cent.
Wherever one ventures – in the streets, cafes and squares – there is talk of politics and the vanishing economy. Like the heat, there is no escaping it.
And there is no escaping the fact that increasing numbers of people are giving up any hope that the country’s politicians are in a position to steer the county out of the crisis and stave off default and a possible return to the drachma.
Support for the governing socialists in Pasok and the main opposition conservatives of New Democracy is at an all-time low. People are dumping long-held political allegiances and viewing the system with unprecedented cynicism. Were elections held tomorrow, neither party would command an overall majority.
Most Greeks shudder to think of what the social response to the government’s new-found steely determination to apply even more degrees of austerity will be.
The word on the street is that it is not a question of whether the country will explode in protest, but when.