I passed the recent tale of woe and schadenfreude from Eugenides to my Greek correspondent, Marinos Antypas, and got the following response:Yesterday our Minister of Economics made a most interesting statement. Asked once again about the debt crisis and the looming prospect of bankruptcy, he said: "The rumours of Greece leaving the eurozone are not precise."
Note, not false, not invalid, but not precise ... the truth is, sydrofe, that the Socialists could not have chosen a worse time to win the elections. Apparently the economy is in such shit that they have money to pay pensions only till March.
As the Minister of Labour said: "on Tuesday we run out of money, on Thursday we have nothing to pay you with, there is nothing, nil, not a drop of saliva, how else to put it?". How indeed.
At the same time huge labour chunks are deserting the PASOK unions to form ad hoc militant committees - like the small farmers who showed the finger to the party controlled unions and have closed all highways and even the Bulgarian-Greek railway, as well as Igoumenitsa, the fourth biggest harbour in the country.
The government would have sent the MAT in other times to smash those stubborn tractors, but who dares to do that now? It would mean an uprising of poor farmers at the symbolic centenial of the Kileler uprising that abolished serfdom in Thessaly (yes, only 100 years since that glorious day around here).
On a more urban terrain, Athens is keeping warm with its weekly bombs against ministries and even the Parliament's main yard - a total blow to the credibility of PASOK. Nea Dimokratia is lost in a grand move to embrace the extreme right that has alienated everyone who still voted for it, while the SYRIZA people are fighting over some bizarre issue of inner party representation.
Oddly, in the whole mess the KKE is the only ones to be looking concrete in an "I told you so" way. In one phrase, everyone are holding their breath, the shops are empty (despite the 60% discounts), violence is spreading in weird and often horrid spirals, and the tunnel seems to have no end. Any ideas? If you see our mutual friend the revolution, tell her to hurry up!
