Financial Times, 25 / 26 enero 2015. “¿Lula? ¿Chávez?”.

Basura que ciega y siembra semillas de incomprensión y odio.

[ .. ]

La France Press resume la cuestión griega con estas cifras básicas:

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AFP, 25 enero.

11,1 millones de griegos deben entre 319,1 millones de euros.

Esas deudas son sencillamente imposibles de pagar. Y han sido contraídas pos los gobiernos de los grandes partidos griegos de izquierda (Pasok) y derecha (Nueva Democracia). Con esa deuda culminan veinte o treinta años de corrupción y desgobierno:

-Fraude y corrupción de los partidos políticos que han gobernando y desgobernado Grecia desde su ingreso en la Comunidad Económica Europea, en 1981.

-Complicidad activa o pasiva de la Comisión Europea y los gobiernos de Alemania y Francia (entre otros) en la falsificación sistemática de sucesivas contabilidades nacionales, desde hace varias décadas.

-Irresponsabilidad catastrófica de las elites políticas, económicas y sociales griegas, participando en el pillaje de la economía nacional, a través del fraude fiscal.

-Irresponsabilidad de gobiernos y sindicatos griegos, acelerando unos gastos públicos pagados con el dinero de los contribuyentes europeos, contrayendo unas deudas que nadie sabe quién pagará ni podrá pagar… Syriza no es culpable del estado de bancarrota de Grecia que amenaza a toda Europa.

Esa es la dramática realidad que debe afrontar un partido, Syriza, acusado de populismo… Populismo mucho menos palmario, a mi modo de ver, que el populismo de CiU y el PSOE andaluz, gobernando, desde hace años, con los subsidios que los gobernantes catalanes y andaluces han recibido y continúan reclamando a Madrid y Bruselas.

¿Qué pueden hacer ante esa herencia Syriza y sus dirigentes?

A juicio de Financial Times, Alexis Tsipras puede comportarse como Lula (reformista pragmático) o como Chávez (populista revolucionario).

Las primeras reacciones de Tsipras son de una extrema cautela. “No habrá conflicto con nuestros interlocutores” [ .. ] “Estaremos dispuestos a negociar con nuestros acreedores una solución aceptable para ambas partes”.

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Twitter, 25 enero 2015.

¿Qué ocurrirá? Pues vaya usted a saber…

Syriza, Grecia, Europa, España y… “ellos” y “nosotros”.
Draghi y el BCE votan Syriza.

El Economist no cree que el triunfo de Syriza sea un desastre para Grecia ni para Europa.

Syriza no es culpable del estado de bancarrota de Grecia que amenaza a toda Europa.
Las campanas de Syriza / Grecia redoblan en toda Europa, España incluida.

Financial Times: «Syriza y Podemos pueden salvar la zona euro».

Grecia: 11 millones habitantes, 350.000 millones de deudas.

Grecia.
Europa (s).
[ .. ]

Financial Times, 25 / 26 enero 2015:

January 25, 2015 7:33 pm

Will Syriza’s Tsipras turn out to be a Lula or a Chávez?

Tony Barber

Syriza leader campaigned as a radical, but may govern as pragmatist, writes Tony Barber
A leftwing party sweeps to victory in Greece, filling European allies with unease. Its leader says Greeks face a choice “between the past and the future, between progress and regression, between dependence and national independence”.
Is this the voice of Alexis Tsipras,, leader of the radical Syriza party, which won Sunday’s election in Greece? It sounds like him. In fact, it is Andreas Papandreou, the late prime minister and leader of the Pasok socialist party.

His electoral triumph in October 1981 turned Greek politics upside down. It created uncertainty in European capitals about Greece’s reliability, just as Syriza’s triumph will.
Papandreou governed Greece throughout the 1980s. The way he wielded power and handled relations with Europe and the US offers insights into how Mr Tsipras, assuming he becomes prime minister, may behave in office. The differences between Greece’s circumstances then and now are, however, as important as the similarities.
Mr Tsipras is to rule a country whose public debt amounts to 175 per cent of economic output. In coming weeks and months, the stability of Greece’s government finances and banking system will depend greatly on the foreign creditors — the EU and International Monetary Fund — which have kept the nation afloat since 2010.
In 1981 Papandreou had more room for independent action than Mr Tsipras will have. Greek public debt 34 years ago was about 25 per cent of gross domestic product. This allowed Papandreou to indulge in a vast expansion of the public sector, colonising it with Pasok appointees to the point where the line dividing party from state became invisible.
Mr Tsipras promises a large increase in public expenditure. He will aim to place trusted Syriza loyalists in the state apparatus, a measure that would recall Papandreou’s installation of Pasok “Green Guards” in civil service jobs. But Greece’s finances are so straitened, with €4.3bn in debt repayments due by March, and billions more by August, that a Pasok-style spending spree is unthinkable.

Mr Tsipras will want to make good on his less costly election promises, restoring electricity to poor households cut off for not paying bills, and providing food stamps for destitute Greeks.

He could fund such steps by raising up to €2bn with the elimination of various tax and social security payment exemptions. He may also try to make scapegoats of one or two of the oligarchs who dominate Greek big business.

In seeking to renegotiate Greece’s €245bn EU-IMF bailout, and win debt relief by hook or by crook, Mr Tsipras resembles Papandreou, who threatened to withdraw from Nato and the then European Economic Community, which Greece had joined at the start of 1981.

In the end, Papandreou took neither step. His political tactics were confrontational, and his rhetoric glowed with fire, but in the essentials of his foreign policy he was pragmatic. Generous European agricultural subsidies, and in later years regional aid funds, tempered Pasok’s radicalism.

The central question, to which no definitive answer can yet be given, is whether Mr Tsipras will likewise turn out to be a moderate in power, willing to cut deals with Greece’s creditors.

For three years he has sometimes sounded like Hugo Chávez, the late populist Venezuelan president and bugbear of the US, and sometimes like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president who, once in office, ruled as a reformist rather than a radical leftist.

Working in Mr Tsipras’s favour, if he chooses the road of pragmatism, is the fact that Greece in 2015 is not steeped in venomous ideological warfare as it was in 1981, only 32 years after the end of the 1946-49 civil war.

Working against him is the fact that Syriza’s far-left factions abhor pragmatism. The decisions he must take will be agonisingly awkward. Perhaps the safest prediction is that, unlike Papandreou, Mr Tsipras is unlikely to enjoy eight consecutive years in government.