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(Alex Callinicos should get in touch with the author of this op-ed piece
to wise him up.)
WSJ, June 10 2015
OPINION COMMENTARY
Reform Is Not in Syriza’s Nature
Asking Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to liberalize Greece would be like
asking David Cameron to collectivize Britain.
By TAKIS MICHAS
Greece’s negotiations with its creditors may finally come to a head this
week. Last week Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was presented with what
creditors say is their best offer on revised terms for the bailout
program, and Mr. Tsipras will soon meet with Germany’s Chancellor Angela
Merkel and France’s President François Hollande. The hope is that Mr.
Tsipras will face the reality that further concessions are unlikely to
be forthcoming, and will accept somewhat lower targets for fiscal
discipline in exchange for politically difficult pension reforms and
other measures.
Mr. Tsipras may indeed be willing to strike such a bargain—for now. But
no one should think that will be the end of the matter. Even if Greece’s
governing Syriza party gives in to pressure and signs up for the
demanded reforms, this doesn’t mean that they are going to be implemented.
The most likely outcome is that the reforms will be undermined by the
ministers who are supposed to apply them. Then, after three or four
months, the situation will once again reach crisis proportions, with
Athens arguing that the program is not working and the creditors
complaining that Syriza is not serious about implementing it.
That outcome would be an inevitable result of Syriza’s ideological
commitments, about which Greece’s creditors have displayed a striking
lack of understanding. The creditors seem to think that Syriza is just
another eccentric left-wing party. They hope that, given time, patience
and the right goading from European Commission President Jean-Claude
Juncker, Syriza will eventually embrace free markets, globalization and
competition. They expect another Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—the former
president of Brazil who abandoned extreme leftism in office and
delivered strong economic growth.
What creditors miss is that Syriza is a special case. The party is
fervent in its visceral hate of all the government attitudes and
policies one usually associates with today’s open, knowledge-based
economies. For Syriza activists, open markets are anathema, as are
concepts like competitiveness, productivity and outsourcing.
Syriza’s two main economic convictions are an absolute dedication to the
principle that government tax, borrow and spend policies are the best
way to manage the economy, and an admiration of communist-style
five-year plans and the principle that the economy must be actively
commanded from the top.
These ideological commitments are at odds with the creditors’ bailout
program, which aims to deregulate Greece’s red-tape-bound economy so
that private-sector entrepreneurship can replace government as the
primary generator of growth and job creation. That fact alone raises
questions about whether a Syriza-led government would ever implement
whatever reform program Mr. Tsipras might agree to this week. For Mr.
Tsipras to liberalize Greek labor and product markets would be like
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron introducing Soviet-style
collectivization to British agriculture.
Creditors also misunderstand the intraparty dynamics within Syriza. A
common view is that the party is split in two. On the one hand a good
Syriza, represented by Mr. Tsipras, is supposedly capable of accepting
and implementing a reform program. Meanwhile, a bad Syriza, represented
by the Minister of Development Panagiotis Lafazanis, who leads the Left
Platform, hews closely to the party’s far-left antireform roots. Some
European politicians believe a reform program can succeed if they can
convince Mr. Tsipras to get rid of the Left Platform and enter into a
coalition with more sensible types like Stavros Theodorakis of the
centrist party To Potami.
This is wishful thinking. One would be hard pressed to find a single
instance where the two purported adversaries within Syriza disagreed on
an ideological or political issue of any importance. In fact, it’s worth
noting that Mr. Lafazanis was among those who endorsed the proposals
Athens recently sent to its creditors, a sign that any “disagreements”
within the coalition are merely theatrics.
Against all of today’s wishful thinking is the fact that significant
reforms weren’t implemented even under the previous, purportedly
pro-reform government of the center-right New Democracy party. They
failed not for ideological reasons but because the clientelism and
vested interests of Greek politics were so entrenched as to be hard to
displace even when Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was committed to
implementing the bailout program.
How then can Syriza be expected to muster the same commitment when it is
deeply and openly hostile to even the slightest change in Greece’s
statist economic tradition?
Creditors may feel they have no choice for now. They don’t want to push
Greece out of the euro, as a default in the absence of a new deal
probably would. But they also can’t demand that Syriza change its
ideological beliefs any more than they could make such a demand of any
other elected European government. For now they may prefer to pretend
that Syriza will honor its signature and implement much-needed reforms.
But no one should be under the illusion that this is anything but a chimera.
Mr. Michas is a political analyst for the website protagon.gr.
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