International

The European Commission is angry with the IMF because this week the Fund issued a report in which it actually stated quite simply that the approach to the crisis had been entirely wrong. What should have been done, according to the IMF, was the granting of a rapid debt write-off and the adoption of an approach which required the strongest parties to shoulder the heaviest burden. In times of recession, said the IMF, cuts should not be too deep, which is exactly what the SP has always argued. Evidently, for opinion-formers it would still have been a bridge too far to have admitted this, but this doesn’t affect the fact that it’s the truth.

The SP is sometimes accused of turning its back on Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth; we feel great concern over injustice elsewhere in the world, and that goes equally for what happens in other EU countries. True enough, the Greeks made a mess of things, but that applies first and foremost to the elite which grew rich on nepotism and tax fraud. It doesn’t apply to Greeks who run small businesses who have been going bankrupt en masse as a result of the deep cuts in spending and the resulting drop in demand. It doesn’t apply to Greek workers who can hardly be said to have profited from nepotism, but have suffered redundancies and wage reductions of up to 30%. That’s why we have been, and remain, side-by-side in solidarity with ordinary Greeks and why we have for years been advocating an approach, which the IMF now says it also supports, under which combatting corruption and tax fraud would be priority number one and Greece’s debts would not remain a millstone, but would be subject to delayed repayment, or partly annulled.

The European Commission reacted this week as if it had been bitten by a snake. That doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve often noted that this is the most right-wing Commission ever. The harsh austerity policies and the drive to lower wages imposed on Greece are pure neoliberalism and no way to arrest the crisis, because given the figures on growth and unemployment, there is no way Greece can achieve these. The policies have become an end in themselves. Greece is simply a testing ground for such policies. The aim is that wages are driven so low and the social entitlements and public provisions are so eroded that the country becomes once again internationally ‘competitive’. It doesn’t matter at all if you are reduced to the status of a developing country, as long as you become more ‘competitive’.

This view of humanity is what guides the Commission. If it works in Greece, the entire model can be exported to the whole of the EU. The Commission’s anger over the IMF report is therefore not only a matter of vanity, it’s the reaction of a neoliberal club that’s frightened of losing an important ally. This Commission will never admit that the proposals brought forward by the SP for many years are capable of cutting the mustard. Next year they’ll be gone, and a new Commission will take their place, one which may be somewhat less neoliberal. That would be a fine thing, but neither leaders of opinion nor the media expect it to happen. I look forward to reading a column in which the proposals of SP leaders are treated as visionary.