Unelected but appointed leaders head the governments of two of the four debt-ridden countries of the euro zone. Lucas Papademos in Greece, Mario Monti in Italy. The so-called ‘national unity’, ‘salvation’ or ‘coalition’ governments in both countries came into power under the time pressure applied by markets attacks. Their tactic is known meanwhile: a rush-rush, win-win strategy that leads spreads and CDS in exorbitant heights. A strategy that leaves no space to people to replace failed governments through democratic procedures, that is through elections. The markets tactic is strengthened by some officials of the European Union and the Euro Zone like Merkel, Sarkozy, Barroso, van Rompuy, who in full harmony with the International Monetary Fund openly threatened and blackmailed democracy with the sixthaid tranche of €8 billion as in case of Greece. Even thought this tranche has been agreed upon withprevious agreements and has little to do with the October 26th Agreement that refers to a second bailout package for Athens.
Ex Greek PM Papandreou’s referendum proposal triggered panic attacks to Merkel and Sarkozy. They threw tones of sweat on the idea that Greeks would be allowed to cast their votes on the loan-agreement; most likely reject it and bring the EuroZone into collapse thus causing a fatal domino effect. I personally disagreed with the referendum because it would be a trap for the Greeks. Because I’m still so ‘romantic’ to think loan-agreement and a second bailout of another 100-billion euro is one thing, and be part of the European Union is another. Merkel and Sarkozy did their best to humiliate the Greek PM in Cannes and put the grave stone over his political career. Unfortunately Papandreouwas not competent and dynamic enough to deal with them and the Greek crisis. That’s sad.
Under immense time pressure due to the sixth aid tranche for a state that will have not a cent to pay salaries and pensions by December 15th, there was only one solution: A coalition government, a cross-party cooperation to bless the October 26th Agreement with the majority of the Greek Parliament. However given the current situation, a question arises: Does the Greek Parliament represent the will of people? The elections of 2009 took place under totally different circumstances. Should elections be held next Sunday, Greeks would cast their votes under the weight of two Memorandums of Understanding with Greece’s lenders, heavy taxes that cost the average household an extra of 5,000-7,000 euro per year and an unemployment at around 17%. How would 1,000,000 jobless cast their votes? How would frustrated Greeks decide on who will govern them? Quite differently from what they did in 2009, I assume.
Elections in Greece contain the risk that left and communist parties will come out with immense gains and threaten the position of the big parties and their options to form a one-party government. According to latest polls, left & communist parties get together approximately 23% in the preference of the Greeks. That is almost one-fourth. A new coalition government that would most likley emerge after elections would challenge the conservative EU and EZ. No EU leader or EZ official, let alone the IMF, want to see elections results that could bring down the €uro-giant currently sunken in its deepest crisis.
Papademos may be a wonderful prime minister, serious and rational, impartial and devoted to save Greece. No-politician Papademos is surely the best option for a Greek prime minister when compared to the other politicians’ names that were put on the table. Then Greek politicians have been disgraced in the eyes of the people. Technocrat Papademos may be the best option to finally cut down Greece’s overspending. But as I have repeatedly said in this blog, Greece and Greeks are one entity, not two different ‘concepts’. You can’t save the country on balance sheets and have its citizens impoverished in fast track pace. And in fact, it is too early to say what Papademos will achieve and if he will manage to master a political system based based on a series of malfunctions. And thus, he has to prove he is real democrat and go for elections in three months.
So far, in Greece and Italy technocrats took over the power by leaving aside the people’s will. Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti, members of the Trilateral Commission, a think tank of technocrats aiming to save the world. The markets imposed their own rules after taken advantage of political leaders stuck on their chair while the game was over (Papandreou, Berlusconi). Highest priority is to save the euro and the banks. And their method: aggressive attacks on countries enforcing them to borrow on predatory interest rates. Side effects: impoverished people, democratic procedures, the democracy itself.
Is this the post-post modern coup d’etat we were warning of?
There were quite some baseless rumours recently about the military readying to take over Greece. Rumours triggered by the surprise replacement of the leadership of the Greek Armed Forces by the political leadership of the country. The rumours spread like fire in newspapers, television networks, websites and blogs around the world. Editors and internet users felt obliged to spread the rumours with extraordinary zeal.
We, people, tend to think in conventional terms. We think of coup d’etat in terms is a sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government. Usually a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military— replaces the deposed government with another body, either civil or military, thinking it could save the country by mostly ideological enemies.
But times have changed. I hardly believe that a military group within the European union would dare to over throw an elected government. It’s not a small group from the establishment anymore that violently or through ultimatum brings down the governments. Priorities have changed. Ideologies have been erased. Dark men in black silently move in misty lanes and create apocalyptic economic conditions. It is the markets, stupid!
“Unelected but appointed leaders head the governments of two of the four debt-ridden countries of the euro zone.”
Eh… Papandreou nor Berlusconi was ever elected Prime Minister by the people. They were appointed by the President of the country and given a vote of confidence by parliament. To be sure I looked it up and there is a whole host of countries where this is practice. Also in Europe.
In a country like The Netherlands the PM does not even have to be part of parliament and also has not be of the biggest party. And I think that this goes for a lot of those countries who appoint their PM via the President or the King/Queen.
The fact that Papademos is not an elected person might be unusual here in Greece, but I can not see it as a sign of a coup.
If you want to talk about a coup d’etat then one has to go much further back into history to point to where the people lost their say in how their country is run. For Greece that must be somewhere between 1974 and, say, 1985 or so. Somewhere, after the dictatorship, the current structures were formed. And with these the people were effectively shut out of the governing process of this country.
And what little I know about Italy, to me it seems that something similar happened there. Maybe around Berlosconi, but chances are that happened way before him.
Are the other countries in Europe in any better shape, democratically? I don’t know. What I know is that Belgium has no government now for almost 1,5 years. The Netherlands has a crisis between parties and voters since around 2000. And other people can probably pinpoint when in their countries the ‘coup d’etat’ took place.
It surprises me very much that suddenly all over the media you read this talk about “unelected but appointed leaders” as if this is something new. But it isn’t. And it is the rule in an awful lot of democratic states. So why are they all suddenly coming with this point? I wonder…
Just a quick link for those who want to read up on PMs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_minister
Of the countries in debtcrisis at the moment Ireland and Spain is mentioned here too as having an appointed PM.
It also states that the President appoints the leader of the biggest party in parliament as PM in Greece… Is this law or just how it goes?
Im afraid , you have a misunderstanding here: in Greece (in many countries as well) the leader of the political party with the majority of the votes after the elections is ‘appointed’ (metaphorically) by the president to form the government. It’s logical and democratic and is based on people’s/voters majority. By voting political parties and their leaders, voters do know quite well who might be the next PM. Papandreou and Berlusconi were both elected. We don’t vote for prime ministers directly.at least not here. I don’t even know if this is possible a constitutional democracy.
Papademos did not take PM’s office after elections but he was literally appointed. The new government did not come in power after elections. However I didn’t mean that Papademos came after a coup. My post-post modern coup d’ etat ‘definition has to do with the markets practices that in cooperation with some EU officials and EU leaders can ruin countries and bring into fall elected governments. Sorry, if I couldn’t make this clear in my post.
KTG you are right . Here in Spain and in most countries where there is usually a large if not outright majority to one party, the future PM is very clearly seen to be the head representative of that party.
Didn’t the elected leaders of the parties not ‘advise’ the president to appoint Papademos as PM and are not the elected parties giving their backing to this government where most of the ministers are still from the winner of the last elections? And most likely this government will have a parliamentary majority.
By the way: was PASOK and therefor Papandreou voted in by more than 50 percent of the vote? No, just 44% of the voters. Just because of this rule that gives the winner a huge bonus of 40 seats had they the most seats. Without this rule Greece would have had coalition governments and the stranglehold of the two biggest parties on politics, government, state and society would have been broken would have been broken long ago.
Last: markets, eu-officials and -leaders do not topple elected governments. As is shown in Greece and Italy, it are the elected parliamentarians who topple their governments. And if you maintain that it are those coup d’etat makers, then you have to say that they are owning every one of those elected parliamentarians and the system wasn’t functioning at all in the first place. And as this is the system build in the last few decenia, the voters had ample time to do something against it. But they didn’t.
the ‘day’ is still young. and maybe they will 🙂
Yes, and maybe they won’t. I wouldn’t put it beyond them…
I do hope, they will do 🙂
You maybe forgot to mention Portugal which also had a signed pre-election agreement from main parties ‘forced’ through by EZ. Ireland also had its government overthrown , understandably most think, but Fine Gael who took power signed straight into the bailout agreements contrary to its previous stances. That only leaves the far ends of the political spectrum (and a lot of average people also )to protest current moves, both in Portugal and Ireland (and Italy and Greece). Maybe the fact that most European centre left and centre right parties are integrated at European level , both with each other and with European structure, has something to do with this ?
Well, Portugal and Ireland have elected governments respectively PMs. It certainly has to do with that because centre left & centre right parties are not only the creators of the EU and EZ but because they also still get the majority of the votes. Unfortunately smaller parties like the left is broken apart in many smaller groups and they have no chance to win majorityies. Not to mention the communists who want a EZ exit – I’m talking about Greece here – . However I think it’s high time the Socialists re-define themselves because they apply neo-liberal policies.
These neo-liberal policies seem to have emerged with the Euro to my view – maybe it is just the restructuring of investment across a larger area such as EZ due to a more legal integration across the market. I am quite for open or free market , but up to a point :
When a country joins a currency union its ability to control its own financial destiny diminishes. Given various neighbours have much higher established productivity and a very much larger base of funds available, to open a country such as Greece to that might is almost asking for it to be taken over. That the Socialists (and the same applies in Spain in many ways), took full advantage of that funding by running up debt (as did private citizens) is not really a surprise maybe – what is a surprise is when ‘adjustments’ are then ‘asked’ of that country and the Socialist party (has to?) agree(s). Fortunately for the Socialist party in Spain it managed to scrape through the last three years financially without too many concessions , though the decentralization that has taken place from the start did open the door for local authority to engage fully with private enterprise. Now it will be the center right PP that will have the duty to reduce spending and maybe liberalize the work place , though there is a nationalistic streak to the PP and I think they will try to keep appearance at least to any new changes as close to home as possible. According to recent articles here Spain has had exchanges with the German leadership along the lines of agreeing 30 billion in spending cuts after elections in order to be able to access 100 billion from the EFSF with relatively little supervision.
Will just add that though the PP has a ‘grand’ idea , it is not likely to go down very well with a large part of the population. In Portugal the eq. PP party who took over introduced measures to redirect the economy along a more liberal line , for example a ‘fiscal devaluation’ that increased VAT and decreased business contribution to labour costs. This was supposed to be neutral to public revenue, decreasing private spending and hence imports while stimulating business. People there though are obviosly not happy with that arrangement, and the general strike on Nov. 24 might set the tone for Portugal’s future. Irish wages have decreased dramatically due to its more flexible system (as opposed to Spain, Greece and Portugal) , but there is still much discontent there also.
I don’t think that these policies emerged because of the Euro. One has to check but I think that the majority of Euro-countries had conservative governments during that time. Or governments that promoted neo-liberalism. Before that, one of the big complains from the right side of the political spectrum was that the EU was a Socialist construction. Mostly because of its centralist tendencies. And if I am right then it is was the majority will of the voters of the member states which was indirectly implemented, was it not?
That last point about Spain being able to access that 100 billion from the EFSF with relatively little supervision is a very interesting one. Clearly the Germans must be convinced that this or the next Spanish government will fulfill that agreement about the spending cuts? That is indeed in stark contrast with Greece where the government has resisted tooth and nail to the implementation of any spending cuts after agreeing to them. And Samaras has said again and again that he will not implement the agreed measures. There might be a lesson in it for Greece somewhere?
After getting gov’t Samaras said the old measures will be implemented but he will not vote for additional ones.
Yes – but then there was a turn to Socialism afterwards (in Spain mainly due to Iraq involvement, but also due to the concept of over extension of power i.e. non representative ) , and quite clearly the Euro mechanism has contributed to some greater degree in denationalizing the business and financial model .To my view local economy is best run by local dynamics , with the slow tentative introduction of newer directions – now no one knows how to sort out the mess created by the boom-bust, it was not a realistic venture.
With Spain there are historical ties that come into play too – I just wonder if the next government will be able to control the show it plans to implement . Reducing spending by a majority government might be easy enough , given it would want to clear out Socialist influences also, however to meet budget deficits without raising taxes etc. or even by raising taxes , well that is not obvious , nor what 22% unemployment will be like with a then shrinking economy.