Greek NO should be the beginning of the end for Eurozone

“I’m a “no” on grounds of general principles that are as much universally European as they are British.

The arguments for and against European Union are fundamentally about the constitution of politics. Constitutional in the true sense of the word: about the nature of politics, who participates in politics, and for whom political structures are organised.

In that sense, the EU is constitutional in a highly negative way and builds new barriers to democracy and citizenship.”

Greek vote should be beginning of the end for eurozoneby Bruno Waterfield

One thing is clear: the 61 per cent of Greeks who voted Οχι are unhappy at five years of austerity diktats from the bossy European officials who cruise Athens in air-conditioned SUVs.

Europe’s great and good lined up to warn them that voting No would be a vote for leaving the euro, abandoned to a fate something like Germany’s in the 1930s.

They voted No or Οχι anyway.

Just a week ago, Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor, who was once a dove, said that the Greek referendum was “yes or no to the eurozone”.

He went further, to argue that if Greece was to “blackmail” the eurozone with a popular vote “to put forward national interests above the will of all others – the likes of Le Pen and Wilders win”.

So there you have it, the Greeks must be ignored or the far right have won. It is that sort of debate.

Greeks are desperate and brave enough to take the gamble of refusing to carry on the same way, with cuts to living standards in return for a bigger debt mountain dragging down their economy.

The voters knew all too well that Greek banks are quite literally about to run out of cash or collapse if the European Central Bank pulls the plug. They voted No anyway.

The country is paying back billions every month this summer to the IMF and the European Central Bank at a time when it is struggling to meet its obligations to the Greek people.

The austerity – the much vaunted “primary budget surpluses” – is so that Greece can pay back loans, 90 per cent of which were used to replace private banking risk with public debt. It will be paying back money until 2057.

One issue stands out, the eurozone’s refusal to write off debt. A grainy black-and-white picture became an internet hit during the referendum. It showed Konstantinos Karamanlis, Greek finance minister at the time, alongside Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor, in London in 1953. He is signing a document to write off 50 per cent of German debt.

No such such offer is on the table from the eurozone, especially from Germany.

Even the International Monetary Fund, who are no bunch of bleeding hearts, support a debt write-off for Greece, of the order of 30 per cent. The eurozone has made it a point of principle that it will not happen until Greece implements intolerable austerity measures that the country’s parliament has not been able to pass since 2012, well before Syriza.

There’s a problem. Letting the Greeks off their debts has become as politically toxic in the creditor countries – Germany, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands – as austerity is in Greece. Governments in Ireland, Portugal and Spain are hardline too: they implemented eurozone austerity at a high political price, requests for debt relief were brutally rebuffed.

Before talks can begin with Greece, the German parliament must vote to give its approval. Many have made clear that Germany should not do business with Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister. Debt writedowns are a taboo. Angela Merkel has vowed (again, again and again) that all Greek debts will paid back to Germany’s taxpayers – a pledge given the lie by economic reality.

Hard-working Germans don’t want to share their wealth by letting others off debts incurred on their public purse – especially when the money goes to Greeks, who are regularly and offensively pilloried by right-wing politicians and the press.

Last Friday, Germany’s Bild newspaper had a good idea, calling its own “referendum” by asking readers to fill out a poll on whether Germany should keep paying loans to Greece. “Should we support Greece with further taxpayers’ billions?” was the question. It was a joke. But why not?

Germany should have a referendum. A nein would effectively be an in or out vote on euro membership (of course), if Germany voted that it did not want to pay tens of billions to Greece.

In Austria, 261,159 people have signed a petition demanding a referendum on whether Austria should leave the EU because of the loans to Greece. The petition must now be debated in parliament.

France too is restless. Even the pro-EU ruling socialists are profoundly nervous over the discipline that Germany now wants, with powers for the eurozone to impose austerity and economic structural reforms. The largest opposition party, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, wants a referendum on the euro. And why not?

Underneath the EU’s platitudes about peace projects there lies an unpalatable, indigestible truth: Europe’s peoples do not accept that they should take on the debts of other countries or surrender to diktats cutting their living standards from external, foreign bodies such as the European Commission, ECB or IMF.

Not one European nation (that I can think of) enthusiastically embraces the idea that the EU, in Brussels or Frankfurt, should be able to dictate to them how they spend the national wealth that they earned, or instruct them to share it with Greeks or others.

The eurozone, always a dubious political construct (motivated by panicky measures to shackle a reunified Germany) is now in the position of uniting all Europeans, in different ways, in a European Union of resentment and recrimination.

Let all the eurozone’s countries vote. Just as empires once stood in the way of a democratic Europe, so does the EU’s single currency today. It needs to go, before resentment and recrimination become something uglier. The Greek vote should be the beginning of the end.