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The polls in Greece closed fifteen minutes ago as I write. We’ll know the outcome of the vote in a few hours. In the meantime, Stathis Kalyvas, my go-to man on anything Greek—and who voted ‘Nai’ today—has an op-ed just up on WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog, on “Why the Greek referendum is the referendum from hell.”
Personally speaking, I thought the referendum was a crackpot idea from the outset. Since when, in a serious democracy, does a national referendum get called for the following week, on such a momentous issue, and with the question so incomprehensibly worded? À propos, Zizi Papacharissi, professor and head of the communication dept at the University of Illinois-Chicago—who is Greek and presently in Athens—had a commentary yesterday on “A GReferendum state of mind,” in which she argues “why the GReferendum is a bad idea [and] also why all referenda in general rarely work.”
Also à propos, the BBC News website had a comment on June 29th on how “The Greek referendum question makes (almost) no sense.”
Looking at the French angle, columnist Bruno Roger-Petit, observing events from Paris (July 1st), took a dim view of “La gauche française et le référendum de république bananière de Tsipras.” That’s right: Tsipras’s Banana Republic. Money quote
Que diraient [les] entichés de Tsipras si François Hollande, David Cameron ou Angela Merkel organisaient un référendum en moins d’une semaine sur la question européenne, sans campagne et sans question connue dès l’origine ? Ils protesteraient de ce que l’on méprise le peuple français. Ils dénonceraient le populisme de l’affaire. Et ils auraient bien raison.
France Inter political editorialist Thomas Legrand, in his commentary last Wednesday morning, also critiqued the Greferendum, calling it a “bizarrie” and an “aberration.”
Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos, who teaches politics at the University of Athens, weighed in on the Greferendum on the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Greece website (July 3rd), where he said that there has been “A series of blunders of which the largest and latest was Syriza’s…”
À suivre.
UPDATE: Here are Stathis Kalyvas’s “18 tweets on the Greek referendum of July 5, 2015” following the announcement of the ‘Oxi’ victory.
2nd UPDATE: Voilà the early Monday morning roundup of instant analyses:
Paul Krugman (of course), “Ending Greece’s bleeding.” Can hardly disagree with The Man here.
Romaric Godin (of the Paris business daily La Tribune), “Grèce: le ‘non’ grec place Angela Merkel au pied du mur.” This one is quite good.
Zachary Karabell (head of global strategy at Envestnet and contributing editor at Politico Magazine), “Don’t believe the hype about Greece. The Eurozone isn’t on the verge of collapse, yet.”
An interview with Thomas Piketty in Die Zeit, dated June 27th, and translated into English, in which he tells the Germans a few home truths about their own history when it comes to repaying—or not repaying—debt. Piketty is great here. A total must-read.
Pascal Riché (well-known journalist at L’Obs/Rue89), “Grèce: après le ‘non’, tout sauf le ‘grimbo’!” The lede: “Il y a le grexit et le new deal. Mais aussi le ‘grimbo’, l’interminable entre-deux, la solution qui serait de loin la pire. Pour l’éviter, Hollande et Merkel doivent faire preuve d’audace.”
3rd UPDATE: Some late Monday/early Tuesday links:
A smart commentary by FT columnist Gideon Rachman, “Europe should welcome Greece’s vote: Athens and the eurozone have a common interest in making Grexit as painless as possible.” Money quote
If European leaders were thinking clearly, they should see that rather than punishing Greece, it is now in the EU’s interests to do its level best to make sure that Greece can leave the euro, but stay inside the EU with a minimum of pain. If that means giving Greece debt relief as part of the exit package, so be it. Debt relief, in return for Grexit, could make political as well as economic sense.
Even so, restoring the drachma in Greece without provoking an even more intense economic crisis will be very difficult. But, if it could be done, the EU may finally have a model for liberating other European nations from a malfunctioning euro.
George Magnus, Senior Economic Adviser to UBS, in Prospect Magazine, “Greek crisis: How Greece became Europe’s fault line,” in which he reviews Stathis Kalyvas’s latest book. The lede: “Alexis Tsipras and his government will re-engage with their creditors but Greece’s membership of the euro is now in doubt. How did it come to this?”
A nice post by Matthew Yglesias in Vox, “Greek crisis: 11 people and institutions to blame,” i.e. just about everybody. I particularly like nºs 8, 9, and 11.
Stathis Kalyvas observes on Twitter that “The single best example I can give to convey institutional failure in #Greece is the inability to enforce smoking ban in restaurants.” My comment on this: Smoking bans in Turkey are scrupulously respected. I guess that makes the Greeks even more non-European than the Turks…
4th UPDATE: A few Tuesday afternoon links:
Yale University political science prof Nicholas Sambanis writes in WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog on “Why the Greeks rejected Europe’s bailout.”
Indiana University political science prof Kindred Winecoff has a must-read post on the Duck of Minerva blog, which skewers Thomas Piketty’s posture on Germany (see above): “Why Piketty is wrong about debt forgiveness.”
A “Letter from Greece” in Politico by Yannis Palaiologos, a features reporter for the Athens daily Kathimerini, “A populist revolt rocks Greece.” The lede: “Greeks are standing behind their Prime Minister. And courting disaster.”
In Politico.eu, Megan E. Greene, chief economist and managing director of Manulife, says it’s now “Europe’s turn to say ‘Oxi’.” The lede: “After the referendum, a Greek deal may not be impossible but is unlikely.”
Voilà Jean Quatremer of Libé’s latest, “Grexit: tu veux ou tu veux pas?”
And Elie Cohen and Gérard Grunberg deliver their verdict in Telos, “Grèce: et maintenant?”
Robert Misik, an Austrian writer and political commentator, has a lengthy piece dated June 27th, translated from German, and reblogged on Social Europe, “My Greece: The journey inside Syriza.”
5th UPDATE: More late Tuesday links:
Dani Rodrik, who is known to everyone, has a typically on-target piece in Project Syndicate, “Greece’s vote for sovereignty.”
Writing in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, Daniel Howden, a former correspondent for various British publications who presently works for an Athens tech start up, asks “Is Tsipras really looking for a deal with Europe?” The lede: “Despite the Greek leader’s rhetoric on social justice, he appears more intent on consolidating power than resolving this crisis.”
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the guest on France Inter this morning, with Greece the sole subject (here and here). Entre autres, Dany called for a mediator in the negotiations between Greece and the Eurogroup.
Mark Blyth, the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, has a piece in Foreign Affairs on “A pain in the Athens: Why Greece isn’t to blame for the crisis.” So what are roots of the crisis? Answer: they’re far away from Greece and lie in the architecture of European banking.
6th UPDATE: A few Wednesday and Thursday links:
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy asks “Will Angela Merkel Save the European Ideal?”
The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that “Europe is blowing itself apart over Greece – and nobody seems able to stop it.” The lede: “Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday’s referendum. He is now trapped and hurtling towards Grexit.”
Texas Christian University econ prof and Forbes contributor John T. Harvey gives “Five reasons why the Greeks were right.”
University of Wisconsin political science prof Mark Copelovitch, weighing in on the Greek ‘no’ vote in WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog, asks “Is this the end of the Eurozone?”
Also in Monkey Cage is a post by University of Zürich international relations and political economy prof Stefanie Walter, “What were the Greeks thinking? Here’s a poll taken just before the referendum.”
Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Time magazine, asserts that “The U.S. must save Greece.”
Mediapart has a “document” (in English), “‘We underestimated their power’: Greek government insider lifts the lid on five months of ‘humiliation’ and ‘blackmail’.” The lede:
In this interview with Mediapart, a senior advisor to the Greek government, who has been at the heart of the past five months of negotiations between Athens and its international creditors, reveals the details of what resembles a game of liar’s dice over the fate of a nation that has been brought to its economic and social knees. His account gives a rare and disturbing insight into the process which has led up to this week’s make-or-break deadline for reaching a bailout deal between Greece and international lenders, without which the country faces crashing out of the euro and complete bankruptcy. He describes the extraordinary bullying of Greece’s radical-left government by the creditors, including Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s direct threat to cause the collapse of the Hellenic banks if it failed to sign-up to a drastic austerity programme. “We went into a war thinking we had the same weapons as them”, he says. “We underestimated their power”.
Looking at the larger picture, Nobel Prize economics laureate Jean Tirole, in a tribune in Le Monde reblogged in English translation by Social Europe, says that “Europe’s future is federal.”
Swarthmore College visiting professor George Lakey, who has written prolifically on non-violent social action, offers “Four lessons from Iceland and Greece for movements fighting austerity.”
Here’s a pertinent commentary by La Tribune’s Romaric Godin, dated May 12th, “Grèce: pourquoi Yanis Varoufakis est-il insupportable aux Européens?”
Hi Arun, I fully agree with you about this caricature of a Greferendum. I was impressed by this article “How Merkel failed Greece and Europe“, in the Spiegel underlining how and why Angela Merkel can’t handle a guy like Tsipras.
I loved this anecdote : (…) In October 2012, she visited then-Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras in Athens. She didn’t have much respect for Samaras, who had won as head of the conservative party Nea Dimokratia by running against the reform program demanded by Greece’s creditors. Once he got into office though, he buckled — but as has so often been the case, his pledges to Brussels were never fulfilled.
On the return flight to Berlin, a bemused Merkel told of a boast Samaras had made in an interview — that his ministers could reach him on weekends as well. The moral of the story was clear for her: How can a country move forward when its leader sees something so banal as an act of heroism?
La Grèce n’est pas sortie de l’auberge….
Massilian, nice to see we’re on the same page here. As for the Spiegel article, I linked to it as an update on my previous post. It’s very good.
In the face of 55% of the eligible voters going to the polls and 61% of them voting No, here comes Arun to explain how pathetically undemocractic the Greeks are. Thank goodness for the superior democracies of the UK, France, and Germany!
No matter. The bitterness of those who believe that democracy can be found in first past the post elections or oligarchies in disguise, when faced with people voting against their propaganda, is not surprising. In some ways, it’s satisfying.
Arun: you never disappoint. Your intellectual strength always collapses when faced with a situation you cannot abide. And so again we are left with eloquence: crackpot! Banana republic!
Compare these sad little insults with the eloquence of the Greek people, who have uttered only a single word: No.
dojero, my issue here was with the procedure of the referendum, not the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote, over which I did not take a position. I thought this would be clear from my previous post, in which I made clear my conflicted views on the question.
The referendum that you disdain was imperative. Tsipras was forced to it by the finance ministers et al. What I find insulting is your terrible condescension. Do you really believe that the Greeks didn’t know what they were voting for (you say: “question so incomprehensibly worded”)? Did more than 60% of the eligible voters in Greece vote today in ignorance because they couldn’t understand the question? Did Samaras resign today from New Democracy because he believed that he didn’t have enough of a chance to really explain things? Do you imagine that all of the dire warnings from the EU weren’t heard by most of the voters? Do you think that the Greeks haven’t been thinking about this “momentous issue” for the past five years? Do you think that they didn’t know that by voting No they were showing support for the Syriza government?
This referendum was made necessary by the people who ignored the Greek pleas for mercy, ignored the majority of economists who have disdained their economic programs, ignored the plight of the Greek people, made loans without even considering the possibility of risk, allowed a market for those loans to prosper and enrich their friends and themselves.
These people wanted to see Tsipras out of office. They “negotiated” from the beginning in bad faith. Even the IMF, which published a report this week that demonstrated clearly that its leader, Christine Lagarde, was violating their understanding of the situation, couldn’t be counted on to negotiate honestly.
So a referendum was called. The Greek people knew exactly what the question was and they knew exactly what they were doing when they voted No.
I think the timing of the referendum was dictated by the pressures brought to bear by the Troika to force full surrender and/or a regime change. The Greek situation is becoming more dire my the day, so there wasn’t much time to lose. Besides which, I think at this juncture everybody had a pretty clear picture of the two competing position and what was at stake, so I don’t see what would have been the value of a longer period for electioneering.
By the way, I want to thank you for once again providing better coverage of the crisis than most newspaper websites. I really appreciate the time and effort it must take to do this.
Thanks Mitch. Thomas Legrand, in his commentary I linked to, called Tsipras’s referendum gambit a coup de poker: a high-stakes gamble. Maybe it will work for him, who knows? (and we can’t know this Monday morning). If it does – if Greece achieves debt reduction and avoids a Grexit – then I will tip my hat to Monsieur Tsipras.
See Krugman’s last line for his view of democracy in Greece.
It’s a throwaway line – not germane to his analysis (with which I entirely agree) – but he’s right, of course. Democracy rules.
Full marks to dojero (above) for his welcome defence of democracy and why the referendum and its historic outcome are an eloquent Greek response to the insulting German-led barrage of repressive anti-democratic venom issuing from Brussels-am-Berlin. The German leadership is hungup on the ‘Schuld’ — meaning both debt and guilt in German — for the purely pragmatic reason that there is likely to be an electoral bloodbath once voters fully realise that some 56% of German GDP could be destroyed by a Greek debt jubilee.
frenchnews1online: We’re all for democracy, aren’t we? I cannot imagine that anyone reading this would not be. But there’s an implication here that a referendum is the highest expression of democracy, a notion I vehemently contest. As a firm believer in representative democracy, I am generally not favorable to the institution of the referendum, except in places where there’s a long history of it (where it’s integral to the political culture, e.g. Switzerland) and in particular circumstances (e.g. in France in the final year of the Algerian war). The French left, for its part, was historically hostile to the institution of the referendum, as referendum = plebiscite = Bonapartism. And Tsipras’s referedum was a classic Bonapartist manoeuver: a fait du prince, decided by the leader and the leader only (it’s not as if such an initiative could have emanated from ordinary citizens collecting signatures, which, unless I’m mistaken, is not authorized by the Greek constitution). As for dojero and the countless friends and others on my social media news feeds who’ve been praising yesterday’s apparently Über-democratic referendum, would they be doing so if the Greek people had not voted the “right way,” i.e. had voted ‘yes’ and against Tsipras? Poser la question c’est y répondre.
This is getting very passionate and much too ideaological for me (ie dojero and frenchnews1online). If I salute the greek referendum as an exemple of democracy, I should also salute a german referendum on wether Germany should loan more money to Greece, or a french one on the same issue. Or a Hungarian one on the size of the wall against immigrants.
I suppose there are a little doubts on the results of such referendums. My love of democracy has been deflating lately. I blame the system for the stunning mediocrity of our political representatives. I can’t be too enthusiastic when I consider the way Europe drags its feet and painfuly hobbles along on too many critical issues. But this is not a specific European disease. If democracy hand we keep I don’t have as much sympathy for Greece or the Greek people as I probably should. In my opinion, in a democracy the voters are responsible for the people they have elected. You can’t always say, I voted for this guy, but I didn’t know he was a crook. And again. And again. As long as everyone benefited from the greek system it was more or less ok according to the benefit you could get out of it.. I blame all those who lent money to an insolvent country. I blame Mme Lagarde who maintained the dumb and lethal “culture de la maison”.
SORRY ! I I hit the wrong key… Getting back to =
But this is not a specific European disease. If the american democracy has nothing else to offer its people but a Clinton-Bush election… This is extremely sad but even more worrying.
Alon the same lines, I don’t have as much sympathy for Greece or the Greek people as I probably should. In my opinion, in a democracy the voters are fully responsible for the people they have elected. You can’t always say, I voted for this guy, but I didn’t know he was a crook. And again with another. And again with another. You are irresponsible or accomplice.
As long as everyone benefited from the greek system it was more or less ok according to the benefit you could get out of it.. Of course I blame all those who lent money to an insolvent country. I blame Mme Lagarde who maintained the dumb and lethal “culture de la maison”. But I blame Greece for cheating and then never being able to come up with a sound development proposal. There never was a vision, to rebuild this country. I accept the idea of dumping a large part of the debt but I for one, wouldn’t lend 10 euros to Mr Tsipras. Referendum or no referendum. Sorry if I spoill the “OXI” fiesta.
Arun: As I’ve said before, in terms of calling for a referendum, Tsipras had no choice. The rest of the authorities in Europe were, to understate things, extremely aggressive in their opposition to Syriza’s election (with the support of a media that has never failed to use the word “left” or some variation thereof when mentioning the party or its representatives…imagine if every time Merkel’s name were mentioned it was preceded by “conservative” of whatever). They wanted Tsipras out of office and in some cases explicitly called for his ouster. And when he rejected their absurd and impossible offers, they pushed harder by claiming that Tsipras wanted Greece out of the euro and that this was in direct contradiction to the people of Greece, who wanted to remain in the euro zone. So Tsipras called them on it; he called for a referendum asking the Greek people to either agree with him or agree with all the people who were making these allegations and demands.
The referendum wasn’t “crackpot”. It was an effort by Tsipras to put an end to the catcalling from the Germans and the Finns and…to establish firmly (as if the January election hadn’t done that) that Syriza had the support of more than half the people in Greece (because some were saying that they were supported by only the third who had voted for them in the general election).
You asked, ” does a national referendum get called for the following week, on such a momentous issue, and with the question so incomprehensibly worded?”. And the answers are yes (because time didn’t allow for more than a week), and yes (because part of the reason that it was such a momentous issue is that it was an urgent crisis, mandating a quick answer from the people), and no (because it wasn’t incomprehensibly worded and that was always a red herring that no one is even now trying to claim…as though the Greeks couldn’t understand what they were voting about).
Massilian: I agree that the Germans and the French can now claim a need for a referendum. I’m not sure it would be a bad idea. But the more important problem is that Europe is not a democracy. If it were, would the people of Europe have supported the austerity programs in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece? I don’t think so. So we have to ask how well European democracy is working.
Arun: You’re absolutely wrong in your suggestion that I would be opposed to the referendum had it resulted in a Yes vote. Before the vote, I actually expected the Yes side to win. Polls indicated that it was a 50-50 split, and, as I said in a comment on a previous blog here before the vote, I expect that fear will motivate many people to choose the status quo over the unknown. The triumph of the No vote is deeply gratifying to me, it’s true, but it also came as a surprise. I supported the referendum because I believed then and believe now that Tsipras had to prove that he had the support of the people (or admit that he didn’t).
Finally, I recommend this article here to any who want to know about the Greek people as they voted. And I note that there is no way to infer from this particular piece that the question upon which they voted was “incomprehensible”. To the contrary, it seems clear at least from this that they knew exactly what they were voting for or against.