The troika and the International Monetary Fund representatives in particular do not believe that the program can be complete and consider the additional measures that the Finance Minister proposed to be inefficient and unable to address their objections and demands.
For them, the exemptions in the insurance legislation that allow scores of employees, men and women, to retire before the age of 62, when the average pension age has risen to 65 years, are inconceivable.
Just like they find it inconceivable that thanks to the social solidarity benefit (“EKAS”) those worked 15 years receive the same pension with those who struggled for 30 years.
The troika representatives cannot understand how hoteliers, who are prone to tax evasion and horde half their money abroad, pay only 6.5% VAT.
They also believe that it is inconceivable that in the current financial and social circumstances exemptions in direct and indirect taxation are maintained.
Nor can they realize the particularities of the Greek political circumstances and the dominant clientelist logic, which however is keeping friendly-to-their-logic and ideological direction forces in power.
In any case though, the gap seems unbridgeable.
Under these circumstances there is no deal on the horizon.
Even if there is some sort of agreement at the end, it will undoubtedly be accompanied by an extension of the bailout agreement and a special credit line full of terms and conditions.
The likeliest scenario is for a six-month extension of the bailout program to be granted, with a provision for further extensions, which will allow the International Monetary Fund to maintain its supervisory role until 2016, when its involvement in Greek affairs is set to conclude.
Until then the weak Greek political system supposedly has the time to recover and assume real power.
However, not much can come from such an environment of dependence and weakness.
The country will carry on resembling a herd without a ram, without a leader than it capable of taking it where it deserves to be.
Just like in the past five years, the political forces will be “up in arms”; they will literally evaporate from the humiliating contact and exhausting negotiation with the foreign oppressors.
It is not unlikely that the “Colombians”, who are already developing political ambitions, will dominate in the end.
Truth be told, the way Greece is headed, there is a great danger of the country entering a transitional state of a socialist country entering the free market – to experience conditions similar to those that former socialist countries in Eastern Europe experienced after 1989.
This should trouble and mobilize the smart people in politics, so that there can be a political recovery and a leadership can emerge that will be capable of assuming the cost and responsibility of a different direction, which will tell the truth to the people and for many years will promise nothing other than efforts, struggle and justice.
We used up everything else in the past decades.
Antonis Karakousis
To VIMA
Posts
