We’re half-hearted
IN MY OPINIONKlaus Doring
The Re-public of the Philippines got a new president. The first in history from Mindanao. Congratulations Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. One term is on everybody lips now: unity! Yes, besides all black propaganda and smear campaigns from the past – this Philippine nation should continue as a united country.
Who is half-hearted? Let’s take a look again at Europe. The looming Europe crisis seems to continue. Can Greece deliver on its promises this time?
Five years, three bailouts, two governments and countless emergency meetings later, neither the country’s government nor its people – 25 percent of whom are unemployed in an economy that shrunk by a quarter in five years – fully back the latest austerity deal that was agreed on last Monday.
In fact, there have been major demonstrations against the €5.4 billion worth of measures, which will increase social security and pension contributions and raise taxes. Since the crisis broke out in 2010, similar deals have not borne fruit. So why would anything be different this time? In order to make a repayment due in July and receive the first tranche of funds from the EU bailout program, Greece desperately needed additional funds. The bailout money largely goes towards paying off Greece’s debt – and therefore has little effect on the economy.
‘Our agreement is a compromise’. In an exclusive interview with DW – Deutsch Welle, Nikos Pappas, Greek Minister of State, has now admitted the Tspiras government was “half-hearted in measures that we believe that could be implemented in a different way”. “Our agreement is a compromise. The agreement itself has got the elements that our partners asked us to implement, and our wi-shes. So, the program is not totally ours, it is a compromise,” Pap-pas added when Michel Friedman confronted him with a statement by the German Munich based Ifo Institute that said Athens were dragging its feet on economic reforms. Nikos Pappas currently serves as a Minister of State in Alexis Tsipras’ second cabinet.
Syriza – the far-left party that took government in 2015 – failed to deliver on its promises, posing a problem to Greek citizens, its creditors and EU diplomats in Brussels. German Klaus Regling, head of the Eurozone’s rescue fund EFSF said that although Greece has made some progress with its reforms, the overall “implementation capacity” has been slow – and in fact the “weakest in the European Union”.
Questions like ‘Is your tax collection office on a permanent vacation?’ have been noticed several times. When Friedman asked whether the constant emergency meetings don’t have a certain resemblance to a bad drama, with Athens simply repeating the same old lines, Pappas said: “We have never denied they were internal problems in the Greek state, the Greek economy and the Greek society, never. But these problems were matched with a totally wrong approach that resulted in such a severe recession.” Pappas also refused to take responsibility for the 17 billion EURO that escape state coffers every year, so that the Greek shadow economy repre-sents up to a quarter of the country’s GNP. Pappas called this figure “another extreme expression that does not reflect reality”.
Greece – quo vadis? Europe – quo vadis?
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Email: doringklaus@ gmail.com or follow me in Facebook or Twitter or visitwww.germanexpatin thephilippines.blogspot.com.
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