The Guardian — The Greek prime minister has promised to defy his critics by taking the country out of its longest-running crisis in modern times. “The worst is clearly behind us,” Alexis Tsipras told the Guardian in an exclusive interview published on Monday.
“We can now say with certainty that the economy is on the up … Slowly, slowly, what nobody believed could happen, will happen. We will extract the country from the crisis … and in the end that will be judged.”
Tsipras is now the longest serving premier in the eight years for which Greece has struggled to keep bankruptcy at bay.
Yet it has been at immense cost, and while facing at times megaphone criticism, that has clearly hurt. “When I came into this office, I had no experience, or sense, of how big the day-to-day difficulties would be,” he concedes. “I think, now, I have a very different picture from the one I had initially.”
In 2015, Tsipras’s radical Syriza party was the great anti-austerity hope in the nation that, debt-choked and insolvent, threatened to tear Europe’s economic union apart. It was under threat of euro ejection that Tsipras compromised by accepting a bailout programme whose excoriating terms were harsher than those that had been rejected by more than 61% of voters in a referendum only days before.
But the eurozone’s weakest link is far from being out of the woods. With a debt load close to a staggering €340bn, or 180% of GDP, economic recovery is still a distant dream. The net worth of Greek households fell by 40% between 2009, when the crisis erupted, and 2014. For many, the noose is tightening, with authorities raiding the bank accounts of private debt holders and stepping up confiscations of properties. More than 1 million Greeks, or 21.7% of workers, are unemployed, down from 27.9% in 2013. Among Tsipras’s goals is a 10 percentage point drop in joblessness, but that is “in the next five years”.
Yet headway has been made. Amid speculation of Athens’s imminent return to markets – the first in a series of test runs seen as crucial if the country is ever to wean itself off bailout money – the leader is keen to exploit the signs of light at the end of the tunnel.
With fiscal measures legislated, and a horizon free of elections until September 2019, Tsipras says his government can get on with the business of governing; of applying an agenda more in line with the liberal values of his party. To this end, laws aimed at alleviating hardship, starting with reconstruction of the shattered welfare state, are in the pipeline.
The time has come to push ahead with “a new model of development”: one that exploits the nation’s highly skilled young professionals, redresses the brain drain that has seen close to half a million flee already, and ensures that the mistakes of the past – sins embodied by epic corruption and cronyism – are never repeated.
Greek society has changed and matured. “Our first priority is to regain our [economic] sovereignty,” he explains, adding that plans are afoot to exploit Greece’s prime geopolitical location, at the crossroads of three continents, and promote its potential as an international energy, transport and telecommunications hub.
With the worst behind them Tsipras insists Syriza can bring about a moral revolution that will profoundly change the way Greece is governed. “If you go out into the street and ask about this government, many might say ‘liars’, but nobody will say we are corrupt or dishonourable or have had our hand in the honey pot.”
