Syriza Isn’t Giving the Greeks the Whole Story

Elevated talk may bolster the Tsipras government’s domestic support, but it does nothing to inform voters about Europe’s political reality.

The Wall Street Journal

By YANNIS PALAIOLOGOS

Feb. 10, 2015 2:28 p.m. ET

Athens

The moment of truth has arrived. The six days starting with Wednesday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels will determine the ability of Greece’s new government to come to terms with its European partners and avoid a catastrophic Greek exit from the currency bloc.

In an emotional speech to parliament on Sunday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras set out the new government’s legislative agenda and once again rejected the possibility of asking for an extension of Greece’s current bailout program beyond its Feb. 28 expiration. He also outlined a series of measures that hewed very closely to the pre-election pledges of his Syriza party. These included free housing, medical insurance and electricity for the victims of the “barbarity” of the bailouts, as well as pension increases for the poor, a repeal of a major property tax, an increase of the tax-free threshold of personal income to €12,000 ($13,500) from €5,000, and a gradual increase of the minimum monthly wage to its precrisis level of €751.

Mr. Tsipras’s pledges, taken together, make his government’s stated goal of sustainable primary annual surpluses of 1.5% of gross domestic product a lot harder to achieve. It’s unclear, and a cause of some concern for Greece’s already-battered middle class, where he will find the tax revenue to make up for the spending increases his plan entails.

But what was really worrying about the speech wasn’t its content, which left room for compromise, but its tone. Visibly affected, the prime minister made a number of references to restoring Greeks’ national pride and sense of dignity. He spoke of not backing down from implementing his pre-election program, saying his government would “keep its word”—a clear reference to his predecessors, Antonis Samaras and George Papandreou, who didn’t. “Our people cannot take further disappointment,” Mr. Tsipras said.

A curious thing has been happening in Greece in the weeks since its Jan. 25 election: There has been an outbreak of optimism, a rare public sentiment in the past five years, along with a torrent of support for the new government even from people whose ideology is directly opposed to Syriza’s hard-left politics. Polls give Mr. Tsipras approval ratings around 70%. Not a day goes by without someone telling me that, though not a Syriza voter, he or she is thrilled by the uncompromising stance of the prime minister and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in their dealings with Greece’s creditors.

Behind the scenes, an intense negotiation has been taking place in the past few days. In fits and starts, and doing its best to hide the fact from the public, the Greek government has begun offering major concessions that will pave the way for an agreement. These include a commitment to continued budget discipline and are likely to include more flexibility on privatization and product-market reform, though details have not been made public yet.

These are salutary developments, but Mr. Tsipras can’t hope that they will escape the attention of Greek voters forever. His political ascent was premised, among other things, on the great populist lie of an innocent people laid low by nefarious elites domestic and foreign. He blamed Greece’s collapse on a small caste of corrupt politicians and their big-business backers, and on a ruthless, dogmatic command center of European and International Monetary Fund officials who imposed the pain of adjustment on the many and attacked workers’ rights in the interests of international capital. He has never admitted the central contribution of mass tax evasion and unsustainable pension obligations to national bankruptcy, nor has he attempted to educate people on the limits to sovereignty implicit in participating in a single-currency area.

Mr. Varoufakis has already said that the government agrees with 70% of the measures in the Greek bailout program, something Syriza had somehow neglected to mention before the election. The prime minister will need to elaborate on this. He must explain to his domestic audience that the Europeans are partners in the existential struggle to rid Greece of clientelism and corruption, not imperialists seeking to squeeze it for their own profit. His appeals to reclaiming sovereignty and to restoring national pride are shoring up his domestic position, but they are also limiting his room for maneuver. If compromising is seen as tantamount to a loss of dignity, then the government will not be able to make the necessary adjustments.

This isn’t to absolve Greece’s creditors of their own responsibility, both for facilitating the cheap lending that financed Athens’s unreasonable spending in the past and for their overly rigid stance now. The view that some northern Europeans still cling to, that Greece needs to stick to what its previous government agreed to because elections change nothing, is both misguided and unsustainable. But Greece’s new leaders must also realize that they are not the only ones with a democratic mandate, and that their own voters, no matter how good they feel when they hear elevated talk of dignity and pride, want nothing to jeopardize the country’s euro membership.

Mr. Palaiologos, a journalist at Kathimerini newspaper in Athens, is the author of “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules” (Portobello Books, 2014).