Extremists ready to take advantage in Troika-shackled Greece

You could have parked anywhere you liked in Athens a few weeks ago — the city’s parking police had all been fired.

Most university students were still on summer holidays because much of the administrative staff had been let go. A law was going through parliament to take away the six days’ annual leave and extra pay given to civil servants for using computers. Apparently many were getting the time off and the money despite government offices having very few computers — Dutch experts are helping to change that at the moment.

But the lights are still on in this most august of cities — the up-lighters in Syntagma Square pick out the stark lines of the parliament, the grass glistens in the evening dew, and the palm trees stand out in the city centre after dusk.

The number of protesters keeping a noisy vigil outside the department of finance has dwindled over the four years, to the point where they are well outnumbered by the riot police and military constantly on guard.

The tug-of-war between the troika and the government continues, even as the European Commission and the president of the European Council arrived into Athens for the official start of the country’s six-month presidency of the EU.

Conflicting messages continue to come from Athens, with the prime minister, Antonis Samaras, telling his citizens they will exit the bailout this year, while his foreign minister, Evangelos Venizelos, warns they need a better deal on the €240bn bailout.

This could pose a major policy problem for the ECB and the EU’s bailout fund, which would have to take a hit on the amount they are owed by Athens. Otherwise, the man who negotiated the bailout terms when finance minister warned they could be forced out of the eurozone, which would be a threat to the German taxpayer.

Their new year messages could yet set the tone for a year when German chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity message is challenged as the euro settles down and market pressures continue to ease.

But the fact will remain that Greece continues to be seen as a basket case. At the moment the troika insists the government’s figures for the budget shortfall are out by €1.4bn. This is important because getting the next tranche of money Greece needs to repay debts and keep the state running depends on both sides agreeing on the budget figures.

And it’s not always easy to tell. Much of the state’s finances are still recorded in ledgers — large books with the details of the country’s affairs handwritten, and often barely legible, in ink.

“An IMF friend said the only place she could compare it with was Egypt — the level of chaos, nobody really in charge, nobody knowing where anything was, or how to find anything,” said an Athenian in a good position to watch the day-to-day progress of his country. “They should really have sent in the World Bank — we need state building, not a bailout.”

In the old middle-class neighbourhood of Petralona, near the Acropolis, a restaurant serving local food and organic wine is full of young people. Most are students — only one third of those under 25 have a job. Several musicians come in to play — some are turned away. An older lady plays a classical piece on her violin — she refuses money, saying she is playing for pleasure.

But a short distance away in Omonia, once the quintessential modern commercial centre, there are few signs of civilised life. Here is the all too visible and grimy face of recession, of a broken system — if it ever worked — of poverty, a criminal underclass, prostitution, trafficking, and drugs. Here exist many of the 600,000 immigrants who arrived without documents, most of which the state cannot afford to support and who suffer from a growing sense of xenophobia.

The influx of foreigners, most on their way to other parts of Europe, was largely ignored until the country’s economy collapsed, and until other EU countries began to blame the porous Greek border with Turkey as the cause of so many illegal immigrants.

Xenophobia has been whipped up by the Golden Dawn party, which took 8% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections. Now, some of its leaders are in jail awaiting trial for belonging to a criminal organisation following the fatal stabbing of a rapper, Pavlos Fyssas, who spoke out against it. He was upsetting Golden Dawn’s takeover of Piraeus, a town outside Athens, Europe’s largest passenger port (currently for sale to the Chinese).

Despite the publicly enunciated neo-Nazi views in a country that fought against and suffered under the Nazis in the Second World War, Golden Dawn has been deeply embedded in this community, with soup kitchens, social care, and anti-immigrant actions.

The party was helped enormously by the police who, too lazy or unable to pursue many crimes, handed out contact numbers for the local Golden Dawn office to citizens with complaints.

Many Athenians were shocked by the killing on a Friday afternoon two months ago of two Golden Dawn members, and the injuring of a third, after a lone gunman shot them. The Sect of Revolutionaries claimed responsibility. Three years ago it claimed to have murdered a journalist but had not been heard of since. Now, police say the sect has joined with other guerrilla groups such as the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire and may also include another group, Revolutionary Struggle.

It sounds unbelievable but Athenians take it all in their stride. One points out that this is the country where being a communist was outlawed until 1974. One of his relatives spent years in jail, years in hiding, and years as an army conscript because his political views were socialist. But the heritage of violence intertwined with politics lives on in Greece, with a liberal dose of criminality.

The popularity of Golden Dawn has dropped in the polls but it is difficult to gauge its popularity. As many observers in Athens point out, people are ashamed to admit they would support such a fascist organisation but see it as their only way to protest against the main parties that for decades have betrayed them, building up their own interests at the expense of the country and its citizens.

In May, the people are likely to voice their disquiet in local and EU elections. The old centre-left Pasok party has almost disappeared and few believe that New Democracy, led by the prime minister, will benefit. The choice for angry and frustrated voters is likely to be between extreme right and extreme left-wing parties. First prize will be the mayor of Athens. A few believe that Golden Dawn could take the seat but the Syriza party is more likely to be the winner. Made up of Trotskyists, communists, Maoists, Marxists, and other radical leftists, it came second with 27% of the vote in the general election and, rather than join a coalition government, preferred to become the main opposition party.

Led by 39-year-old populist Alexis Tsipras, Greeks seem mildly amused by his ever-changing positions on issues such as quitting the euro — he now says they won’t but will rather default on the massive debt owed mainly to the ECB and eurozone countries through the ESM fund.

With a structure akin to the Kremlin in the old days of the USSR, the Left Platform faction has 30% of the seats in the ruling central committee. They are expected to greatly increase their seats in the European Parliament from the sole one they now hold. And as people desperately look around for a way to punish the two parties (New Democracy and Pasok) that together ruled Greece since the fall of the colonels in 1974, the feeling is they won’t worry too much whether their choice is radical left or fascist right.

General elections may not be far away and Samaras might be tempted to call them while Golden Dawn is still under investigation and before they come to court. Usually, people spend up to 18 months in jail waiting to be charged, up to five years for their case to be heard, and five to eight years for an appeal. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” said my Athenian friend, adding that the basis of a democracy — the rule of law — could very well be judged to be missing from this country, the cradle of democracy, as the judiciary is not immune from corruption endemic in every state institution.

Greeks want to punish the politicians and to be assured there is light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing much is changing at the moment, however.

There is no point in having a municipal refuse collection, with rubbish carefully separated by householders for recycling, one official explained by way of example. If it involves payment, the streets would become tipping dumps. “They just wouldn’t do it. It seems like too much authority,” he said, pointing to the big waste bins along streets and roads where residents can deposit their waste.

Ways around this kind of intransigence are being sought, of course — property tax is being collected through electricity bills; non-payment should result in the lights being switched off. But this does not appear to be happening so far.

There is a greater awareness with stories of criminality being reported in the media: For instance, the report on civil servants who approached the owners of three private health clinics asking them to submit invoices to the Sailors Insurance Fund for payment of around €1.1m — for which they had already been paid. They were to split the proceeds between them. But one of the clinic staff reported them and, as a result, six people have been charged with embezzlement. Given the lack of checks and computerised payment systems, and with a little help on the inside, it could have worked, even with the troika in town.

The troika has demanded that the public sector, with 1m employees, be trimmed by 150,000 over five years. Many are in positions where there is no work for them and, according to the OECD, some areas had one third more staff than they needed. At the same time, 20% of departments had a chief with no workers underneath, while 90% of the others had less than 20 non-managerial staff. Wages were more than double that in the private sector. The official figures show the civil service has been reduced to little over 700,000, down about 170,000 over the past three years — but the majority of these positions were temporary. At the same time, 51% of workers in the private sector have lost their jobs.

Meanwhile, 226 public-service workers have been fired for wrongdoing over the past 14 months. Even though this is an increase on the old system that saw appeals take years and many of those accused of serious crimes working to retirement, 226 is not much in a system where the tax collector regularly reduced and split tax bills with the taxpayer and where medical professionals expect their brown envelope to provide treatment in public hospitals.

But irrespective of the number of memoranda of understanding signed by the government, when political parties are dependent on many of the 700,000 in the civil service for their support, getting rid of them is never going to be simple.

The Megaron Athens concert hallwas recently filled to overflowing with young people, there to listen to the president of the European Parliament, a selection of MEPs from Greece, Crete, and Portugal, and a few journalists on the topic of “South for Growth” — Ireland being an honorary member of the South Club.

The students attended because they received a credit for doing so, which will be much needed as they have been locked out of their universities since September as administration staff strike over demands that 1,300 be fired or reallocated to other posts.

Some students have places waiting for them in the top universities of the world — but cannot take them up as they needed documents signed by these same administrators. The campuses of the eight third-level institutions were being patrolled by supporters of the administrators to ensure no clandestine lecture took place and no office opened.

They are part of the 12,500 civil servants that must be moved into the so-called mobility scheme this month before the next tranche of €1bn is released by the troika. The scheme — devised to get around the problem of civil-service jobs being protected under the constitution — is to send home 25,000 on 75% of their normal salary for eight months maximum, during which they will either be fired or reallocated a job.

According to the administrative reform ministry, this will make space for staff with more appropriate qualifications to achieve targets. There are no schemes to re-skill anybody. For the first round, municipal police, school guards, and university administrators have been targeted. The second round will concentrate on local government and the health sector.

Each department, the ministry of interior reform, says, has calculated how many people they need to run their services. They assess their staff, allocating points for coming in through the front door by passing the civil-service exam, for educational qualifications, for the number of languages they speak, and other skills.

Only those with more than four children, or who suffer a disability, are exempt from the list. The rest are destined to find a job in another area, or be laid off.

“We found 200 from the municipal police with qualifications in economics and they have been reassigned,” a spokesperson said.

And what about chaotic parking on the streets of Athens with all 3,000 municipal police laid off? Well, the local authority has begun to send out other public servants to patrol the streets and fine those for illegal parking — it was necessary to maintain income, he explained.

There is other legislation going through parliament this month — last year the price of heating oil was hiked by a third, with the result that most residents in Athens moved over to solid fuel. The result was a city filled with smog for several days. So the government is now banning the use of fireplaces and stoves on days when smog is likely.

How to enforce it has not yet been decided yet.

While debt and bailouts get the headlines in Greece, creating a system that works appears to be the real battleground.