An open letter from PASOK was sent last week to the Greek diaspora, arguing that the world’s media and politicians have misrepresented the Greek debt crisis.
The letter, from Kostas Tatsis, Secretary for PASOK’s Sector of Hellenism Diaspora, seeks to explain the causes of the crisis from the party’s perspective and the Greek government’s interventions since PASOK returned to power in 2009. The letter suggests that international media coverage has often “exceeded the seriousness of the problem” with “exaggerated estimations”.
To rectify what PASOK sees as misinformation, the letter begins by attempting to unpick the reasons why Greece “fell into crisis”, noting that essential institutional changes have been left unmade over the past 30 years of Greece’s EU membership, and that Greece had failed to “take measures to create a fair and effective welfare state and a competitive economy”.
The mea culpa introduction sidesteps the fact that for more than half of those 30 years, PASOK was in government. While it might have been instructive to share what had prevented previous PASOK governments from identifying the underlying problems and making necessary reforms, the narrative switches to reject alleged accusations of overblown pensions and defence spending, before rounding on financial speculators “who caused the international crisis at the expense of Greece and the eurozone”.
The letter goes on to propose that the Greek debt crisis is a symptom of a European wide malady and “a consequence of [European] political failure… Europe often has the sense that the EU is not decisive enough to correspond to the new challenges that face humanity”. The letter concludes with statistics that point to positives for the Greek economy over the past two years, including increases in tax revenue by 39 per cent in 2010, GDP increasing by 0.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2011 – after nine successive quarters of negative figures, and inflation reducing from 5.6 per cent in September 2010 to 3.7 per cent by April 2011.
