Sea Change in Greece?
I have been coming to Greece two or three times a year for more than 40 years and served as The Times’s correspondent in Athens from 1977 to 1980. Over those decades I watched succeeding Greek governments get into a vicious cycle that sent the national debt soaring higher than Mount Olympus and threatened to unravel the entire European Union.
Every time elections approached, the party in power would add thousands of new hires to public payrolls, raise salaries and pensions, and increase benefits. When some ministers would try to cut back even a little after elections, hordes of angry demonstrators would besiege the Parliament or block highways and ports until the politicians caved in and withdrew or watered down their meager reforms.… Seguir leyendo »