Grecian Formula

In its fifth year of recession and with an unemployment rate escalating above 22 percent, Greece’s election on Sunday, June 17, 2012 sought to avert an economic calamity in the debt-choked country.

The Grecian formula seems to be a proposal that would form a coalition government that is pro-Euro and continue austerity measures in return for bailout cash to save their bankrupt nation.

The new Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras said, “The Greek people voted today to stay on the European course and remain in the Eurozone…there will be no more adventures.”

“Today the Greek people speak. Tomorrow a new era for Greece begins,” Samaras said after voting in southern Greece.

The decision of nine million people will ripple far beyond the craggy tip of the Balkan Peninsula they inhabit.  An entire union of nations will be affected.

The Syriza Party, which had tapped into a vein of deep anger over the plunging living standards faced by many Greeks, had wanted to rip up Greece’s international bailout deals and roll back the new taxes, job cuts and pension cuts imposed in the last two years.

That plan will have to wait. The New Democracy Party has the first shot at forming a new majority in Greece’s Parliament.  If they don’t succeed, Syriza will doubtless go back to that poisoned well of rage.

The Greeks are under no illusion.  To keep bankruptcy at bay and have any chance of survival, the birthplace of democracy must accept the EU-IMF rescue loans and punishing austerity policies—it is little more than a choice between bad and worse.