By Con George-Kotzabasis--January 02, 2015
Not only the
ideologically antiquated and totally irresponsible and hasty announcements of
the ministers of the new government, that led to the collapse of the Greek
stock exchange and the stratospheric rise of interest rates, but also their
body language, as shown in their performance before TV cameras, exposed with
ridicule their witless incompetence. The Minister of State, Nikos Pappas,
interviewed on Mega TV, was trying in despair to evade and not to answer the
questions of the two interviewers and to cover the poverty of his arguments
behind endless contrived smiles.
More gravely, but
also more comically, the Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis, in the press
conference held in Athens last Friday with the head of the European Union (EU) Jeroen
Dijssebloem, with tongue-in-cheek and with supercilious righteousness was
elaborating with complacent fabricated smiles the ‘perfectly remedial’ counter
proposals of the Tsipras Government that would end the crisis to the presumably
destructive austerity program of the EU that according to the government was
exacerbating it. A program however that aimed, and apparently was succeeding,
as indeed did in Ireland and Portugal, in pulling Greece out of the crisis, as
recent economic statistics were indicating and serious international
commentators were averring. Varoufakis in his last answer to the question of a
journalist, in a bravura theatrical performance, described the Troika, the
representatives of the EU, the IMF, and the European Central Bank, as being
“rotten in its foundations” and the Greek Government would not negotiate with
it but only directly with the heads of these three institutions. Dijssebloem
sitting next to the Greek minister listening to the translation from Greek to
English had a look on his face as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Varoufakis
on the other hand had lost all his pompous confidence and showed in his
movements and facial expression that he was unsure whether he had said the
right thing or not. Totally riveted in his self-doubt and diffidence he seemed
like a little child that had lost its way. But the crown of thorns that was
placed by Dijssebloem on the head of Varoufakis came when the latter proferred
his hand to the former and receiving a contemptuous cold handshake and hearing in
bafflement at the same time the head of the EU whispering to him that what he
said “was a big mistake.” At the end of this grandiloquent thespian performance
by the minister of finance, just before the curtains fell, Varoufakis’ body
language showed the depth of his confusion and perplexity and his attempt to
hide them behind contrived artificial smiles.
It is by such stuff
and political buffoonery that the Tsipras Government will remedy all the ills
that the ‘evil’ Troika brought to Greece. This government of a medley of Marxists, socialists, and
anarcho-syndicalists posit a great danger to the country as it plans to
implement the by now defunct nostrums of its ideology, such as the expansion of
the public sector, the nationalization of banks, airlines, ports, and electric
and water services, the unbridled extension of the State, a highly regulated business sector, hence, replanting all
the poisonous seeds into the soil of Greece that brought a blighted crop of economic
bankruptcy.
As to Syrizas’ stand
toward to the EU and the IMF, it will either stiffen it and thus lead the
country to tactless insolvency and back to the drachma, or it will blink before
the sharp sighted Europeans and will be forced to renege, and reverse, all the
bombastic promises it made to the people before the elections. Indeed, it will
pour so much water in its wine and make it so tasteless that will turn all the
people, who so frivolously believed its false promises and lies and voted for it, into
teetotallers.
