ATHENS | In the midst of last year’s dramatic Greek debt crisis, a small but select group of academics at the prestigious National and Kapodistrian University here could not help but wonder whether they themselves might be to blame for pushing the country to the brink of financial oblivion.
Much of Greece’s economic policy over the previous 30 years had in some way originated from the school’s Department of Economics, whose faculty includes a half-dozen former government ministers, central bank chiefs — and Yanis Varoufakis, the flame-throwing former finance minister who said he “welcomed hatred” from his European counterparts as Greece and the EU squared off over how to repair the country’s devastated finances.
But a year after Mr. Varoufakis stepped down as his onetime ally, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, broke with the platform of their leftist Syriza coalition and agreed to punishing austerity measures in a last-minute bailout deal, the country’s leading economists agree on only two things: Greece is still in very bad shape, and Mr. Tsipras is not helping.
While the recession lingers, wage cuts and record unemployment have further crippled consumption and deprived the state of much-needed tax revenue, said Giorgos Argitis, an associate professor who also serves as the Greek trade unions’ chief economist.
“What’s left? Foreign investment,” he said. “But, of course, nobody wants to invest in a country with this much risk.”
Given the concessions Mr. Tsipras made with what Greeks call the “troika” — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF — his government has virtually no room to maneuver. So as long as Greece wants to keep the euro as its currency, “for us, there is not any degree of freedom,” Mr. Argitis said.
The economist blames the back-and-forth between unimaginative centrist forces that have governed Greece since the 1974 end of the military junta’s rule. The center-left PASOK and center-right New Democracy also neatly divided the Department of Economics, which has few out-of-the-box thinkers.
“This department, in a very big way, is responsible for the collapse of the economy — for the catastrophe,” he said,
For avowed leftists like Mr. Argitis, however, Syriza’s rise from a minuscule left-wing coalition to the largest bloc in Parliament initially spelled hope that the paradigm of free market economics and austerity might finally be curtailed.
But not only did Mr. Tsipras and other coalition leaders give in to a bailout package that required Greece to privatize government assets, cut social spending and run a primary budget surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP, Mr. Argitis said, but they also failed to acknowledge that these were, in fact, “neoliberal” policies.
“So what is left for the left? Nothing. It pushes the center of gravity of the political system in Greece to the right,” he said. “I don’t know if it is the last chapter [for the left]. But it is a great ideological and political shock.”
His colleague Nikolaos Haritakis — a few doors down the hall — could not agree more. But unlike Mr. Argitis, he believes that a further shift to free market policies would be hugely beneficial to revamp a new Greek service economy backed by the logistics, tourism, maritime and agricultural sectors.
“There is a great potential for the economy,” he said. “I am extremely optimistic.”
And the Syriza government, Mr. Haritakis predicted, was on its way out anyway — probably within months, not years.
“They lack an understanding of how the political game is played,” Mr. Haritakis said about Mr. Tsipras and his allies. “For the economies of the future, political correctness and political costs are not valuable components.”
But such scholastic battles are of little interest to ordinary Greeks like Thanos Economou, who owns a small tobacco store across the street from the economy department’s unassuming building near Athens’ famed Acropolis.
“If you studied and you don’t speak with the people, you don’t see,” Mr. Economou said. “It’s only numbers.”
His own numbers — a 30 percent drop in sales since January — mean that, for the first time in 20 years, he did not take a summer vacation. And even though customers spend less and less at his shop, the 38-year-old still needs to help out his brother, who has been out of work for six years.
A few doors down the street, coffee shop owner Spiros Kondilis does not have that luxury. To give his 16-year-old child a better shot at the future, the 43-year-old Mr. Kondilis and his wife have already decided to emigrate to Canada.
“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “But the Greek government said to me: ’Go.’ Because here, we cannot live.”
In the meantime, though, Mr. Kondilis said he had no choice but to lay off one of his four employees. And with a possible new round of deregulation and privatization on the way, the worst of the economic crisis may be ahead, Mr. Argitis warned.
“We will have strikes and social unrest again,” he predicted.
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