The centre-right government of Greece, which recently won re-election, is facing problems on a multitude of fronts, as neoliberalism fails to provide answers, argues Kevin Ovenden

Tens of thousands of workers demonstrated in seventy cities across Greece on Wednesday in strike rallies for the national stoppage across both the public and private sectors. It is a sign of growing activity at the base of unions, new and old, and fresh forms of organisation that have been developing in the last two years. Sectors involved include hospital workers, shipyards, construction, transport, council workers, teachers, communications, universities, and other groups such as students and pensioners. The active mobilisation by health workers was especially strong.

The centre-right, Tory government of New Democracy was re-elected last year with an unexpectedly strong vote. It confounded expectations that there could be some boost to the then main opposition party, Syriza. It came after an enormous wave of reaction to the Tempe rail disaster in which 57 mostly young people were killed on 28 February 2023. People immediately grasped how underinvestment and decaying infrastructure were to blame. 

They held the government and its predecessors responsible. That so many of the dead were students returning to their university in Thessaloniki symbolised how young people especially have been sacrificed in the crisis years as if in some ancient myth.

Yet the government was able to bounce back, even with little enthusiasm. How? First, it pointed to the recovery from the depths of the crisis. That has been very modest and living standards are still far below where they were in 2008.

Second, it acknowledged that what recovery there had been has not been evenly distributed, but has gone overwhelmingly to the better off. So it promised two things centrally: that wages would now go up and that the health system in particular would receive a big boost through ‘reform’ and some extra spending.

The government also pointed to the incoherence of the Syriza opposition whose criticisms of, for example, the privatisation of the railways leading to cuts to safety, were blunted by the fact that it had pursued the same policies when in government.

New Democracy could say that it recognised people’s suffering but it was a competent administration that would now prioritise fairness. Meanwhile, it pointed to the confrontation with the EU and then capitulation by Syriza and said the alternative was another round of false hope and chaos.

It could work, not because people had great faith in the government, but because they saw nothing from the opposition and were still smarting from the experience of the Syriza government. The left did very badly in the election with the exception of the Communist Party which improved its vote.

Social crises

Now, the promises of the Tory government are being put to the test. That is why there was such a big turnout by hospital workers. The main right-wing and business paper Kathimerini has been championing the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, hailed as a modernising liberal, but even it has had to admit that there is ‘a very long way to go’ in addressing the crisis of the health system.

There have been rising struggles in the hospitals over funding, staffing, pay and contracts. That’s also true in schools, where there is the additional question of the imposition of English-style punitive testing and monitoring measures.

The government is boasting of achieving among the highest growth rates in a largely depressed EU economy, led downwards by Germany and France, its biggest economies. Growth in Greece will probably be 2.3% this year. That has served, however, to highlight the gulf between those who feel some recovery, most obviously big business and the banks, and the majority of people.

It is one thing reluctantly to accept slashed wages in a years-long depression followed by Covid. It is another when the private pro-government TV stations are broadcasting non-stop how wonderfully the ‘national economy’ is doing under the Harvard-educated prime minister. 

This is felt especially in housing. House price inflation is at 10% in Greece, the third highest in Europe. This is leading to growing social strains. One reason is that austerity memorandums imposed on Greece meant removing the protection from eviction from the family home of those who fell into unpayable debt.

Home ownership, largely through historic passing down of the family home, is very high in Greece. The ‘financialisation’ of that through a massive expansion of credit and borrowing against property in the 2000s produced a housing market much more like the unstable US and British versions.

Rising prices, but also rising interest rates and flat wages, are producing a housing crisis even as there is ‘growth’. It is amplified by a big increase in speculative developments and the expansion of schemes such as Airbnb.

These are pricing out younger people from housing. Rents are soaring in Athens and not only in the gentrifying areas. This is at a time when the government hopes to reverse the exodus of young professional people which happened in the depths of the crisis. Greece is going down the Irish path of housing becoming a national emergency even as the population is set to fall.

There are ‘golden visas’ for ‘investors’ who bring little except the driving up of housing costs. The biggest development is at the old airport site to the south of Athens, Ellinikon, which is a bonanza for corruption and is aimed at creating a kind of gated Las Vegas or Macau – a high-end casino destination for the world’s mobile upper-middle classes. It is marketed especially to that layer in China.

These economic contradictions and social antagonisms underpin this week’s general strike. It was not on the scale of those fourteen years ago at the beginning of the austerity offensive, but it was not some routine trade-union action either. There has been a rising curve of strikes and other forms of struggle in Greece for months.

This has come from construction workers, for example, for whom the visible speculative building boom means greater immediate job security from which to make demands. Teachers have struck over regressive education ‘reforms’. Their anger was intensified when the government went to the courts to ban a strike. Firefighters are among those fighting for full-time employment, not the serial contracts so many are on, where they are out of work after the summer wildfire season. Then there are workers in newer industries. Part of the ‘neoliberalisation’ of Greece through which it is supposed to become a fully European country is the recent expansion of the gig economy. This came later than in Britain.

Delivery riders for two now very big firms – eFood and Wolt – have taken very effective strike action, winning their status as workers, as opposed to being self-employed with few rights, over pay and working conditions. They have organised through a combination of a new startup union and the longstanding left trade-union front PAME. It is modest, but there are some signs of the recovery of union organisation in both traditional and non-traditional sectors. Dockers have made some gains recently.

There has been a huge amount of damage to the labour movement from the capitulation of the Syriza government and the labour movement bureaucracies nine years ago, but this week’s strike points to some recovery. This is in the runup to a new budget next month which we can say for certain will not meet what many workers are not so much expecting as demanding.

Political fragmentation

The political context of this is an astonishing fragmentation of the parliamentary political parties and a sense of malaise. There are defections from the governing party. Mitsotakis has expelled the Trumpian figure Antonis Samaras who has led the national-chauvinist hard right of the party. It is almost a repetition of a previous split between the Mitsotakis and Samaras factions which saw the former split, set up his own party, and then return to lead New Democracy. 

A reason for the division is that Mitsotakis is under pressure from Nato and the US to achieve some kind of definitive settlement with Turkey over both countries’ competing claims in the Mediterranean and Cyprus. This is so that the military alliance of which both are members can consolidate further without these tensions erupting.

The previous government of Alexis Tsipras was able to do this over the Macedonian issue. The US and Nato bureaucracies are essentially telling Mitsotakis ‘Tsipras could do this. Why can’t you?’ However, anything that may be presented as ‘concessions to Turkey’ will produce an incendiary reaction from the Greek nationalist right, including in New Democracy. 

There are three far-right parties in the Greek parliament. But they too have suffered crises and splits. Meanwhile, Syriza has split again and has lost its position as official opposition to Pasok, which is nevertheless far from pulling back together the voters and supporters of the centre-left as the clear leading party. There are also now 21 MPs sitting as independents in a parliament of 300.

There is paradoxically a political malaise and a volatility despite what appeared to be such a decisive election result last year. It is into this situation that a fragmented radical left will have to find ways of coming together to take initiatives on a stronger basis than last time.

The possibility of doing so was underscored on Wednesday by the level of politicisation in the strike demonstrations. There has been, even in moments of intense struggle in Greece, a strong tradition of separating the trade-union, workers’ mobilisations from the ‘political’ demonstrations. 

This time, the Palestine flag was flown throughout the different blocs of workers. Slogans counterposed wages and health to arms spending and Greek participation through Nato in wars and slaughter in Palestine and Ukraine. Struggle and the strong politics to match will have to grow to a much greater extent to break through. But it is not as if this is a strong government or restored political system of incorporation. There are no convincing answers from above, rather people are told: be patient and you will feel the benefits at some point.

In this and other respects you may recognise in this picture similarities with the situation in Britain. For different reasons from the socialist left, Starmer, Reeves and their praetorian guard would do well to look to Greece and the fate of another lauded liberal-moderniser whose big election victory has turned out to be an optical illusion within a year.