The crisis in Europe has reached its first great political turning point. James Meadway examines the dramatic developments in Greece and explains their significance

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 opened up an extended period of economic turbulence and decay for the advanced capitalist world. That enveloping chaos is now summoning up clear political confrontations.

Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, stormed to 16.8% of the vote in Greek elections on 6 May – from 4.6% in 2009. With the parties of the IMF failing to form a pro-austerity coalition government, a further round of voting is due.

There have been other elections in the last four years. Almost universally, whichever government was in power at the time of the crisis was duly deposed: British Labour; French Tories; Spanish Socialists. Centre-left or centre-right, the result was the same. The crisis appeared merely to be accelerating the usual turn of the electoral wheel, alternating between neoliberal parties of a more or less pleasant hue. No serious systemic challenges were mounted.

Greece changes this. The collapse of the traditional party of the left, Pasok, has occurred with a rare suddenness. After two years in government oscillating between ineffectiveness and brutality, its traditional base of support in the Greek working class has close to evaporated. From winning 43.9% of the vote in 2009, its support now barely scrapes double figures.

Its last Prime Minister, George Papandreou, and his government diligently enforced incessant demands from the EU/European Central Bank/IMF “Troika” for deeper and still deeper austerity measures. The so-called bailouts did little more than make sure payments could keep flowing to Greece’s many creditors.

Even on its own terms, their policies were an abject failure. At the end of 2009, Greek public debt stood at 130% of GDP. By 2012, it was forecast to hit 160%. The Greek economy is forecast to have shrunk 20% over the last four years – a rate of collapse comparable, for a developed country in peacetime, only to the cataclysms of the Great Depression.

The social costs are staggering. To pick just one example, Greece used to enjoy the lowest suicide rates in Europe. No longer: Greek suicides have risen 40% in the last year. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras is absolutely correct to call austerity “barbaric”. It should be no great surprise so many Greeks entirely agree.

Syriza’s formation

This is the immediate background to Syriza’s meteoric rise. In the elections of three years ago, it was outflanked electorally by the long-established (if profoundly isolationist) major Communist Party, the KKE, and was later hit by a right-wing split in June 2010 that led to the establishment of Democratic Left (Dimar), subsequently joined by a group of former Pasok MPs. Syriza itself was established prior to the 2004 elections from a constellation of smaller organisations that had, since the start of the decade, come increasingly to share common platforms.

The largest amongst them was Synaspsismos, which began life in the late 1980s as an electoral alliance between the KKE and the Greek Left, who traced their lineage back to a previous KKE split in 1968. After the “Eurocommunist” wing of the KKE was expelled from the party in the early 1990s, the Eurocommunists – together with their allies – established Synaspsismos on a more permanent basis.

Synaspsismos participated briefly in the conservative government of Tzannis Tzannitakis in the latter part of 1989 and voted support for the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, but then later moved to the left, beginning a long period of work with other organisations in the anti-capitalist movement at the end of the 1990s. By 2004, this collaboration had allowed the creation of a common electoral platform in the form of Syriza.

Alexis Tsipras, former member of the Communist Youth, became Syriza’s leader in 2007 after his creditable campaign for mayor of Athens. Synaspsismos remains the largest component of Syriza, accounting for approximately 85% of the membership, and largely sets the political pace for the Coalition. It is, however, a genuine Coalition, with Trotskyists, Maoists and other radical formations taking full part; and Synaspsismos itself is not homogenous.

Syriza has continued to tack leftwards under Tsipras’ leadership, perhaps most notably during the December 2008 riots following the police shooting of a 15 year old schoolboy when – unlike the KKE – its leadership refused to condemn rioters. Syriza activists have played significant roles in the movement over the last four years. Its positioning as both a credible (if, before these elections, small) Parliamentary force and party of radicals and activists left it well-placed to shape and pick up on the radicalisation of Greek society that austerity has produced.

Syriza’s message – that austerity can be rejected, but that euro membership need not – positioned Syriza precisely at the point at which large numbers of Greeks also found themselves. This set it apart on the left from both the older KKE and the newer Antarsya, both of whom came to place Greece’s euro membership front and centre of their campaigning.

After two years of struggle, the question of forming a government opposed austerity has finally been posed. It is Syriza on the left who have consistently called for the formation of a united anti-austerity government, when other forces (notably the KKE) have failed to do so. The miscalculation of their opponents on the right, after the 6 May election, was that this consistency would count against them: that by presenting Syriza’s refusal to countenance compromise on austerity as irresponsible extremism, the tide would turn against them. It has, instead, flowed still more strongly in their favour. Against a corrupt and compromised political system, Syriza looked like the principled and credible defenders of the interests of broad sections of Greek society.

The movement and the parties

Syriza has laid out its claim to government on two grand promises: that it will halt the EU-imposed austerity measures; and that it will halt the payments due on Greece’s crippling national debt. The question of austerity, and of tearing up October 2011’s “Memorandum of Understanding” between Greek government and Troika, is the decisive issue in this election campaign. All other concerns are strictly secondary – including that of Greece’s continued euro membership – and Syriza’s leadership is quite correct to refuse the blackmail of Angela Merkel and others across Europe.

Over two years, hundreds of thousands of Greeks have protested and struck against the Troika and their catspaws in Athens. Occupations of main squares have taken place across Greece, in direct and deliberate echo of the Spanish indignados, with the most spectacular crowds gathered in Syntagma, opposite the Greek Parliament. 17 separate general strikes have been staged by the Greek trade unions, two of them over 48 hours. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller strikes have taken place alongside them.

Eleftherotypia, a left-leaning daily similar to Guardian, has been occupied by its staff, unpaid for seven months, and now turns out a “Workers’” edition. A hospital in Kilkis, starved of cash, has been placed under occupation by its workers. Steel workers at the Halyvourgia plant have now struck for well over 200 days. In smaller towns, consumer groups organise directly with farmers to carve out supermarket middlemen. No section of Greek society is unaffected by the crisis; few are not also attempting some form of protest.

Golden Dawn, a formerly utterly marginal Nazi grouping, has moved to exploit the turmoil. Its anti-immigrant rhetoric – and, frequently, disgustingly, actions – have acted as a lightning rod for at least some Greeks, although there is little evidence of deeper support for its programme. A GOP poll suggests that 27% of its voters claimed to have done so principally because of its stance against migrants, while only 4.8% identified themselves as “far right”.

There are no grounds for complacency, not least given Golden Dawn’s role in leading an anti-migrant pogrom at Patras, and in attacking the offices of leftist organisations. Ominously, the organisation appears to enjoy widespread support amongst the police. Half of Athens police force are estimated to have voted for the Nazis, and, despite a warrant for his arrest, Ilias Kasidiaris, the MP who assaulted two leftist parliamentarians during a televised interview, remains at large, the police apparently unable to locate him. But at the present time the threat of Golden Dawn is constrained by the polarisation between ND and Syriza.

The mainstream right is suffering. After their rout of 2009, and in the midst of a debt crisis for which many of even their natural supporters hold them directly responsible, New Democracy has had an awkward job in presenting itself as a credible alternative government. ND pushed, somewhat absurdly in hindsight, for an overall majority in the elections of 6 May, insisting that not only would taxes be cut, but that borrowing could be reigned in – largely on the basis of unspecified further reductions in the public sector workforce and hacking away that eternal (if elusive) bugaboo of the right, red tape.

After this opportunistic hodgepodge failed to convince, Antonis Samaras – minister for culture until 2009, party leader thereafter – has opted to terrorise his own side, warning in lurid terms of the calamity that will befall Greece should Syriza win the election. Fear may be the only card ND have left. They remain damaged goods, and Samaras inspires little confidence. “I have to vote for a complete idiot,” as one reluctant ND supporter put it to the Financial Times.

The movement in society thus far has been to the left, forcing the pace of the crisis and heralding a break in the political order. This places it in direct confrontation with the austerity regime. Syriza is today the sharpest political expression of this confrontation.

But the movement has not, yet, been faced with the wider questions of economic reconstruction. That would draw in the issue of Greece’s euro membership. There is little serious prospect, over the longer term, of Greece staying a euro member: to remain so is to remain in trapped in the Troika’s austerity death spiral, chasing an accelerating debt burden with an economy daily less able to meet it. But the question of Greece’s membership has not yet been driven into the political confrontation with austerity.

A fine balance has instead emerged, between a population unwilling to risk exit, and euro members unwilling to risk allowing them. The Syriza proposal to demand an end to austerity while maintaining euro membership – holding out the threat of exit if new terms are not met – can function as long as this balance holds. Further decay in the economic situation, either within Greece or without, will unsettle it. Until it is unsettled, the question of Greece’s membership or otherwise of the euro will remain a secondary question.

17 June elections

The last published polling before the election puts Syriza with a clear, if not decisive, lead over its pro-austerity rivals, New Democracy. Syriza has consolidated and built upon its previous support, now polling as high as 31.5%, while ND have fallen back slightly to 25.5%. Pasok has disintegrated to 13%.

These are just opinion poll figures. But translated into Parliamentary representation, these figures give Syriza 134 seats – benefiting from the 50-seat bonus rule – 68 for New Democracy, and 36 for Pasok. With the support of (perhaps) the Democratic Left (Dimar), they should be able to form a coalition government with a working Parliamentary majority.

The situation is sharply polarising between Syriza and ND, with smaller parties largely squeezed out. Of the main parties on the left, Dimar has maintained its support at around 7.5%, while the Communist Party (KKE) has dropped from 8.67% on 6 May to 5% and Antarsya, the “anticapitalist front”, has been polling at around 0.5%. Support is now transferring sharply to Syriza as a credible future party of government. Recent polling shows voters from other parties now saying they will shift to Syriza in large numbers, including 40% of Antarsya’s support, 24% of the KKE’s and 11% of Pasok’s, along with a very substantial transfer from the 20% who voted for more minor parties last time round (bottom chart).

To the right, a similar situation prevails. ND has rallied those forces seeking to continue with austerity measures and EU bailouts, resulting in a squeeze for the “anti-austerity” right Independent Greeks and the Nazis of Golden Dawn, down to 4.4% from 6.97% in the election.

Syriza’s rise has provoked a predictable – if sometimes at least imaginative – hysteria. A deal between Tsipras and former Pasok minister Louka Katseli is greeted by a leading Greek daily as the arrival of “THE SOVIET”. An outgoing Pasok minister of the interior threatens “civil war” and “armed gangs with Kalashnikovs” should the Greek vote go awry. IMF Director and noted tax-dodger Christine Lagarde, her evidently tiny grasp of historical or personal irony overwhelmed by the loftiness of her vantage point, chides the selfish Greeks for dodging taxes while children starve in Niger.

Thus far, the caterwauling appears to have had little direct impact on Syriza’s support. The polls speak for themselves, but Syriza membership is also growing, while assemblies in working-class districts attract significant numbers. In Keratera, just north of Athens, locals have spent the last year campaigning, successfully, against the construction of an incinerator. When Tsipras spoke there in the 2006 election campaign, he attracted a crowd of 17. This week, around 2,000 turned out to hear him.

The pattern is repeated elsewhere, with over 1,000 turning up to local meetings and rallies in working class districts of Athens. The presence of these assemblies and mass meetings can act as substantial barrier to the evident risks of backsliding from Syriza’s leadership – if Syriza members are there to argue for it.

That leadership has held up well to date. The offer of a “national unity” government and immediate political power was dangled, tantalisingly, after the 6 May elections. The Greek bosses’ organisation, the Federation of Greek Enterprises, proposed opening the door to Syriza, “great winners of the election”. Intense international pressure was applied from all quarters. Syriza, to its credit, did not buckle then. Tsipras continues to insist that the tearing up the Memorandum is “non-negotiable”, and that any attempt at a deal would be like “negotiating with hell”.

Syriza’s offer of an anti-austerity government was rejected out of hand by the KKE, whose leaders have become increasingly vehement in their verbal attacks. KKE leader Aleka Papariga used a speech last week to denounce Syriza as a “new social democratic party” and, citing Syriza’s widespread US media coverage, claimed it was part of a US plot to covertly “break up Europe”, thus weakening Germany and allowing the US to move against Russia.

Antarsya, meanwhile, argue that while Syriza victory would be welcome, they must stand against it, to force it leftwards. The evidence for this proposition – in a tight, polarised election – is extremely limited. It is hard to see how the minuscule electoral support Antarsya now enjoys would exert any meaningful influence on the course of events. Of far greater weight against the pull to the right on Syriza are the mobilisations of its members and supporters across the country.

A crisis in three parts: Greek society

There are three levels to the crisis. The first is in Greece itself, where the economic, political and social turmoil has produced (in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase) an “organic crisis” of the whole of society, in which whole classes become detached from their traditional political representatives, and old forms of rule and order begin to break down. Pasok is the principal victim of this: what makes the break achieved by Syriza so decisive is precisely that it is a breach to the left, on a national scale, with an historic party of the left – a social-democratic organisation, of a recognisably similar hue to Britain’s Labour Party or Germany’s SPD.

Pasok was always somewhat distinct from other European social democratic formations, reflecting Greece’s very particular history. It was formed in 1974, after the collapse of the colonel’s dictatorship, and came to power just seven years later. Its links to the organised working class, via the trade unions, have always been weaker than those of parties elsewhere, and its core support, at least initially, has been strikingly middle class. In its early years, it was dependent to an exceptional degree on the personal authority of Andreas Papandreou, founding member and father of the less exalted George Papandreou, rather than its largely passive membership.

These peculiar features help account for the rapidity of the break to the left that has now occurred in Greece. But they do not make it a break sui generis. It fits into a pattern seen also, on a smaller, less dramatic scale with the Front de Gauche or Die Linke; or, shrinking the scale still further, George Galloway’s nonetheless important victory in Bradford.

Pasok members and supporters have shifted, rapidly, from Pasok to Syriza. Pasok’s limited trade union base is subject to similar pressures. Nothing like this has occurred in a European country essentially since those social-democratic parties were founded. Where Communist Parties substituted for more traditional social democrats, as in France and Italy, their collapse and disintegration through the 1980s and 1990s aided the right wing of more conventional social democracy. Greece has broken that mould, and the manner of its breaking points the way to further polarisation. It is entirely correct that, at this juncture, all those on the radical left should be in Syriza and fighting to elect a government of the anti-austerity left. That is where the political question for the working class now lies, and how it can best be answered.

The form of rule established in Greece after the end of the dictatorship hinged on Pasok. Its first government, in 1981, extended and enlarged upon the initial steps taken by the conservative administration installed as the Colonels left the scene in 1974. A feeble welfare state was hugely expanded, alongside education, the creation of a national health service, and the establishment of secure public sector employment on a wide scale.

Pasok, alternating with ND for government office, likewise oversaw and profited from the luxuriant growth of patronage and corruption, while maintaining the same extraordinary unwillingness to allow both the Greek rich and, in practice, major chunks of the national economy to skirt around minimally acceptable standards of tax collection. Pasok, despite the presence of both a comparatively large and unreconstructed Communist Party and a significant far-left, maintained and developed an effective political hegemony on large layers of the Greek population.

Greece’s entry into the euro in 2002, whatever the rhetoric (as elsewhere in Europe) of economic transformation, did not materially alter the outline of the settlement. Indeed it could be presented as a triumph of the system, apparently rising living standards marching in step with rising growth, and the expansion of Greek finance across the Balkans. It is the unwinding of this euro-fuelled expansion that has provoked a crisis of the entire post-dictatorship settlement. It is in this organic crisis that the shape of Greek society will be settled, with the first step taken on Sunday 17 June.

The left in government

Syriza is poised to win the election and so take that first step. A week is, in these days, an eternity to crawl through before ballots open. Whatever polls say now, much can happen to remove Syriza’s lead in the final days: more international pressure; a sudden economic upset elsewhere in Europe; a loss of confidence amongst newly radicalised layers of the population in Syriza itself.

The formation of an anti-austerity government will be only the first step. It is afterwards that the profound difficulties start. The Greek banking system is all but insolvent, dependent on an ECB drip to function. The Greek state has never been effectively able to police its own rich, and hopes of enforcing new taxes seem slim. Greece’s economy continues to spiral downwards. There is little doubt that the rich of Greece, and international capital, will rush for the exit if Syriza wins. The flight of capital and an effective investment strike, depriving the country of funds, are close to a certainty.

So if victory is difficult, government will be immensely more so. Holding Syriza’s leadership to its promises in dire circumstances will be the essential task for the left. That requires not just organisation to deliver a victory for Syriza, but a clear understanding that extra-Parliamentary organisation will be necessary to prevent the very obvious pressures overwhelming it. The Greek working class is, by some distance, the most combative in Europe. That powerful threat against Greece’s ruling class must be maintained, and used if necessary.

That stricture applies with all the more force should a pro-austerity coalition or, as seems more likely than this, no stable government emerges following elections. It is quite possible that the immediate task will be to arrange demonstrations and all possible popular pressure in favour of an immediate end to the Memorandum and its austerity regime.

This is the point at which strictly secondary demands before 17 June can come to the fore. A Syriza-led government that was committed to breaking the Memorandum, and suspending debt payments, would – whatever its intentions – be confronted in short order by the Greece’s membership of the euro. Either a political confrontation would be forced on it by the European powers, or – more likely – an economic confrontation: a major bank run, accompanied by capital flight abroad. In either case, the demand to stage a democratic and orderly exit from the euro would move from being propaganda to being a demand that addresses immediate needs.

Capital and exchange controls would be required, with banks closed temporarily and reopened under state ownership. Recapitalisation of the banking system – filling banks with currency, impossible in the euro without ECB approval – could take place. These are measures that can only be imposed by direct government action. But to take them would move that government substantially beyond the accepted rules of the game for Greek and European capitalism. The political crisis would sharpen.

A Syriza government would be one formed under sufferance. The instability in Greek society will have produced an outcome parliamentary regimes are established to forestall: the formation of a government that directly opposes itself to the perceived needs of capital. The tensions this will produce are palpable. They will be broken in one direction or another – for capital, or for working people. Mass democracy and organisation from below are the only reliable means by which the balance can be shifted to their favour. That means maintaining and broadening the mobilisations against austerity that have already taken place, from mass assemblies to strikes.

A European crisis

The second level of the crisis is that taking place across Europe, in which Greece is the focal point. The Greek banking system is essentially insolvent, now reduced to dependency on the ECB’s “Emergency Liquidity Assistance” to continue functioning. The Greek state is close to running out of its own cash, and perhaps as early as the end of June will not have the funds needed to pay its own employees. Greece’s exit from the euro, short of some miracle, looks under these circumstances to be only a matter of time.

But this is not, and has never been, solely a Greek crisis. Spain, the fourth-largest economy in the eurozone, is receiving a banking bailout – hailed as yet another “resuce” for the eurozone, like so many before it. Spain’s property bubble has shrivelled, following the retreat of the great tide of credit that flowed into peripheral Europe during the boom years. And as the bubble shrivelled – still, perhaps, with some way to shrink – its banking system has been left exposed, unable to meet the demands placed on it, with bank runs brewing as panicked depositors seek to withdraw their funds. As the economy has shrunk, so has the ability of the Spanish state to guarantee the credit-worthiness of Spanish banks, state tax revenues collapsing just as unemployment pushes back up towards 20%.

This is no crisis of excessive spending. Spain, like stricken Portugal, Ireland and Italy, ran a surplus on its government spending in the boom years, right up until the collapse of 2008. It is the chronic fragility of Europe’s banking system, allowed off the leash during the boom, that is at fault; that, plus the similar weakness of a single currency built around multiple economies.

Trade surpluses in the north of the eurozone, particularly Germany, were recycled by Europe’s banks as debt for the countries of the periphery – private debt for Spain, Ireland and Portugal; public debt for Greece. Enormous loans appeared on the balance books of European banks. As weak economies cannot now repay those loans, those banks face collapse.

Since October 2009, when Greece’s then-Pasok government revealed the scale of its government debts to be far larger than previously admitted, Europe has spiralled downwards. Bailouts, tied to austerity, drive deeper recession; deeper recession threatens default, either be states or banks; a banking crisis drives bailouts, and further austerity. The Spanish bailout is merely another turn of the screw.

Each twist brings a serious crash a little closer. It cannot be guaranteed that the backstops in place to deal with a crash – the European Financial Stability Facility and the new European Stability Mechanism – would be able to cope with a widespread collapse: not least because those paying into the funds, like Spain, are those who will also be requesting assistance. The worsening severity of the predicament is forcing a choice on the EU: either to allow the disintegration of the euro, with its unknown economic consequences, or to drive hard at a closer union, as Angela Merkel now suggests.

To allow the euro to fall apart, however orderly an exit might be staged, is to risk reversing the steady march of integration, continuous since the Treaty of Rome. But to pull the EU still closer together would require aligning the differing interests of its competing member states, and enforcing the transfer of at least a portion of their taxation and spending powers to a new, central authority. This is something that the EU and its predecessor institutions did not manage in benign economic circumstances, and something that looks still more unlikely in the dire situation today.

Nor should it be allowed to happen. The consequences for democracy of a dramatic centralisation will be severe. It is fundamental to our conception of liberal democracy, and has been since the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, that those who apply taxes and make spending decisions must also be accountable via parliament. And it stretches credibility to assume that Merkel and the other European powers will allow this centralisation of control to mean continued support for public spending and welfare states across the continent.

Quite the opposite. The fiscal compact, signed before Christmas last year, showed the line of future travel: making austerity legally binding on its signatories. Euro-Keynesianism is plainly not on the cards. Francois Hollande’s snub to Alexis Tsipras on his recent visit to Paris made this abundantly clear, with Hollande and the Socialist Party simply refusing to meet Syriza’s leader. The message is simple: at best, we may get some soft-soaping of austerity – a few lines about “growth” in the treaty, or some extra cash for the European Investment Bank. But the EU will not alter direction.

Syriza, then, stands in a critical position. Greece is the weakest link in the European chain. Breaking the austerity drive here means breaking the forced march, across the continent, to smash up welfare states, remove labour rights, and bear down on democracy. The direct challenge it already presents to the major powers will be magnified a hundredfold if it can form an anti-austerity government on 17 June.

A crisis of capitalism

The third layer of crisis is the deepest. This is a crisis not only of a country, or of finance, or of European institutions, although it is most acutely felt through them. It is a crisis of capitalism itself. Partly it reflects the continued decline of Old Capitalism – the major powers of the west, led by the US. But even the economies of the New Capitalism may now be sliding into the buffers: China has spooked markets with an unexpected interest rate cut, hinting at trouble brewing. Across the globe, further recessions are breaking out and a continued period of stagnation opens up.

Like other periods of chronic malaise in capitalist history – of which the Great Depression is paramount – this crisis will not be resolved through the usual channels. The self-correcting mechanisms of the market are failing. The institutions designed to support them – from central banks to nation states, up to transnational institutions like the EU – are sclerotic.

The malaise will only be broken, as in past years, by political action: breaking old institutions, creating new ones. That political contest will, in the end, be resolved to the benefit of workers and their allies, or against them. At its peak, it becomes a direct contest over the form of the state – and its power.

Serious breaches to the left are now opening up between European social democratic parties and their historic support in the working class. Syriza is the most dramatic example, followed closely by the Front de Gauche in France and Socialist Party in the Netherlands. These breaks, casting aside a tradition of support that has in many cases been there for most of the preceding century, open the route through which the political crisis may be resolved in the workers’ favour. New and revitalised forces to the right, with the Northern League and Front National in the lead, indicate the path to the alternative.

Conclusion

The stakes are now the highest they have been for decades – both for Greece, and for the rest of Europe. Not since the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 has a radical left been so central to events in any European country. What were once its esoteric concerns or hypothetical questions – support, or otherwise, for left governments; demands to nationalise banks – have become the central, pressing concerns of daily political life.

It is essential that this opportunity is not missed. The radical left across Europe should, without exception, support Syriza and march with those radicalised workers who now follow the political lead it has set. But we must also know that no left government – formed in these circumstances, operating under a kind of sufferance – can, by itself, resolve the crisis. An extra-parliamentary mobilisation will be necessary, with the working class at its centre: supporting a left government when it ends austerity and defaults on its debt; applying the necessary pressure when it buckles; building its own forms of organisation and democracy on the ground.

Practical solidarity matters. The newly-formed Greek Solidarity Campaign is one part of this. But the main enemy is at home – particularly so, for the major financial power of Britain. Threads of debt connect Athens to the City of London. Actions taken here against austerity, and in pulling together the kind of mass mobilisations that Greece has seen, both undermine the austerity regime here and weaken its resolve elsewhere.

The TUC has set 20 October for a further anti-austerity demonstration. This can act as a key focus for the national movement, pulling in all the separate strands of opposition. The first steps towards creating that focus can be taken now. The Coalition of Resistance meeting on 19^th June is one of them. A mass movement against austerity remains to be built.