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Anastasia Balezdrova

As SYRIZA leader and Greece’s current Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras promised, the first bill submitted for voting by his office purposes to "alleviate those affected by the humanitarian crisis." The measures described in it alone would require over 150 million euro. In parallel, the government has already provided food allowances for the employees of the Public Power Corporation DEI and as GRReporter has announced, it is planning to re-launch the former state broadcaster ERT and reinstate to work all of its more than 2,600 employees.

At the same time, the financial team of the cabinet is collecting "euro by euro" the nearly 1.5 billion euro required for the payment of part of the loan from the International Monetary Fund. According to the majority of commentators, March will be crucial for the situation in Greece, since it is not excluded that it remains without money, being unable to pay salaries and pensions at its end.

We discussed the possible alternatives and developments for Greece in the coming months if it has no funding with Greek writer and political analyst Sakis Moumtzis.

Mr. Moumtzis, we see that the first bill of the new cabinet, which is submitted to parliament, aims at dealing with the so-called "humanitarian crisis" and it is expected that its cost will amount to almost 200 million euro. At the same time, the government is promising to re-launch the state broadcaster ERT, it has already given additional benefits to the employees at the Public Power Corporation. Where will it find the money for all this and for the payment of its obligations to the lenders?

If it does not obtain any assistance from the European Union, it simply will not find the money. This is clear. It will not find it either in March or in April.

Therefore, the government is interested in being able to vote in parliament some bills that will determine its ideological profile. Its aim is to consolidate its position among the voters.

Why has this happened? It has happened because in no way can this cabinet complete the latest monitoring of the rescue programme in June. Therefore, my personal opinion is that there will be early elections by the end of May. There is no way for the European Union to give Greece the tranche of 7.2 billion euro which it needs to pay off the huge maturities of the bonds that are due in July and August without bending the government. This is not only Germany’s position. The ratio in the euro zone is 17 to 1, which is why the government is now building up its "popular" profile.

I must say that Greece’s European partners do not aim at it exiting the euro zone. What they are trying to do is to bend the government in terms of politics, to drive it to throw Kammenos’ party out of the coalition and for the far-left wing of SYRIZA to unite with other parties like Potami and PASOK.

As for the "humanitarian crisis", it is certainly an exaggeration. 500,000 out of 1.4 million unemployed today were unemployed before the crisis. They were the constant unemployment rate in Greece, or 8-10%. The percentages to today's 25% are due to the crisis and we are talking about former employees of private companies. According to statistics, more than 300,000 companies have closed down since the beginning of the crisis. Currently, the private economy is shrinking. And when things settle down by an agreement, hopefully this will happen soon, it will restart from a position that is much more severe than in 2012. The damage to the real economy from December, when early elections were announced, to the present day are enormous.

What would the outcome of these possible elections be?

If events continued to develop as before, probably SYRIZA would win with a big margin.

But if some "incidents" occurred, such as the introduction of a limit on the money that could be withdrawn from ATMs for some time, as was the case in Cyprus 2 years ago, then people would find out that they would be involved in an affair, despite their reluctance.

The vote for SYRIZA on 25 January stated, "Negotiate, but whatever you do, we want to stay in the euro." When the majority of citizens who voted for SYRIZA find out that the pace of negotiations can lead to exiting the euro zone, their voting behaviour will change.

Isn’t it logical for their behaviour to change anyway, when it turns out that SYRIZA will not be able to keep its campaign promises, because it cannot obtain the money required for this purpose from anywhere? How would you explain the forecasted victory in the possible elections in May?

The time until then is very short, it is less than three months. If the incident I described does not occur and the situation remaina unchanged, and the government fails to find any money or obtains a loan from another country such as China, it might receive 3-4 billion euro in exchange for something; we must not forget that the Chinese want to redeem Thessaloniki port.

But in this case, the government would violate the European Union conditions. It is not possible for a country to receive such a loan without the approval of Brussels.

That is, it will be unilateral action. And Greece is committed to refrain from such actions under the agreement with the lenders.