Greek voters swung to the once-marginal left-wing party after five years of punishing austerity measures demanded under €240 billion (about $336 billion Cdn) bailout deals threw hundreds of thousands of people out of work and left nearly a third of the country without state health insurance.What are the chances that Syriza will keep its word? (Here's hoping they do.)
What are the chance that Syriza and the Greek people will successfully replicate the same autonomist policies of the Bolivarians in Venezuela and elsewhere?
What are the odds that either the loathsome Barack Obama, or some European variant will not do to Greece what Obama did to Honduras?
What does this election result say for Canadians? Personally, I think Canadians turned to the NDP in clear-eyed disgust at the failure of the elite prescription for the economy. And that, furthermore, had harper not stolen the 2011 (and had we not acquiesced to that crime) Canada would have had an NDP-Liberal coalition government.
Even still, Mulcair's inexplicable move to place the NDP at the discredited centre of the political-economic spectrum, only served to alienate those voters who took a chance with the NDP. Now, faced with a choice between a grumpy, bearded Liberal and a dreamy, young-looking, Trudeau Liberal (backed by a cynically partisan attack-pug Elizabeth May of the Green Party), voters are split.
Canadians haven't gone through what the Greeks have gone through. We aren't as polarized and we don't have the strong leftist political culture. It's going to have to get a lot worse for us, and the Canadian left will have to do a lot of growing up, before we're able to pull-off something like what Syriza did.
2 comments:
I kinda liked Iceland's position. let the too big to fail banks failed. charged those they could and got on with rebuilding their country.
Greece has done the right thing. They don't owe the banks anything. Much of what happened in Greece, when they went from their own money to the Euro was supported and known by big banks. Now the banks can "eat" the difference. The Americans may want to "bail" out the too big to fail boys and girls, I say let them fail. The American economy would have been better off if the American government had bailed out the homeowners.
e.a.f.
The banksters own the politicians though. And most of the media. Too many of us act like they don't own the place and dream that a neo-liberal politician only needs to find his or her backbone to stand up to them.
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