From the Parthenon in Athens to the Temple of Poseidon on the southernmost tip of Attica and the once-great cities of Macedonia. This country is littered with reminders of the era when it dominated the ancient world.
But more striking still are the modern ruins: monuments to a time, barely a decade ago, when the Greek economic story was an optimistic one, before the depression that has turned this society inside out.
You see them dotted around the cities: abandoned buildings; empty office blocks. In most countries, evidence of the past seven years of economic crisis is often disguised. Here, they are never far from sight.
Of all those monuments, few are as sobering as the 2004 Olympics sites. The signposts directing you towards them were taken down long ago, but every so often you turn a corner and there they are: the beach volleyball stadium where the dirty sand is overgrown with weeds; the baseball venue where the concrete is starting to crumble away; the kayak course which has been unused for a decade.
The water in the kayak venue has long since dried up, but the fossils are instantly recognisable. Here is a set of air nozzles which created the currents, here are the banks over which the rapids would flow, and over there the conveyor belts which would transport the kayaks and canoes back to the starting line.
This was once a state-of-the-art complex, where 7,000 spectators crowded onto the amphitheatre-like seating. Now trees are growing in the stands, and the only signs of life are the hawks circling overhead and the occasional snake in the weeds.
There had been a plan, once, to turn the site into a massive water park with slides and pools for the Athens area but, like so much else here, the deal fell through some time ago. The tubes that would have contained the water flues are still here, scattered around the site.
Once upon a time this was Greece’s future; now it stands as a dispiriting reminder of its past.
In 2004 Greece was the coming man of Europe. Living standards were on the rise, unemployment was falling and, after many decades of economic deprivation, finally it seemed to have arrived in the developed world. The country was now a member of the single European currency. The Olympic venues were even finished in time for the games — not to mention the new airport, specially commissioned to ferry in all those athletes and dignitaries in and out of the country.
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The old Athens airport, shut down three years before the games, is still there today. Half of it was given over to some of the Olympic venues, the rest remains more or less as it was in 2001 — save for a decade and a half of corrosion.
The international and domestic terminals are empty, boarded up. There are still old, abandoned planes on the runway. It is an eerie sight: this airport used to be an international hub — famous as a staging post to the Middle East, notorious for the occasional hijackings that happened on its tarmac. Now the runway is deserted, overgrown, eerie.
This whole site — Hellinikon, as it is known — was supposed to have been sold off and redeveloped years ago. Sitting, as it does, in the suburbs of Athens, it is considered among the most expensive real estate in the country. However, the process to get it into private hands, a key part of the country’s bailout programme, has taken far longer than expected. Buyers have been hard to come by: why build apartments in a country where house prices have been on a dizzying slide? Why construct a shopping mall when Greeks struggle to afford their bills, let alone a trip out to a boutique?
Recently, though, a buyer was found. At last a development plan is underway. However, the election this weekend may well scupper the deal. Syriza, the political party which looks set to win the poll, has pledged to reassess and, potentially, cancel many of the asset sales agreed by the current government. The party’s charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, has specifically name-checked Hellinikon.
It is only the latest reminder of how political turbulence has further undermined the Greek recovery. It seems as if every couple of years there is a new administration with a new plan. Some of the ideas are good; some are bad. Few, so far, have worked.
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But in this election at least one thing is different. For most of the post-war period, Greek politics has been dominated by two parties: New Democracy on the centre-right and Pasok on the centre-left. These parties have, in turn, been dominated by three dynasties. The last prime minister, George Papandreou, was a son and and a grandson of a previous prime minister. Even the post-war prime ministers who were not from the three dynasties went to the same school as them.
Syriza is something else entirely: a new party, in truth a coalition of many left-wing parties. It is a broad and vocally diverse church, ranging from soft-left, champagne socialists to hard-bitten Marxists. At just 40, Tsipras is fresh-faced, he’s good-looking and charismatic (“He’s just the kind of guy my mum would want me to marry”, says one young Greek woman). He didn’t go to the same school as the rest of Greek prime ministers. He is, says my taxi driver, a “regular guy; he’s just like me.”
Most impressively, he has managed not just to corral Syriza into something resembling a single political party, but to transform it into a phenomenon. It is not just that the party leads all the polls — like Obama in 2008, it is seen as a byword for optimism and change. “Hope is coming… Greece is moving forward… Europe is changing.” The party’s election posters bespeak a new dawn.
The slogans are working. Speak to the families which have suffered in the past few years and they declare that the party is the only hope left for the country.
“With all my heart I am Syriza,” says Artistea Sourlis, “They have ten votes from my household alone.”
She and her husband Panagiotis are live in borrowed accommodation as they have just been evicted from their home. A few years ago he was a successful restaurateur in Crete, but he expanded his business at the wrong time, in 2009. Business dried up in the face of the recession; his creditors came calling. Soon enough he had to shut down the restaurant, leaving him hopelessly in debt. To cap things off, when he came to collect his pension, it wasn’t as big as he had been led to believe.
For someone who was a comfortable member of the middle class, the fall has been unbelievable.
“Never. Never. Never,” he says, when I ask whether he had ever expected to be where he is today.
“Our fridge used to be full to bursting,” says Artistea. Today the only things in there are three-day old morcels and some dishes given to them by well-meaning neighbours.
Chania, the capital of Crete, was once a thriving Venetian port. Today, the centuries-old warehouses along the harbour are abandoned. At night, you can hear echoes and cries of stray cats fighting inside. On the other side of town, up a narrow back alley, live the Popodakis family. Their home is cramped — one of the brothers sleeps on a mattress in the kitchen. The youngest brother, Andreas, works three jobs to support his family.
There is one bedroom that is unoccupied: the one that used to belong to their mother, Eftychia. Family life revolved around that front room, where the sons would gather throughout the year. A paraplegic, though she was fully conscious, she needed oxygen and a ventilator to survive. In the past two years, as electricity tariffs rose and property taxes dug into the family’s income, the brothers ran late with their power bills. Eventually, the company sent someone round to cut it off. He snipped the cord attached to a box at the front of the house. On the other side of the wall, Eftychia’s equipment stopped working. She died shortly afterwards.
“On the one hand I felt like crying but on the other, it was something you couldn’t comprehend,” says Sifis, the oldest of her sons. “You freak out knowing that a person has died because their life, ultimately, was worth 800 euros. The price tag placed on my mother’s life was 800 euros.”
Both of these tragic stories are spreading quickly around the island. In both cases, Syriza has been fast to respond. Among its policies are free electricity bills for the less well-off. It also plans to curtail the property taxes which have caused so much difficulty for many families.
However, when it comes to tax, the trouble in Greece has never been levying it, but collecting it. Avoidance is rife — particularly among the more well-off. So it is that in an era of austerity the yachts still populate the harbour in Athens. And with the snap election approaching, many Greeks have simply stopped paying taxes, delaying them until after the polls.
The upshot is that the country’s public finances have taken a dive before the elections. While one might assume there is nothing new about that (the country has faced a sizeable budget deficit for years), the reality is that its fiscal position had finally been improving. Last year, the country finally attained a primary surplus, meaning it could cut taxes or raise spending if it no longer had to keep up interest payments. Growth was beginning to return — in fact the International Monetary Fund expects Greece to grow faster than any major European nation save for Ireland this year. Or it did, before the recent slowdown.
The sad truth is that confidence and economic activity have slumped in the run-up to the elections. Why spend when you don’t know what kind of chaos lies ahead? Why keep all your cash in the country, for that matter? And the concern is that the election of a Syriza-led coalition would imply more chaos in the coming months.
Spend a bit of time listening to the party’s pronouncements and you understand why. The bailout is to be renegotiated. Interest payments are to be withheld. Everything is back on the table. And, most compellingly of all, austerity is to be scaled back. So many promises have been bandied around that it is occasionally difficult to keep track.
Some fear that if Syriza did come to power and try to renegotiate its programme, the Germans would refuse and it would trigger a chain reaction ending in its ejection from the single currency. And while there is no discounting this possibility, the reality is that a compromise is more likely. It may be a messy compromise; it may involve some nervous negotiations, but neither side is interested in causing a fight that would result in the disintegration of the eurozone.
Indeed, according to George Stathakis, one of Syriza’s most senior economic advisors, the party’s leading lights have already been talking to the Germans. There have been multiple missions to Berlin. They have met with advisors and with German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble himself. He says that a compromise is likely — “that’s what normally happens in Europe”.
Such concilatory words are a far cry from some of the more inflammatory claims about the party. However, they owe something to the fact that it rarely speaks with one voice. According to Stathakis there are about 30% of its members who believe that the country would be better off outside the euro. He believes they will be kept in check when the party is in government, though it is difficult to make any predictions about a movement which has never been anywhere near power.
Nonetheless, there is no way the rest of Europe can ignore what is happening in Greece at the moment. This is a country which has endured a collapse in economic activity greater than anything seen in the developing world in recent years. The country’s national income has fallen by a quarter. Unemployment is over 25% — 50%-plus for the under-25s. The average wage has fallen by a fifth since 2009, leaving it below the comparable rate in Slovenia. This was a depression greater, in almost every sense, than the one suffered by the United States in the 1930s.
However, the difficulties are not over yet. Greece is by no means ready to return to capital markets. As such, it remains reliant on funding from the Troika — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and European Commission. They still have yet to agree how or when to disburse the final €11bn of its bailout cash. That was supposed to be agreed by the end of March. Beyond that point, the country faces the prospect of running out of money. As the summer arrives, it needs to issue more debt to keep paying its public spending bills. Syriza has yet to provide a compelling case of how it will manage this without bailout cash.
And the Troika is getting impatient. They feel, with some justification, that Greece never really cooperated. Whereas other countries (Ireland, Portugal) were proactive, carried out the reforms that were necessary, attempted to modernise their economies, Greece dragged its heels. The average retirement age has actually fallen in recent years rather than rising, as the IMF had suggested. The government has tended to implement reforms only at the last minute and only under duress.
Then again, unlike in Ireland, there is no public appetite for austerity. Some 95% of Greeks say the country is heading in the wrong direction, according to a Pew survey. Which raises another worry, one we also see elsewhere in Europe. The mainstream political parties have been marginalised — discredited by the financial crisis. In Greece, as in Spain, the people, tired of austerity, are turning to new voices not tainted by association with the past seven years of miserable policymaking. Some of these parties may well succeed, but it is alarming, occasionally, just how much faith people are putting in them. If they fail — what then? The worry is that people would turn to other, less palatable extremists. Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party, have become a significant force in Greek politics. Although they are only polling at around 5%, some fear that those surveyed may not be honest about their voting intentions. They worry that Golden Dawn could gain third place in the elections.
Either way, no-one — not even New Democracy’s own MPs and advisors — expects them to retain control of Parliament. A new era will soon begin in Greek politics. Whether it ends in disaffection or delight remains to be seen. Perhaps hopes are too high. Perhaps not. As Panagiotis Sourlis says: “They only have to change things a tiny bit. A tiny bit. That’s all we want.”
