The Effects of Greece’s Twin Crises
In less than a decade, Greece has been gut-punched twice, its weary population and battered government doubling over in worsening states of crisis. The first hit came in 2009, when the Greek economy collapsed. In the midst of the global recession, Greece was forced by its European creditors to undertake severe austerity measures designed to shrink the public sector and squeeze tax dollars from citizens. Suddenly, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and stuck at 25%, pensions were sliced to fractions of what they once were, and millions found themselves on the verge of poverty.
The second disaster struck in 2015, one social rather than economic. Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and violence (and some seeking economic opportunity) flooded into the Greek islands from the Middle East. Though they sought to simply move through Greece and towards wealthier countries further north, nearly 60,000 of them became trapped in the country when Western Europe slammed its borders closed. This frayed Greece’s social fabric; Greece was been almost entirely homogenous until an influx of Albanians in the 1990s, and had only become slightly more diverse since then.
The purpose of my research is to understand how the economic crisis has affected Greek sentiment towards foreigners, essentially trying to discover how these two crises have interacted. My fieldwork was focused on assessing how the impact of the financial crisis has varied across the country and how that variation relates to differences in sentiment towards foreigners, including refugees and immigrants. I also investigated how those sentiments related to the rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi party that in 2015 went from garnering less than one percent of the vote to winning nearly seven percent, making them one of Greece’s most popular parties.
Save those at the very top of the income scale, nearly every Greek has been affected by the economic crisis. When asked if they had been personally affected by the crisis, half the time my interviewees simply looked at me like I was crazy. Everyone has a story to tell. Artists, business owners, academics, engineers, service workers, retirees — all of my interviewees had been negatively and dramatically impacted. Some were forced to retire; others saw their salaries or pensions cut to a third of what they once were. Those with some wealth saw their taxes jump enormously, while property values disintegrated. “Of course everyone has been affected,” one interviewees said, confused that I was even asking the question.
Those in Athens, the capital which is home to roughly a third of the Greek population, feel that they have it worst. “In the villages they have their gardens,” one interviewee told me, echoing others. “In the islands they have the tourists.” In Athens, however, they felt they had nothing except dysfunctional and inadequate social services. The lack of government support, my interviewees told me, has fed immensely into the hostility that immigrants and refugees have seen in Greece, as well as the rise of the Golden Dawn party.
This could be because the Greek people are watching their own government refuse to spend money on them while it simultaneously devotes resources to the ‘outsiders’. In fact, being closer in proximity to any refugees, asylum seekers or migrants seemed to make Athenians more anxious and hostile towards them. “I have to pay for every medication I get,” said one health worker I spoke with. “The migrants we treat get everything for free.” Others echoed the feeling that, although they were receiving no help from the government, they saw asylum seekers getting every service for free. With a hint of outrage, one person told me, “They shut down homes they built for the refugees because they didn’t have air conditioning. I don’t have air conditioning. No one here has air conditioning. It’s ridiculous.”
Those I spoke with continually iterated the feeling that both the economic and refugee crises were yet more failures of the Greek state, further illustrations that it was unable to care for its own people. They linked the rise of hostility towards foreigners and the popularity of Golden Dawn directly to this anger at the government.
Like a throbbing vein, there is a deep-seated lack of trust in the government that runs through the country. “Crooks” said one interviewee. “All the same, no matter the party,” said another. “None care.” These disasters have challenged the Greek state and left the Greek people yearning for something different in an economic and political landscape that seems to have barely changed since the first crisis began.
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who allowed me to interview them for this research. I am also so grateful to my father, who acted as my translator for these interviews!
Written by Zoe Savellos ’18, political science major, FSI Large Research Grant recipient for summer 2017.
