Europe's Fault Lines by Elizabeth Fekete

Author:Elizabeth Fekete
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

Southern Europe: The Legacy of Dictatorship

In southern Europe, grassroots movements organising around different aspects of the social crisis provided the groundswell for the electoral breakthrough of radical parties such as Syriza (2013) in Greece and Podemos (2015) in Spain. While the traditional centre ground of Spanish and Greek politics shows signs of distress, an examination of how the recent past impacts on the present suggests that national elites in both countries may adopt underhand, undemocratic methods to keep power.

After the Second World War, a nexus of police, military and oligarchs ushered in the southern European dictatorships that only came to an end in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1970s. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which still has eighteen MPs in the Hellenic parliament (despite the mass arrests of its leadership on criminal charges), appears to have enjoyed the patronage of Greece’s powerful shipbuilders. The party’s penetration of the police and the military is one sign that, in Greece, the diaplekomenoi (‘entangled ones’) are pushing through again. Spain does not have the electoral equivalent of Golden Dawn, but the centre-right Popular Party is pushing through authoritarian laws. The 2015 Citizens’ Security Law (popularly known as the gagging law or citizens’ repression law) massively strengthened the powers of the police, who can now disband virtually any form of public protest, as well as fine those who afford them ‘a lack of respect’. The Popular Party, which drafted the legislation, has been accused of taking Spain a step back towards dictatorship. Much of its support lies in traditional ultra-Catholic national elites, nostalgic for Franco.

Once again, an analysis of economic weaknesses in the context of German hegemony is crucial to an understanding of the defensive nationalism of old elites in Spain and Greece. Wolfgang Streeck has described how the Mediterranean countries developed a model of capitalism in which growth was driven not by exports and international competitiveness (as in Germany and much of northern Europe), but mainly by domestic demand, with borrowing and public expenditure used to stimulate growth.18 The rigorous monetary policy of Germany does not suit the economies of southern Europe, which require monetary flexibility. But, a country having joined the Eurozone and accepted the convergence criteria, one model had to yield to another. The poorly regulated Spanish financial sector, which recklessly financed the rapid expansion of the banking sector through international borrowing, has been in deep trouble since the collapse of the property market and the bankruptcies of major companies in 2008. But Spain, the fourth-largest Eurozone economy, and therefore too big to fail, was spared the gruelling treatment meted out to Greece, receiving a €41 billion bailout under generous terms via the European Stability Mechanism.

The terms of Greece’s third bailout (which came without any debt relief), laid out in the Third Memorandum, were, in contrast, draconian. Stigmatised, punished and reduced to penury, the Greek people woke up to the nightmare of a sovereign parliament dispossessed of power within a debtors’ prison. ‘Greece is now a semi-protectorate: a bigger Kosovo’, argues

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