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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Greek PM Who Was Fired For Referendum Bluff Tells Zero Hedge “It’s Different This Time””

Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.

Submitted by Tyler Durden.

Remember George Papandreou? The former Greek prime minister who in 2011 resigned just after he threatened to do what Tsipras shocking just did last night, i.e., hold a referendum?

If not, here is a reminder. From November 2011:

Greece will hold a referendum on a new European Union aid package intended to resolve the country’s debt crisis, Prime Minister George Papandreou says. Last week eurozone leaders agreed on a 100bn-euro loan (£86bn; $140bn) to Athens and a 50% debt write-off, in a effort to tackle the euro crisis.

Opinion polls in Greece show that most people do not support the austerity deal.

Mr Papandreou told a meeting of his governing Socialist party that Greek people would have the final say on the package, which is designed to reduce Greek debt by about 100bn euros. “The command of the Greek people will bind us”, he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

He set no date for the referendum, but indicated that it would be held after details of the deal have been finalised with the EU and the country’s creditors.

It is a big gamble for Mr Papandreou, who will argue that it is in Greece’s national interest to support the deal, the BBC’s Europe editor Gavin Hewitt reports.

It was a big gamble: less than a week later under Eurogroup pressure G-Pap was forced to resign.

George Papandreou, under intense pressure to end the political uncertainty engulfing Greece, is expected to formally resign immediately as prime minister after convening an emergency cabinet meeting.

Sunday’s extraordinary cabinet session would be the crisis-hit leader’s last as prime minister, a government spokesman confirmed as cross-party talks to form a national unity government continued behind closed doors for a second day. Papandreou would quit once personnel of the new administration had been agreed, he said.

“We just have to wait for the prime minister’s announcements in the cabinet,” veteran socialist Telemachos Hytiris told Greek state television. “Everything must be wrapped up within the day otherwise tomorrow it will be hell.”

Hell was delayed by 4 years after the Eurogroup managed to replace this particular “unruly” Prime Minister with two sets of technocrat governments both of which did everything in their power to not shake the boat and to perpetuate the status quo.

Until this morning, when in a shocking development, the referendum finally became a fact.

Which, paradoxically, also brought G-Pap out of his 4-year-long hibernation in order to slam Tsipras for having the guts to do what George was promptly talked out of back in November 2011 after a few very angry phone calls from the Eurogroup.

This was a level of hypocrisy we couldn’t simply let slide, and so we inquired:

Unexpectedly, the former PM decided to reply (just as Mario Draghi did back in 2013 a topic we will revert to shortly now that the Euro is finally shown to be “reversible” and Europe has run out of “political capital”) as follows:

At this point we realized that it would be difficult to fit into 140 characters that what Greece now has is a legitimate chance for a true beginning, not just a German bank bailout can-kicking as has been the case every single time in the past 5 years, one unburdened by the disaster that has been the Eurozone from day one for all but Germany, whose soaring Deutsche Mark over the past decade would have crushed the German “golden age” on the backs of million of peripheral European workers.

What Greece now has is the opportunity to take a huge, and long overdue, amount of pain now and for the next few years, at which point it can truly flourish and recover, thanks to the Drachma finally allowing the long-overdue external rebalancing. Without this, Europe would be assured a slow, miserable, painful death, “but at least it would have had the euro.”

To the Greeks: yes it will be a painful few years, but then the sustainable recovery will finally come. Look no further than Iceland as an example of a country that dared to say no to banker and oligarch interests.

So yes, George, it’s “not the same.” Now there is actual hope as some of the replies to G-Pap’s tweet reveal, all by people who are sick and tired of being lied to over and over by those in charge.

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