Tagged structural reforms

More democracy, not technocracy, Mr. Draghi

By Clément Fontan

On 16 March 2015, ECB chairman Mario Draghi delivered a speech at the Süddeutsche Zeitung Finance Day. Eurozone economic governance reforms were the topic of the day. The structural reforms proposed by Mr. Draghi are ideologically loaded and the creation of new institutions might worsen the democratic troubles in Europe rather than solve them. The ECB and other EU institutions have already been exploiting the financial crisis as an opportunity to implement structural reforms in a coercive manner for more than four years. The results have been worrying, to say the least.

Chaos has always been a scenario for Greece, ever since the bailout. The mix was there: a bankrupt country, crippling unemployment, violent riots, weekly strikes, neo-Nazis in parliament, a rapid decline in living standards that turned into a humanitarian emergency. Outside Greece, in public analysis and private conversations, the possibility of the destabilisation of democracy came up every now and then, some kind of coup that would send the country to the extreme left or right. For those who indulged in these cassandric predictions the rise of leftist Syriza was a vindication: surely this is a rogue party, self-positioned on the Radical Left, with communist roots, and a populist rhetoric? Discussion of the Greek problem has always involved a degree of fear-mongering, which is useful in the manipulation of public opinion, but rather redundant in adding any nuance to our understanding of a foreign context. A useful key-phrase, if one truly wishes to understand Greece in crisis, is “structural reforms”.

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