One year after Greek bailout, aftershocks rock EU

BRUSSELS, (AFP) - One year on from Greece’s bailout request, Europe has overcome the shock of finding a black hole the size of the Aegean in its finances -- but is only just waking up to new political aftershocks.

After Greece bowed to the inevitable on April 23 last year and asked its    European Union partners for help, Greeks took to the streets to protest the austerity that followed the bailout, some lashing out at banks with firebombs.

Sporadic violence followed demonstrations in other countries too as deep public sector spending cuts and tax rises hit a public angry that their taxes bailed out banks that just as quickly returned to big bonus payments.

What politicians fear now is being turfed out in a voter backlash against the EU and the austerity squeeze it demands in return for its help.

The most striking example was this week’s breakthrough vote by the True Finns party which stood largely on an anti-bailout platform.

Finland is among a handful of gold-plated EU economies picking up the tab for less successful neighbours and one in five Finnish voters deemed Portugal’s own request for a bailout earlier this month a step too far.

The danger as EU leaders haggle over a lasting safety fund to guard against future crises is that talks to set up a European Stability Mechanism (ESM) are now “taken hostage,” former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt told AFP.

Bailouts were considered taboo when the shared currency was introduced in the late 1990s.

But after Greece secured a 110-billion-euro ($160 billion) international rescue from EU partners and the International Monetary Fund, Ireland too landed a    67.5-billion euro handout before Christmas and now Portugal is locked in negotiations for 80 billion euros in loans.

The experts, meanwhile, maintain Greece’s debts of 340 billion will need to be re-structured, meaning some is either written off or payments delayed.

Greek citizens already have to work harder, doing longer hours for less pay and the state also has to sell off some of its crown jewels -- everything it owns bar the country’s iconic relics of antiquity.

The other part of the EU solution, alongside the post-2013 ESM, is a future regime to sanction states that repeatedly disregard common economic policy objectives, a policy eurosceptics such as the True Finns refuse to swallow.

“The fire brigade stands ready for future fires in the eurozone,” Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank Research analyst Nicolaus Heinen told AFP.

At the same time, Heinen said “the Finnish scenario is also conceivable in Germany,” where Chancellor Angela Merkel has already suffered reverses in regional elections.

Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the Eurogroup of finance ministers from the 17 currency partners, also sees potential dangers politically.

He sees “potential for an inherent conflict within the EU” because while interest rates and money supply are managed independently by the European Central Bank, state governments still control their own fiscal and macroeconomic policies.

“I don’t want to have a central government at the EU level,” said Juncker, Europe’s longest-serving national leader.

“But if you don’t have a central government ... you have to have common rules that have to be followed by each and every member state.”Ireland’s government was swept away by voters in a general election after calling in its bailout, primarily to repay debts run up by over-extended banks, while Portugal’s also fell before asking for aid.

As Portuguese parties compete for votes going into their June 5 election, Nigel Farage, the eurosceptic British MEP, says with heavy irony: “You can vote for any political party you like -- as long as it does what it is told” by the European Commission.