#mera25

(Also there's no 5% barrier in the European election so voting for small parties holds more weight.)

ATHENS – “This is no time for sadness, we are too pissed off,” the head of an intensive care unit at a hospital in my Thessaloniki constituency told me recently. Along with his staff of dedicated doctors and nurses, he had not slept the previous night, which he evocatively described as “our Night of St. Bartholomew.” I asked why he was fuming. “I lost a 43-year-old who could have been saved,” he replied angrily, adding: “But it is the lies, the damned lies, and the propaganda that drive me mad.”

Greece had a good first wave of COVID-19, but the second wave caught the government utterly unprepared. Insiders at hospitals in northern Greece, like the ICU chief I spoke to, now compare their situation to northern Italy’s in early spring.

But little information about the current horrors seeps into the public domain. One reason is that government-appointed hospital managers threaten staff with nasty repercussions if they speak to the media. Another is that during the pandemic, the media have become fully dependent on large grants that the Ministry of Information (Orwell lives!) dispenses at the minister’s whim.

DiEM25 condemns the militarisation of the Greek-Turkish border, the European Union’s violation of every principle of humanism, the instrumentalisation of refugees both by the Turkish regime and Brussels, the abandonment of Greek islanders to their own devices – the list goes on and on.

DiEM25 calls for an immediate opening of all borders. The Greek-Turkish one and, more importantly, all borders within the EU. It is the only way the humanitarian crisis can be dealt with rationally and humanely, without resorting to military solutions under a cloud of hysteria.

MeRA25 ON THE SITUATION ON THE GREEK-TURKISH BORDER

A virus and the inevitable escalation of refugee inflows from Turkey were enough to heighten xenophobia and cause the right-wing Greek government to embark upon a large-scale campaign of disorienting Greece’s public opinion – so as to mask the reality that the much heralded economic recovery was a mirage given the continuing troika program of attacking labour, fiscal austerity and fire sales of public property.

The fear of others’, be it the Chinese or the wretched refugees, is being instrumentalised so that the people of Greece can no longer discern the true causes of their continuing asphyxiation – that is, the continuing surrender to the troika policies and the permanent subjugation to the EU’s irrational and inhumane policies regarding refugees, the EU-Turkey, EU-Libya relations etc.

Yes, the COVID-19 epidemic is a worry. Yes, the exploitation by President Erdogan of Turkey of refugees as part of his geostrategic gaming (i.e. varying the number of refugees to cross to Greece with a view to increasing pressure on the EU to side with him in Syria) constitutes a violation of basic human rights.

However, neither COVID-19 nor the refugees justify the motivated hysteria that Greece’s troika-run regime is cultivating so as to escape its responsibility for the decade-long asphyxiation they have brought to the people of Greece.

DiEM25 and MeRA25 will not allow this new Troika-Nationalist Alliance to pull the wool over our people and to bolster xenophobia – whose end result will be to worsen the Greek’s circumstances and rob Greece of its capacity to appeal to progressives across the world.

Klaus Regling is “very sad” as a result of the “breach of privacy” by Yanis Varoufakis’ audio recordings of the Eurogroup meetings.

Of course he is sad, given that if citizens could hear and see what he said and did, Mr. Regling would find it very difficult to stay employed in any European country, including his own.

If he was scrutinised by the public, would he ever have dared to recommend to a minister of a fellow European nation that he should withhold all pension payments so that his country could pay back an instalment to the IMF?

If he was scrutinised by the public, would European citizens have not noticed that Mr. Regling is not simply a cynical bureaucrat, but an inept one at that?

When he speaks off-script, even when the camera is pointed at him, Mr Regling makes basic technical mistakes. For example, in the most recent documentary of George Avgeropoulos, AGORA II, he said that Italy and Belgium have managed a primary surplus of over 3% per year for decades – something that, with only some basic research, the documentary-maker revealed to be false.

This is the reason why people like Mr. Regling are terrified of the eyes and ears of citizens: public scrutiny.

“You can hear Schaeuble’s voice saying that the profits from Greek bonds he wanted for the German budget,” Yanis Varoufakis revealed in an interview ahead of the controversial release of his secret recordings from the Eurogroup sessions in the first half of 2015.

“Don’t you want to hear Schaeuble speaking about the ECB’s profits from the Greek bonds?” he said in an interview with Skai TV late on Thursday.

Stressing that the promise to Samaras’ government in 2012 was that the profit would return to Greece, Varoufakisrevealed that then German finance minister Wolfgang Schaueble said during a Eurogroup meeting: “No, I need the for my budget. I have no obligation to pass it on to German citizens so that they understand what their own finance minister is doing in their own name. There is no democracy without transparency.”

He revealed that then Eurogroup head Jeroen Disslebloem had threatened with closure of the banks already at the first  meeting in February 2015.

He pointed out that the lenders”took back what they had promised” and “started to lie,” adding that he was expecting “a war.”

he revealed that IMF’s officer in charge of Greece Poul Thomsen and he had agreed on the Value Added Tax issue. “While we were preparing the announcements, he took everything back demanding [a new deal?] on Labor issues,” Varoufakis said adding “that’s lack of word of honor.”

The world has to learn all these things during the negotiations, it has to hear “how we argued when they were giving deadlines to Greece.”

He accused the EU lenders of cheating saying “they never went to the meetings with proposals, but they would come out and claim I was going there with proposals.”

This is what the world has to learn. They had never come up with suggestions and they went out and said that I was going there without suggestions. This is what the world has to learn. You have to hear how they were cheating on the ultimatums they were giving to Greece, “he said, and said if there would be any legal implications for their publication: