#tsirpas

It’s Judgment Day in Greece this Sunday. Greek voters will get their chance to say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to the international bailout terms.

Predicting the outcome of the referendum seems difficult, to say the least. A poll published in Ethnos newspaper on Friday gives the ‘yes’ vote 44.8 percent and the ‘no’ camp 43.4 percent. At the same time, the poll showed 74 percent in favor of staying in the eurozone, with just 15 percent looking for a return to a Greek national currency.

This is not simply a vote about bailout conditions, though. Greece’s membership of the eurozone and even of the European Union seem to hang in the balance and a ‘no’ vote could also turn into a serious challenge for the EU project as a whole.

No country has ever left the eurozone after joining it, and certainly no member state has ever left the European Union. “The EU is in deep crisis,” Belgium’s deputy prime minister Kris Peters said Thursday. “For the first time in its history, it’s in danger of becoming a less-close union.”

And as Stephen Fidler points out in the Wall Street Journal, “the European idea has been eroded elsewhere. The British have attacked the concept of “ever-closer union” enshrined in the EU treaties and have sought a renegotiation to take powers back to London.”

After the recent election triumph, the Conservative government of David Cameron has reaffirmed the promise to hold its own referendum by 2017 on British EU membership and, of course, the UK never joined the euro in the first place. A ‘no’ vote in Greece will certainly not discourage the eurosceptics in Britain.

It seems doubtful that the European Union could easily survive a Grexit and a Brexit within two years. The sad thing is that, different from many Britons, most Greeks don’t really want to leave the EU or even the eurozone, they just don’t want to suffer more austerity measures imposed for the country’s financial sins of the past.

There is a clear sense of panic that the dreaded Grexit might actually happen now and there are desperate appeals to vote ‘yes’ by former Greek leaders. 

Breaking years of self-imposed public silence, former conservative leader Costas Karamanlis implored his fellow citizens to stay with the European family. The EU may have made “serious mistakes” in the crisis, he said, but it was vital that Greece remained at Europe’s core.

Former Conservative premiers Antonis Samaras and Constantine Mitsotakis made similar appeals while current Socialist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has urged a ‘no’ vote in the referendum he suddenly announced on June 27. On Friday, he told Greeks that their country’s “presence in the EU was not at stake.”

Earlier in the week Tsipras tweeted:  “Come Monday, the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the #referendum w/better terms for the Greek people.”

The Greek people don’t seem convinced: many Greeks have been trying to take whatever funds they can get out of their bank accounts and neither EU nor IMF are likely to extend new loans after a ‘no’ vote.