With Greece poised to miss a debt payment to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday evening, the country’s leftist political leaders are asking European leaders one last time to loosen the austerity rules that have shattered the country’s economy and wrought havoc on the health and well-being of its people.
Months of negotiations to extend Greece’s current bailout on gentler terms have stalled, backing the Syriza political party that was elected to fight austerity into a corner. The country is set to vote this weekend on the most recent European proposal, which relies on sales taxes and further cuts to public programs. If “no” votes carry the referendum, Greece could finally be on its way out of the European Union after years of worry among commentators and economists about that possibility.
Protesters are preparing to rally in Athens Tuesday in support of the “yes” vote, after the opposing side gathered there Monday evening. The Guardian has relayed unconfirmed reports of Greek businessmen threatening to fire employees who don’t attend the “yes” rally.
The camps are split on what the vote will really mean for Greece. Business leaders whipping “yes” say that rejecting the austerity terms would make the country’s exit from the union inevitable. Syriza, which is urging a “no” vote, hopes that a populist rejection of the terms set by E.U. leaders would strengthen their negotiating position without forcing the country to leave the economic pact. Its leaders asked the E.U. on Tuesday for a new bailout with new terms instead of an extension of the current lending program with further budget cuts, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the continent would not consider any such deal before the votes are in from the Greek people.
But more cuts to public services may be untenable. Austerity mandates have already robbed Greece of a full fifth of its economy. The country’s gross domestic product is more than 20 percent smaller now than it was before Europe’s leaders began extracting stiff concessions in exchange for bailout money. That rapid economic shrinkage has defeated the very purpose of the austerity package in the first place. Instead of lowering its debt-to-GDP ratio, Greece has seen the relative size of its debts increase by 35 percent.
Greece has pulled back on public health spending dramatically in order to meet bailout demands, and the cuts have produced a measurable increase in human suffering.
Mothers delivered stillborn babies at a 20 percent higher rate in 2011 than they had in 2009, according to a health study done in 2013. The infant mortality rate jumped from 2012 to 2013, and the country’s population shrunk that year.
Half of the country’s nearly 11 million people are not getting enough to eat. The suicide rate spiked in 2011 and 2012, with one estimate finding that 11 more Greeks killed themselves each month in 2012 than the pre-austerity rate would have projected. HIV infection rates leaped in 2012. And after four malaria-free decades, the country reported that the disease had returned to Greece in 2012 following cuts to mosquito containment programs in the southern part of the country.
The alarming decline in these various measures of public health can be traced more or less directly to the austerity program imposed on Greek leaders by their fellow Europeans. The resource cuts and tax increases that collapsed the Greek economy have exposed hundreds of thousands of people to a kind of double hardship: severe unemployment and reduced safety net resources for the jobless.
Going 12 months without work in Greece means losing access to the country’s publicly-funded healthcare system. 770,000 people had been unemployed for more than a year as of 2012, quadruple the number from 2008 by Greece’s own calculations. Eurozone statisticians reported that about three in every four unemployed Greeks has been out of work for over a year in 2014. If that ratio is holding up through the first half of 2015, there are now approximately a million people in Greece who have lost access to healthcare because they can’t find a job.
The bailouts were supposed to take a small, brief bite out of Greek prosperity before triggering a radical turnaround. International Monetary Fund analysts predicted the country would return to economic growth after a few years. The organization has since acknowledged that its predictions were way off, but it continues to resist the Syriza government’s requests for budgetary elbow room.