The bankers, the billionaire financial speculators and the heads of the European Union – backed up by all the key political powerbrokers and the major media corporations – are trying to squash Greece’s newly elected left wing Syriza government.

Syriza was swept into office by a groundswell of opposition to brutal austerity measures that have destroyed the lives of a whole generation.

The EU-imposed policies turned the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis into a full-blown depression. In return for bailout funds to cover Greek government debt, the “Troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) took over the administration of Greece.

The bulk of the money was simply used to bail out financial institutions and speculators, in many cases German and French banks, rather than to shore up the Greek economy, let alone to help the mass of the Greek population.

The Troika forced a series of compliant Greek governments to slash public sector jobs and salaries, make deep cuts to social spending and privatise government services. Regressive taxes that hit workers hardest were sharply increased.

Government revenues flowed out of the country to boost the profits of foreign banks. The overall impact was to send the Greek economy spiralling downwards. Rather than helping to reduce the debt burden, it actually rose.

The unemployment rate has shot up to more than 25 percent (the youth unemployment rate is more than 50 percent) and real wages have fallen 30 per cent. Some 2.5 million people (out of a total population of just 11 million) live below the poverty line, with another 3.8 million at risk of falling below it. The health system has been ravaged.

Democracy?

Syriza came to office promising to reverse the worst effects of this catastrophe. Its election victory was met with a wave of enthusiasm in Greece and in a number of other European countries, such as Spain, which have also been racked by recession, cutbacks and mass unemployment. At last it seemed it was possible to begin to reverse the tide of attacks on the living standards and basic rights of working class people.

But the powers that rule European capitalism and the world financial system are having none of that. They are determined to humiliate Syriza and to teach the Greek working class a bitter lesson for having had the effrontery to hope for something better and for rejecting all the mainstream parties.

Democracy is at best an optional extra for the rich and powerful. Prattling on about defending “our democratic values” can be a handy rhetorical device to justify Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or for ramping up attacks on Muslims at home. Elections every few years can also be useful for sustaining the pretence that the mass of people have some real say over how the country is run.

In Western democracies, the capitalists usually prefer the election of a conservative government rather than a social democratic one. But most of the time they are not all that worried about the outcomes of elections. They know that all the mainstream parties accept the key rules of the game: profits are sacrosanct; governments are not to interfere overly with the operations of the market; the rich are not to be heavily taxed; the military, the police and the security forces are to be given free rein; and workers are to be disciplined to be productive units who accept their exploitation.

But if the mass of workers and the poor actually get it into their heads that they should have some real say over their lives and vote for a party that is committed to defending their interests and not abiding by all the capitalists’ rigged rules, then all hell breaks loose.

We saw it here in Australia on 11 November 1975, when the Liberal Party, the media, the top business leaders and the police and military establishment backed a coup by governor-general John Kerr, which sacked the mildly reforming Whitlam Labor government. In Chile two years earlier, a much more brutal military coup overthrew the democratically elected left wing Allende government and ushered in long years of murderous dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

In the case of Greece, the powerbrokers of European capitalism made it crystal clear immediately after Syriza’s election victory that, as far as they were concerned, the wishes of the Greek people counted for absolutely nothing. There was to be no retreat from austerity.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.” He was backed up by the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who said: “Elections change nothing. There are rules.”

The expiration of the bailout package and looming Greek debt repayments came almost immediately after the elections. Syriza went into the negotiations about restructuring the Greek debt in a crisis atmosphere and facing a wall of hostility from the European finance ministers. The European establishment was determined not just to make an example of Greece but to grind the hopes of Greek workers into the dust.

An opinion poll showed that 80 percent of the Greek population backed Syriza’s stance leading in to the debt renegotiations. Such popular support counted for nothing in the eyes of the European establishment.

The big worry for the EU bureaucrats and the European capitalist class more generally is that the Syriza government could set a precedent for other countries by encouraging further left wing protests against austerity policies across the EU.

In Spain, the newly formed radical populist party Podemos rapidly shot to the lead in opinion polls in response to widespread anger against austerity measures imposed by the conservative government of prime minister Mariano Rojoy. If Syriza succeeded in even partially rolling back the cuts, it would further boost Podemos’s prospects and help to revive the left across the continent.

Compromise

The pressure on Syriza grew in the immediate lead-up to the debt renegotiations. A run on the Greek banks started moving faster, withdrawals rising to more than one billion euros a day. There was a real threat of a total meltdown of the Greek banking system.

This was a sheer act of bastardry from the bankers and the international financiers. They were sending a signal that they would go to any lengths in their attempt to destroy the Greek economy if Syriza did not bow to their wishes.

Unfortunately, rather than taking decisive measures to counter these threats – nationalisation of the banks and the other main financial institutions and rigorous controls on speculation and the export of capital – Syriza backtracked in the face of intimidation.

The Syriza leadership went into the debt renegotiations seeking a compromise. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and finance minister Yanis Varoufakis had already backed away from Syriza’s policy of writing off most of the debt and suspending payments. In the course of the negotiations Varoufakis made further substantial concessions.

But Schäuble was not interested in compromise or meeting them half way. He was determined to humiliate Syriza. The so-called concessions offered by the EU “negotiators” were deliberately insulting.

After the negotiations had concluded, Schäuble gloated that, under the terms of the new memorandum that had been imposed on Greece, Syriza would have to implement austerity measures that it had vowed to repeal. “The Greeks certainly will have a difficult time explaining the deal to their voters”, he said.

The German government has long been the most strident supporter of harsh measures against Greece. Tsipras and Varoufakis built their debt negotiations strategy around the hope of exploiting divisions amongst the other EU governments, especially discontent with the German leaders’ insistence on harsh austerity measures right across Europe. These divisions turned out to be illusory or exaggerated.

While the governments of countries like Spain and Portugal would have liked to see some easing of the austerity conditions, they feared that any unilateral concessions to Syriza would lead to an upsurge of mass anti-austerity struggles in their own countries and the danger of them being swept out of office by radical left parties inspired by Syriza.

So the hardline stance against Syriza was not just about teaching Greek workers a lesson; it was a warning to the likes of Podemos in Spain and workers all across Europe that anyone who attempted to challenge austerity would faced no-holds-barred opposition from the capitalist establishment.

Greek lessons

There is a very different lesson that those of us who stand for genuine democracy and the interests of workers and the oppressed need to draw from the unrelenting response of Europe’s ruling classes to Syriza’s electoral victory: it is not enough simply to reject the mainstream neoliberal parties and vote a left wing government into office.

That can only be a first step. We have to go much further. To stand up to ruling class intimidation and to counter any wavering from the leadership of a left government, there need to be mass popular mobilisations on the streets, in the workplaces and on the campuses.

Workers have to refuse to implement cuts to essential services such as hospitals and schools. Workplaces facing mass sackings needed to be occupied and run under workers’ control. Popular organisations need to be formed to prevent evictions of the poor or the cutting off of essential services like gas and electricity.

In other words, we need another form of democracy – a genuine mass popular democracy – in which the millions of the exploited and the oppressed take control of every aspect of their lives and break the power of the rich.