Will Greek Voters Say Έλα σπίτι?

As Greeks head for the polls Sunday to elect a new government, we are told that their vote will “send a message.” A message to European governments that made loans in 2010 to bailed-out Greece’s insolvent government. A message about the future of the euro. A message on Greece’s possible exit from the European Union (the “Grexit” message).

But those, in a sense, are metaphorical “messages”—messages to whom, exactly?

Some 35,000 doctors have left Greece to work in Germany–the greatest “brain drain” in modern times from a Western country.

But one very specific group of Europeans is awaiting a message and hoping that it will be Έλα σπίτι. They are some 200,000 young Greeks who have left their country since the 2010 to seek jobs in Europe, the U.K., America, and beyond. They tend to be educated, talented, and motivated—the doctors, entrepreneurs, and university professors. (Some 35,000 doctors have left Greece to work in Germany alone.) This is being called the greatest “brain drain” in modern times from a Western country.

More than half of those who have left Greece are under age 35, and not only Europe and North America, but also Africa and Asia, are their destinations. In addition, colleges and institutes abroad have been hit with applications for entrance by more than 50,000 young Greeks. And lately, Greeks who do not have advanced degrees and special talents have begun joining the exodus.

And yet, there are indications that they want to go home. Informal surveys, most recently by the Guardian (January 19, 2015), found many of the Greeks in self-imposed exile eager to return if doing so does not mean unemployment or long-term stagnation in their profession.

What, then, would the message of Sunday’s election have to be? To answer that, a little background is necessary. Admission of Greece to the Eurozone came late, in 2001, and actually required some fudging of statistics; but to the Greek political leadership, it was a windfall. Though among the poorest of Eurozone members, membership itself conferred a sense of security about Greece’s economy. For the first time, the Greek government found that many new sources of loans had opened up.

And so, without the bother of unpopular taxation, Greek governments could borrow and spend to please their constituents with a burgeoning welfare state—seemingly at no cost—and such delights as the 2004 Olympics at a price tag of €6bn (estimates are that the final bill was four times that).

Another gift of Greek politicians to their constituents was a minimum wage that increased by more than 50 percent in the decade after Greece joined the euro. Even in 2001, when Greece first joined the euro, unemployment was over 10 percent, but, as the minimum wage rose, employers laid off or did not hire workers unprofitable to them at the legally enforced higher wages. Within a decade, at the peak of the financial crisis, one-in-four Greeks was unemployed. Among youth, more than half were permanently unemployed.

The brain drain is not mostly of minimum-wage workers, of course, but with employment plunging, those employed chronically evading taxes (a long-standing Greek problem), and government spending forced into “austerity” mode by the European nations whose loans kept Greece from bankruptcy in 2010, economic opportunity had vanished. And many of Greece’s talented, ambitious sons and daughters began a modern economic diaspora.

What would it take to bring them home? They certainly are not interested in government handouts—or government jobs. For the most part, they are established young professionals or aspiring businessmen. They want an economy that works and that means a government that does its job–including equitable collection of taxes; does not borrow and spend its way into insolvency; and does not enter into corrupt government-business deals that are the hallmark of “crony capitalism.”

At this writing, the party leading in the polls among the seven parties likely to send candidates to parliament is the radical-left Syriza, polling 35 percent. A decade ago, Greece had two major parties, New Democracy and PASOK (both more or less “social democratic”), both involved in bringing Greece to its present crisis. But economic hardship has split voters into many factions, and the great beneficiary has been Syriza—a uniting of democratic socialists, green leftist groups, Maoists, Trotskyists, and euro-communists. Since the legislative elections of 2004, Syriza has gained steadily in elections. Its dynamic young leader, Alexis Tsipras, has tended to suppress the party’s old-left, hardline communist ideology; but parties such as his always have done that in order to obtain power.

Will a victory of a profoundly anti-free-market, socialistic party, with its roots in totalitarian Maoist and Trotskyist factions, send the message “come home” to the homesick, but resolutely ambitious and demanding, Greek diaspora? Simply judging by the fact that most have chosen to work in Germany, the most dynamic capitalist economy in Europe, the answer is a definite “No.”

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here