WASHINGTON –- Greece gave us democracy and theater, and now is giving us a gripping new synthesis of the two: the dramatic, hysterical alarms of supporters of austerity.
Facing slow growth and crushing debt, “Austerian” leaders in democracies such as Greece, Spain, France, the U.K., (and, until not long ago, Japan) clamped down on social welfare spending and eased regulation of business.
But with unemployment widespread, especially among the young, and disturbing signs of renewed recession in many countries, a backlash has begun. On Sunday, Greece chose as its new prime minister a 40-year-old leftist, Alexis Tsipras, who vows to renegotiate $272 billion in foreign loans while amping up government wages and spending.
In Greece, across Europe, and elsewhere, Austerians are responding to Tsipras types with apocalyptic warnings, many of which are overstated, comical, outrageous or just plain wrong.
Here’s a theater program guide to them (and reasons why not to be alarmed), compiled by HuffPost editors in the U.S. and at our global editions:
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In the U.K., Conservative David Cameron said an anti-austerity Labour government would lead to economic “chaos.” This month, he staged an unprecedented photo op with five Tory cabinet ministers lined up in a row to warn of the dangers of abandoning austerity, reports Mehdi Hassan of The Huffington Post U.K. They offered up an official looking (but not official) dossier filled with lurid claims about what Labour would do to the fiber of British life.
Such warnings remind others of similar dire predictions that came in similar confrontations long ago. When Francois Mitterand was running on a leftish ticket in France in 1981, a member of the conservative leadership suggested that a Mitterand victory would bring Russian tanks to the Place de la Concorde and an era of repression to France.
Mitterand won; the tanks never arrived. “We laughed about it for years,” recalled Sinclair.
In that same year, a close friend of Mitterand’s, Socialist Andreas Papandreou, won election in Greece. There were similar warnings about how the Cold War was lost because Greece -– always pivotal — had fallen to the East.
The Cold War eventually was was lost -– by the Russians.
Anne Sinclair (France), Montserrat Dominguez (Spain), Mehdi Hasan (U.K.), Nikos Agouros (Greece), and Kosuke Takahashi (Japan) contributed reporting.
