Greece Prepares To Leave

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog / ZeroHedge

Speculation and expert comments are thrown around once more – or still – like candy on Halloween. Let me therefore retrace what I’ve said before. Because I think it’s really awfully simple, once you got the underlying factors in place.

But first, if one thing has become obvious after Syriza was elected to form a Greek government on January 25, it’s that the party is not ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’. Those monikers can now be swept off all editorial desks across the world, and whoever keeps using them risks looking like an awful fool.

All Syriza has done to date, when you look from an objective point of view, is to throw out feelers, trying to figure out what the rest of the eurozone would do.And to make sure that whatever responses it got are well documented.

Because of course Greece (through Syriza) is preparing to leave the eurozone. Of course the effects and consequences of such a step are being discussed, non-stop. They would be fools if they didn’t have these discussions. And of course there will be a referendum at some point.

There’s just that one big caveat: Syriza insists on needing a mandate from its voters for everything it does, whether that may be kowtowing to Greece’s EU overlords or walking away from them. At present, however, it doesn’t have a mandate for either of these actions.

The best it can do is to drag out negotiations as much as it can, and let Europe openly assert its perceived superior power over the Greek population as much as it wants to, complete with more iron-fisted demands for austerity, more budget cuts, more asset sales. Tsipras and his people will let this go on until the Greeks are even more fed up with Brussels than they already were when they elected Syriza in the first place.

It’s a subtle game, but it’s the only one open to Tsipras and his crew. Even if they’ve long concluded that trying to negotiate a deal with Germany et al was a lost cause way before talks started, Syriza has to go through the motions until it is confident the people of Greece are ready to vote in a referendum on eurozone membership.

A risky game, since it could bring back ‘the old guard’ of the handful of families that have governed the country for decades and that were willing co-operators with the Troika, but at the same time it’s the only game in town at the moment.

Tsipras needs to explain to the Greek people that the double mandate of staying inside the eurozone and at the same time ending austerity is in fact an empty mandate, because the eurozone refuses to allow it.

Read more at ZH:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-28/greece-prepares-leave