Current government coalition has been a possibility even before the votes were counted on the night of June 17. And as most analysts admit, elections were won due to fear tactics explored by old politics. Samaras, Venizelos and Kouvelis, after failing to agree in May, they got a second chance in June to form a government that should be willing to sacrifice itself to save the country.

In troika’s mind, there was only one path: to follow the Papademos’ government way. However, this was something Greek voters pledged the new government to avoid. When they heard the right-wing rhetoric built around the ‘MoU re-negotiation’ concept, they thought they did it. When Antonis Samaras promised to renegotiate the infamous Memorandum, voters saw an opportunity to combine austerity relief with the conservative, safer approach of ND. So they ditched the radical vote, doing Alexis Tsipras a favor, who, in reality, hoped to spend sometime in the opposition before getting serious with the country’s core politics.

By voting for old politics, Greeks decided to stay in familiar waters and refrain from exploring the uncertainty of the new. Besides, a 3-year austerity made people weaker, placing them closer to the indifference threshold.

Unfortunately or not, voters were spared with the technicalities. Pre-election rhetoric was based on the magic word of ‘re-negotiation’; a handful of columnists and politicians who really explained the fallacy were swamped by partisan juxtaposition. On election night, the new Prime Minister already abandoned the strong campaign word and started talking about ‘amendments’ that would be put into effect sometime during the 4-year period of governance and, most importantly, they would be received as a ‘bonus’ for playing the predetermined austerity cards right.

This is how a government can screw up political communication strategy (if any) overnight. Hardcore Samaras’ associates will probably say that communication is not that important, since what matters is real structural changes. Wrong. In times of crisis, people are disoriented. If you do not package your politics right, you are finished, especially in Greece, and particularly when you are a conservative leader running a coalition scheme supported by the socialists and the left.

From the moment the coalition is once again messing around with pensions, salaries and social benefits (namely horizontal measures) the pistol is cocked and the trigger is about to be pressed. Is people’s new disappointment enough to break a government? Probably not, but if the opposition manages to give meaningful words to social discontent, then breaking a link would be enough to unlock the administration and take it down; not noisily on the streets of Athens, but in the chambers of strategic politics.

The survival of the government depends on a really weak link held by PASOK leadership and this weak link is about to crack for a variety of reasons.

First of all, despite all the laws and measures passed in the past, most people consider the attack on household income a fresh piece of government policy. Being under the bankruptcy threat is no longer a strong argument; it was burned out during the Papandreou years.

The government’s vagueness about the new austerity measures continues the fear tactics, making things even worse. This alienates voters even further from the old political system, whose leftovers were used to form today’s government coalition. In simple terms, those who initiated fear and presented themselves as citizens’ protectors quickly failed on their promises and once more engaged fear as a tool to bail themselves out of the pressure.

When you need cash fast, is there any other alternative than cut spending from the source? Probably not, but why lie to the people? Was it the result of amateur political spinning or a failure of leadership to assess reality?

And this brings us to coalition’s inner politics. Old PASOK and Venizelos are in a down slope (sources say that a new formation is under way by key PASOK people) and Kouvelis is already experiencing an identity crisis and is in no position to play a role without the intermediary socialist link. This could crack the government in no time.

But still, a triggering event is required to make things roll that should be about the people (and not about partisan relations) and would put the coalition in a real unity test. In my view, this grassroots event is already scheduled in the political agenda for late August or early September and has nothing to do with troika’s wises.

It will be genuinely about the people and for the people.

This is the new draft bill for the relief of over-indebted households from loan obligations, tabled by SYRIZA to be discussed when the Parliament returns from the summer break.

Tsipras’ political argument is simple and involves hundreds of thousands of households that saw their budgets flattened by the crisis, due to unemployment or massive reduction of income. This policy was included in Antonis Samaras’ speeches during the pre-election period, but nothing is heard ever since.

The technical argument is that the banks are making up the losses from bad loans through their recapitalization from the Credit Stability Fund. At the same time, the banks continue to demand the repayment of the delayed installments, regardless of the fact that those loans have been classified as bad debts and are taken into account by the recapitalization.

In plain talk, those who will disagree with the bill would sound like asking Greek people to pay the banks twice for financial management failures of the past: first, via national borrowing for recapitalization, and second, from their own pockets for bad personal loans.

So, who is going to disagree with Tsipras’ proposal and on what grounds? In terms of political communication, this move is an absolute winner. It could rule the agenda and meddle beautifully with the new austerity measures the coalition government is about to announce; furthermore, it corners the coalition government politically, and challenges MPs (through a catalogue name vote) on an individual as well as collective level.

Conspiracy advocates could say that this is planned between the Premier and the main opposition. If this is not the case, New Democracy will have to react, PASOK and Democratic Left will have to take sides; MPs individually will have to do the same. This could prove to be a unique moment in Greek politics, gathering an across the board agreement, or the trigger in question, ending up being a win-win for the centre left.

It could also make Antonis Samaras the Prime Minister serving the shortest term in modern Greek history and turn Alexis Tsipras into the youngest one, ever.

Dr. Demetris Kamaras is the Editor of Alyunaniya.com

They both assumed the leadership of their historic parties at the end of different political eras, thus both had the opportunity to enter the mainstream on their own pace and mark their way towards the top, i.e. the Premiership of the country. They both succeeded, through quite similar paths.

George Papandreou assumed the leadership of PASOK from his father’s adversary Costas Simitis who led a reformist movement that delivered much less than it promised. The latter’s landmark moment was Greece’s accession in the EMU, something that ten years later many Greeks considered a drag. Now it is clear that, although many euro area members may have doctored their statistics to fit the Eurozone dress, Greeks ended up embracing the scheme, building up our very own fallacy.

This is not of the last decade’s however. Systemic malfunctions were built back in the 1980s when Andreas Papandreou institutionalised budget deficit as a national policy. In the years that followed, all signs pointed towards a looming ending. Even the new FinMin Yannis Stournaras, when he was taught economics by legendary academic Constantine Drakatos, he already knew that there was not even a chance traditional Greek-style economic policy to prevent the national economy from taking a fall. Short periods during which the fundamentals of the economy were turning towards the positive, due to increased consumption and internal borrowing made nothing than deteriorating the misleading notion of progress.

During Karamanlis 2004-2009 governance, the countdown of this era began. Admittedly, it was the first real opportunity Greece had to change course and move away from the destructive path drawn by party politics, corruption and extreme clientelism. It was a period during which Greek economy’s tremor started; most importantly, it was a period during which Greeks lost the last remaining iota of trust towards Greek politicians.

This opportunity was lost. During the Karamanlis administration, Papandreou has been very difficult as an opposition leader, putting up strong fights against the then Prime Minister and the centre-right administration, who had adopted a minimum risk approach that turned it into a sitting duck. If Karamanlis government had a slim chance to produce tangible results, G. Papandreou’s populism killed it. That period will be recorded in Greek history as a period during which the country kept burning several billions of borrowed money, next to torched forests and Athens historical buildings that went ablaze in the 2008 riots.

Then, in October 2009 George Papandreou became Prime Minister and Antonis Samaras picked up the conservative party in ruins.

It was at that moment when the God of Greece turned George and Antonis into two sides of the same coin, in a process sometimes known as “Schumpeter’s gale.” Economic history tells us that Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter adapted it from the work of Karl Marx and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and the business cycle. At its most basic, “creative destruction” describes the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order.

Both stages are essential in order to reach the end game, which in the case of Greece has to do with the drastic transformation of they way we do things in the country; economic and business mentality, social interaction and development, individual and collective responsibility and accountability.

George came in for the destruction; to fight the past, impose the concept of change the hard way; widespread pain and horizontal austerity action that shocked Greeks and made them start thinking. He brought into surface all the things Greeks used to hide under the mattresses. Neo-Hellenic illnesses strongly embedded in the daily life of citizens, amongst them what Princeton’s professor Stathis Gourgouris called “a propensity for disorder.”

To fix the Greek economy and conclude the capitalist cycle, major distortions had to go. The destruction process began based on two parametres: 1) things in Greeks’ daily life will not be the same again, since the mother-State had nothing more to give and 2) old incomes and previous generations’ benefits had to fade away to save Greece’s youth.

The process was harsh and George died (politically) in the trenches. Interim procedures were activated with Lucas Papademos stabilizing the field and Panayiotis Pikrammenos neutralizing the political passion.

Then Antonis came in for the second phase, to orchestrate the creative part, stepping on a smoother pathway, after all the reactions, political juxtaposition and pathos were tamed.

Reconstructing Greece requires the ability to synthesise necessary policies through sound leadership. In the creative destruction process, his predecessor delivered the first part and history will have its say. We need Antonis to appear creative and finish the job.

Dr. Demetris Kamaras is the Editor of AlYunaniya.com

Barroso writes: “… the Commission is ready to support the Greek authorities in taking decisions that can restore confidence and begin the process of revitalising the Greek economy… there are a variety of steps that should be taken right away to improve the business environment; to support small businesses and young people; and to remove the bottlenecks in public administration and the financial system that are preventing the structural funds from flowing to where they are needed, holding back growth and job creation.

The European Commission has already paid more than EUR 8 billion of the EUR 20 billion allocated to Greece since 2007 through the EU structural funds. We are keen to help your authorities target the remaining funds on stimulating growth and competitiveness. For now, there is no shortage of funds but as we discussed there are still too many open questions and administrative hurdles to be overcome before the available funds can reach the real economy.

In priority areas we need to identify where the bottlenecks are and decide on how to remove them within a clear timeframe. This often has to be done top down, which is why I am prepared to work in partnership with you to get things moving…”

Referring to the aim of the meeting he said they wanted “to see how we can work more effectively together to enable Greece to make the most of its cohesion funding at this critical time” and also to see how we can with this reinforced monitoring and reinforced technical assistance do more to create hope for Greece. “We want to seize this moment to help get the Greek economy moving again,” Barroso stressed.

He added: “The second programme has a very strong focus on reforms that we believe will transform the capacity of the Greek economy to generate growth and jobs. It is important that this is recognized, so that the second programme does not, like the first, suffer from misperceptions as being all about fiscal consolidation. Of course fiscal consolidation is indispensable but this is not just a programme of fiscal consolidation, it is a programme for structural reforms, competitiveness and growth in Greece.”

Barroso said that there are over EUR 20 billion in structural funding available to Greece for the 2007-2013 period. “We have already released more than EUR 8 billion in payments but there is scope for doing much more before 2013. And we are already giving the priority to the payments to Greece. This means also that we need to get essential growth-enhancing projects off the ground. We have identified a number of these, which could give a particular boost to investment and employment,” he said.

Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker told the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee yesterday, a European Commissioner should be nominated to help return Greece to growth, according to an official announcement. He also observed that there was scope for cuts in the country’s military spending.

Speaking at one of his regular meetings with the committee, Juncker fielded MEPs’ concerns about the need for growth to emerge from the fiscal crisis, the next steps in solving Greece’s problems and boosting the firepower of the bailout funds. Juncker said he had hoped this would have been the week when a decision was taken to boost the European Stability Mechanism’s capital, but the idea “needed to mature further in some countries”.

On Greece, he said the Eurogroup would be keenly awaiting the participation rate of private Greek bondholders, which “would need to reach 66% for the collective action clauses to be activated”. He also stressed that the Greek government needed to act on the commitments it had given to ensure that the second bailout programme could become effective, and at the same time insisted that “it was time to stop humiliating Greece“.