Greece: The implosion of the sy (original) (raw)

First, because of the new flare-up of riots in Athens in December 2009 caused by the alienated youth of the country marking the first anniversary of the police killing of a 15-year old student a year before ―when an unprecedented social explosion took place, which, as I tried to show a few months ago, [1] had not been seen again since the student uprising in the early seventies that eventually led to the fall of the military junta in 1974. However, this was only a pretext and the new flare-up should be seen, in fact, as part of a process indicating the flimsy foundations on which the post-war social and economic system has been built and, also, as an indication of the fact that the systemic crisis in Greece is continuously deepening. In this context, the recent Greek elections in October, which gave an overwhelming parliamentary majority to PASOK’s social-liberals and was celebrated by the political and economic elites both in Greece and abroad, could be shown to be just a sideshow,...