Breathing space or a tighter stranglehold?

REGARDLESS OF how the agreement with the Eurogroup is finally assessed, one thing is certain: It ensures neither a truce nor relief for the next four months.

Having started negotiations with a proposal for a four- or six-month "bridge"--that is, the funds necessary to cover the government's financial needs during a period of negotiations toward a comprehensive agreement--the government ultimately agreed to a "bridge" toward accepting the general framework of the Memorandum and the European elite's monitoring mechanism in Greece, but without ensuring the financing it needs for the coming four-month period!

The Eurogroup agreement provides that 7.2 billion euros will be disbursed as the last installment of the current bailout program, along with 1.9 billion euros owed to Greece as the proceeds of Greek bonds held by European state banks.

But this will come at the end of the four-month period, and only after the successful completion of an intermediate evaluation by the lenders in late April and a final evaluation at the end of the time. In other words, the Troika "institutions" will decide, according to their whim at the time, if the Greek government has implemented the "reforms" promised by Yanis Varoufakis and avoided taking any unilateral action.

Until then, starting in early March and continuing throughout the month, the Greek government has large debt repayment obligations totaling nearly 2.3 billion euros (repaying a 1.5 billion loan to the IMF, plus 750 million euros in interest payments). It must also renew three government bond issues at a total value of 4.6 billion euros. These obligations continue in the coming months, though at a lower amount, bringing the total liabilities for the four-month period to about 7.5 billion euros.

The result is that the financial suffocation of the Greek state will not only not abate--it will return on harsher terms than ever.

[German Finance Minister] Wolfgang Schäuble continues to insist that if Greece fails to meet its obligations, it will be pushed into bankruptcy, and [European Central Bank President] Mario Draghi announced that he won't allow an increase in the limits on issuing government bonds, and that Greece won't be part of the ECB's new program of purchasing government bonds.

With the Eurogroup agreement approved, the threat of the immediate collapse of Greek banks has diminished--but the threat of Greece being forced into bankruptcy has come closer. The blackmail threat has changed form, but Greece has not gained any time at all.

WITH THE primary surplus falling due to the sharp drop in government revenues in January and February, the government has even less funds to address the immediate financial needs of the government. In order to address these needs, it is planning to use funds that belong to public institutions (like the agency in charge of agricultural subsidies or the hospitals).

The problem with this "solution," aside from the fact that it constitutes voluntary austerity, is that the government will give the lenders another weapon of blackmail. Returning these funds to the public institutions--that is, paying the agricultural subsidies, financing the hospitals--will now depend on living up to the Eurogroup agreement in order to receive funding at the end of the four-month period. In other words, we are making these public funds… subject to the negotiations!

Even with this course, the financial needs of the state cannot be met. And so the lenders are offering a "carrot." Jeroen Dijsselbloem [the head of the Eurogroup finance ministers] has said that a part of the financing could be advanced to Greece in March if the government has honored its commitments to the recent agreement.

This explains the message of the exuberant public appearances by Yanis Varoufakis when he suggested that the list of initial measures presented to parliament to deal with the humanitarian crisis would be subject to evaluation by the lenders (to prove that they weren't being carried out "unilaterally"), and that the government would make other gestures of "goodwill" toward the lenders.

If it is confirmed that Varoufakis’ statements about honoring the agreement and showing “goodwill” toward the lenders of the commitment to remain in the eurozone at all costs, is indeed the course of the government, then this will represent complete submission to the Memorandum framework and the signing of a new Memorandum.

This would be against the spirit of the decisions of the recent SYRIZA Central Committee meeting and the official statements of Alexis Tsipras and other leading members of the party--that the Eurogroup agreement provides breathing space to begin implementing SYRIZA's election commitments. The aim would be to push the boundaries of the agreement and take advantage of any "creative ambiguity" in order to build up popular support and international solidarity that would allow the government to say "no" the blackmail in June, and move toward abolishing the Memorandums.

IT'S OBVIOUS that the Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is heading in a very different direction from this path. His statements in the media are not only erasing the official positions of SYRIZA on issues like debt and privatization at a rapid pace, but he is--with his talk about showing "goodwill" to the lenders--imposing his own positions as those of the government.

There are two possible interpretations of his statements. Either he is doing all this on his own initiative, and thus creating a pole within the government for social democratic policies. Or he is doing so with the collaboration of Alexis Tsipras, which means the situation has gone much further. In either case, he has shown in a matter of a month that he is completely unsuitable for carrying out the promises and commitments made collectively by the members and different forces of SYRIZA.

In the face of the immediate extortion faced this month, the only possible answer is: You can't take something from someone who has nothing. The repayments of interest on the debt and the IMF loan must be suspended. And in the face of the wider extortion and the lenders' strategy for isolating SYRIZA and pressuring it into representing a government of "national consensus," or forming a “national unity” government, the only solution is to organize disobedience and resistance to an agreement imposed by the lenders at the point of a gun.