Editorial Ta Nea: Youth

One need not have waited until the end of the outgoing government’s term to realise that its basic characteristic was doing – to a greater extent than any previous government – the opposite of what it said it would.

No other government promised so much only to break one after another of the pledges that it handed out right and left.

The government did not do away with the bailout memorandum with a single law as it had promised.
It was forced to implement austerity measures.

It maintainted the ENFIA real estate tax which it had pledged to abolish.

It hiked the VAT tax instead of lowering it.

Even if one in good faith were to accept that it simply could not keep its promise of ending austerity as the PM said he would with his later self-confessed illusions, one cannot but observe that the government adopted (without any bailout memorandum mandating it) all the practices that it scathingly criticised while in the opposition.

The image of decadence in Parliament with last-minute patronage measures before its closure due to upcoming elections is a prime example.

While in the opposition SYRIZA lambasted last-minute political favours.

Now, it kept Parliament open a bit longer to set up an unprecedented operation of unabashedly passing into law various patronage measures.

To paraphrase a poet, SYRIZA’s youth showed that it would end up differently. Not only did it become what it had condemned, but indeed outdid it by far.