And, as Marx would have noted with a smile if he were still alive, Europe’s leaders are now, unusually, openly worrying about whether the high cost of the Greece bailout might lead to “violence” or “revolution.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday urged the Bundestag to pass the bailout and keep Greece in, using these words, the Financial Times said: She emphatically rejected the alternatives of stretching further the EU laws until they lost their meaning, and a sudden Grexit which could bring “chaos and violence” to Greece.
Late Thursday night, European Council leader Donald Tusk told the Financial Times: “I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion, not financial contagion, of this Greek crisis,” said Mr Tusk. … “For me, the atmosphere is a little similar to the time after 1968 in Europe,” he said.
“I can feel, maybe not a revolutionary mood, but something like widespread impatience. When impatience becomes not an individual but a social experience of feeling, this is the introduction for revolutions.”
That is extraordinary.
It was one thing when the Greeks, internally, began wondering aloud whether the fight over staying in the European Union would lead to a second Greek civil war. The Greeks have always had a strong leftist side to their internal politics, a flank Britain and Germany discarded 15 or 20 years ago.
But now politicians are starting to worry that the anti-EU threat comes not from the right — where nationalist parties such as the UK’s UKIP get their votes — but from the left.
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