Danae’s feat
The other episode came the following evening, when I was in for a rare treat: dinner with Danae and a friend visiting from Australia at our favourite restaurant in Exarcheia.
Exarcheia is where I lived when I first met Danae. It was at my flat there that my daughter Xenia took her first steps; in fact, the inner-city suburb was where I had taken my first steps as a teenager in the 1970s. A neighbourhood on the wilder side of Athens, it is known for its off-beat record stores, bookshops, bars and, last but not least, for the powerful presence there of Greece’s multifarious anarchist groups. In short, Exarcheia was, and to some extent remains, my neighbourhood, even though I have not lived there since 2005.
Danae and our friend arrived first. I came straight from a meeting with Dragasakis and his team, parked my motorcycle outside the restaurant and joined them at a table in a corner of its lovely walled garden on Valtetsiou Street. It was almost May, and the jasmine bushes were spreading their hypnotic scent through the warm spring evening. After an emotionally draining day it was a much-needed tonic to sit in that garden, sipping wine and relaxing with close companions.
I heard them before I saw them. An hour or so later, as we were about to order dessert, three hooded men entered the garden shouting abuse. At first I did not realize that I was their target, but then they threw some bottles which smashed on the brick floor just in front of our table, shards of glass hitting my feet. Telling the other patrons to leave, the attackers approached our table, wielding broken beer bottles and continuing to shout abuse. I sprang up and walked towards them in order to screen my companions from the men but I had not factored in Danae’s determination and speed.
Danae jumped between the attackers and me, hugging me, her back towards them, her hands covering the top of my head. She literally turned herself into a human shield. I tried to push her away towards safety but her hold was so strong I realized that I would not be able to get her off without hurting her. Meanwhile, with the side of her head pressed firmly into my face to shield it, she yelled at them, ‘You’ll have to get through me first!’
The hooded men tried to get at me with the jagged bottles, but Danae’s embrace was too powerful and her body covered me so fully that they couldn’t without hitting her. Frustrated, they dropped the bottles and landed a few blows with their hands and fists on us both. As Danae received more of the blows than I did, they relented, no doubt reluctant to hit a woman, and left the way they had come, bellowing curses and threats. Stunned, we sat down at our table again, our Australian friend shaking.
However, the night was still young. Our attackers must have called for reinforcements, for within half an hour more than sixty of them were lined up outside the restaurant, which was now empty except for us, the patrons of one other table who seemed unperturbed, and the staff, who were concerned and apologetic. I insisted that they not call the police: were they to arrive in large numbers, there would most definitely be bloodshed. In fact, it was just as well perhaps that I did not have a police escort with me already.15
‘What will you do?’ asked our friend. The restaurant owner offered to put us up for the night in the restaurant.
‘I shall just walk out and engage them in dialogue. If they want to hit me, then they will hit me.’ Our friend thought I was crazy.
Danae said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ We told our friend to stay put until the gang had left, and then the two of us, Danae and I, stepped out onto the pavement.
Sixty hooded youngsters shouting and swearing on a narrow Athenian street is a sight to behold. My heart was beating fast but I did not expect them to hit us again. Danae had impressed them, and I was sure they would appreciate the fact that we had neither called the cops nor hidden in the restaurant. I was also encouraged by the fact that they had not damaged my motorcycle, as they easily could have, but instead remained ten metres or so away. If they had been planning to attack us again, I thought, they would have been all over the bike.
So Danae and I walked straight towards my motorcycle, holding our helmets but not wearing them. The mob continued to shout abuse at us but did not make a move. After I had unlocked the bike, Danae sat on it and slowly began to put her helmet on, but I decided I was not going to be chased out of Exarcheia, my own neighbourhood. So I left my helmet on the bike and walked towards them. ‘I’m here. Tell me why you want to hit me. I’m all ears,’ I said.
The ringleader warned me off: ‘If you come closer you’ll regret it.’
‘I want to know what I’ve done to anger you. If this means I’ll be hit, so be it,’ I said, taking courage from the fact that they had still not attacked.
Thus an improbable, boisterous dialogue began. At first they were reluctant to explain their anger but simply continued swearing and threatening. Eventually, after a lot of prompting, they accused the police in Exarcheia of being in cahoots with heroin dealers. I told them that I would not be surprised if that were the case. ‘But why so much anger at me?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ one told me. It was not me, personally, they were angry with, but ‘state terror and its representatives. You are one of them. A minister. Fuck off out of here. Exarcheia is our liberated zone. Go anywhere else you like. Just not here. Leave us in peace.’
Fresh from my clash with Alexis and the war cabinet and all too aware that Greece and Europe’s deep establishment were trying to pulverize me, I decided to let them into a secret.
‘I see your point,’ I said. ‘I can accept that you hate me because I represent state power. But know this: the same establishment that you loathe, loathes me. I am a thorn in their backside and, believe me, they are about to discard me. To vomit me out. Just so that you know…’
Miraculously their anger dissipated. A pause ensued, after which their leader spoke for the first time in a calm, almost friendly, voice: ‘Enough now. Get on your motorcycle and go home.’
I made my way back towards the motorcycle and to Danae, but before putting on my helmet and getting on the bike, I turned round and said, ‘I was roaming around Exarcheia decades before you were born. Are you now telling me that I cannot come back here? Are you banning me from my neighbourhood?’
He thought about it for a couple of seconds before responding: ‘You’re welcome to return when you’re no longer a minister.’
‘See you soon then,’ I replied.
As we set off on the motorcycle, I looked in my mirrors. The sixty or so suddenly looked more like guards ensuring our safe departure than attackers. When we arrived home and I was putting the motorcycle on its stand, Danae hugged me. I hugged her back, both of us trembling a little. The next morning a journalist who was usually critical of me wrote, ‘Last night, the anarcho-fascist hoodlums of Exarcheia were dealt their greatest defeat in thirty years by a woman: Danae Stratou.’
But now a more sinister kind of violence was coming our way.
PART THREE
Endgame
15 Countdown to perdition
After that night in Exarcheia, it took sixty-six days for the endgame to unfold. A political cartoon by the artist Yannis Ioannou sums them up vividly. In it Greece appears on her knees, her arms bound behind her back, struggling to escape. A menacing figure representing the EU, wielding an executioner’s axe, castigates her for refusing to stay still and place her head obediently on the block: ‘Will you at last show a modicum of responsibility?’
My own experience of those days is better encapsulated by a different cultural reference: Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame – which might also serve as the leitmotif of Europe’s establishment since the financial calamity of 2008 left it bereft of ideas as to how to sustain our societies yet unable to relinquish its grip on them – depicts a blind authoritarian barking orders at his servant, Clov, whom he took in as a child, in a grinding repetition of pointless behaviour, moving ever closer to an end that is both inevitable but elusive, simultaneously cursed and desired. For throughout May and June I was under no illusion that the game that Alexis and the war cabinet had chosen to play was already lost. We were merely going through the motions leading to an inescapable checkmate. The one illusion that did remain was my faint belief that Alexis would ultimately baulk at the humiliation the troika were planning for him and at the last moment choose to play another game – the one we had planned all along. That belief faded with every day that passed, but as long as it endured, however faintly, I would stay put. If nothing else I was not going to make it any easier for the creditors to replace the finance minister whose signature they required in order to renew Greece’s indefinite jail sentence.
I dedicated my remaining energy to four tasks: the campaign against tax cheats and gambling machines, preparing my presentations for the Eurogroup so that they were as immaculate as possible, developing the parallel payments system, including Plan X, and, top of the agenda, compiling our Plan for Greece. Jeff Sachs and I were already working on the last of these, and in addition to contributions from Norman Lamont, Larry Summers and Thomas Mayer, we had the help of Jamie Galbraith and fellow economist Mariana Mazzucato.
On 7 May I would be delivering a keynote speech in Brussels. It would be an opportunity to test the water with an early draft of the plan before presenting it at the next Eurogroup, which was scheduled for 11 May, at which point Jeff would start canvassing support for it at the IMF and elsewhere in Washington. I did not imagine for a moment that it would be welcomed with open arms by Wolfgang and his people, whatever its calibre, but there was a chance that a convincing plan would prompt other, less hostile, ministers to break ranks in its support. Before the speech in Brussels, I decided to fly to Paris and Rome, and then after the speech to Madrid, to see if my plan cut any ice there.
With foes like these who needs friends?
Having little to lose and knowing that the current impasse worried the French, Italians and Spanish too, I resolved to be frank and ask them directly to respond to a bold suggestion. I proposed that the Greek prime minister persuade the German chancellor that the only way forward was for them to take a joint Graeco-German proposal to the institutions. This would comprise, first, a package of reforms to be passed through Greece’s parliament by the end of May (including a revised fiscal plan, a simplification of VAT, major reorganization of the tax administration, severe limitations on early retirement, etc.), which would become the new ‘common conditionalities’ for completion of Greece’s current programme; and, second, a long-term Greek recovery contract between the EU and Greece (our Plan for Greece), which would itself comprise the debt swaps I had been proposing, a major investment initiative, a public bad bank to deal with the banks’ non-performing loans, many much-needed reforms in public administration and product markets and a programme for combating the humanitarian crisis.1
I argued that approaching Merkel with this plan was our only chance. It was a moderate proposal, containing everything that Greece needed immediately and in the longer run while maximizing the creditors’ chances of getting their money back, but above all this strategy would allow the chancellor to present it as her own idea. If she refused it, I argued, then no sustainable solution was possible. In that case, I said, let the chips fall where they may.
In Paris, on 5 May, I met Michel Sapin and Pierre Moscovici. They talked at cross-purposes, offering the usual empty promises of support and no ideas of their own, and when it came to the strategic question – of whether to approach Merkel in this way – they were neither in favour nor against. But there was another French politician I met that day who truly engaged with the plan, who told me it was a good one and who encouraged me to proceed with it: Emmanuel Macron.
In Rome, on 6 May, Pier Carlo Padoan had a major surprise in store for me. In the Eurogroup he was reliably conformist with one eye firmly trained on Wolfgang for his approval. In his own office, however, he revealed what I supposed were his true colours. ‘You must most certainly go ahead with this,’ he told me. ‘There is no time to waste. Your prime minister must call Merkel now, or at most by tomorrow, and press her on this. Do not wait until Monday [11 May, the day of the Eurogroup]. By then, if there is no action by Angela, Wolfgang will have the upper hand.’
I was astounded. But that was not all. To strengthen our argument that there should not be two sets of conditions for us to adhere to – which would have meant being unable to embark on our new agreement until we had satisfied the conditions of the current programme – but common conditionalities that covered them both, Pier Carlo advised us to make the case that the previous two troika programmes – those rejected by the Greek people when they elected us – were based on the logic of the IMF, whereas any new arrangement should depart from the IMF’s logic and come closer to the developmental logic of the World Bank. Pier Carlo’s only piece of criticism was that it was a mistake to refer to a ‘humanitarian crisis’. ‘They don’t like being criticized for having caused such a thing,’ he told me. He suggested using the term ‘anti-poverty campaign’ instead, advice that I adopted instantly. As I left his office for Fiumicino Airport, I was both pleased and aghast: pleased that there was intellectual life and honesty in at least one of Europe’s seats of power; aghast that Europe had conspired to ensure that neither ever showed its face in our common institutions, especially in the Eurogroup.
Having delivered my speech in Brussels on 7 May, I arrived in Madrid on 8 May to be received by my next-door neighbour at the Eurogroup table, Luis de Guindos. As the finance minister of a conservative Spanish government that was the sworn enemy of Syriza’s sister party in Spain, Podemos, Luis had never missed an opportunity in the Eurogroup to side with Wolfgang against me, but I had already gathered that this might well be due to tactical expediency rather than out of conviction. That day in his office he confirmed my suspicion. Over a simple but fabulous dish of paella, with a glass of excellent red wine to complement it, a disarmingly friendly conversation ensued. Not only was Luis quick to endorse my idea for breaking the deadlock, but when I told him of Pier Carlo’s similar reaction he shook his head appreciatively and said, ‘You, the Italians and we must band together.’
Intrigued, I encouraged him to come clean. ‘Are you telling me, Luis, that you are no longer interested in overthrowing our government? Was that not your not-so-secret desire?’
Luis thought about that for a moment. ‘Not any more,’ he said with a wicked smile.
‘What changed?’ I asked. ‘I was under the impression you had joined Wolfgang in seeking Grexit.’
‘What changed,’ Luis replied thoughtfully, ‘is that Podemos are no longer posing a threat to us the way they had been a few months ago. And, also, I now fear Grexit more than I did. I am not sure any more that we can contain it.’
Spain’s credit-fuelled mini-recovery was indeed fragile and incapable of surviving the shocks that Grexit would cause, and it was true that Podemos’s rise had stalled owing to internal divisions. Even though he would never come out and say so in public, a pact between Greece, Italy and Spain that averted Grexit and calmed the markets made sense from his perspective.2
On the flight home from Madrid I was plagued by the thought of missing the opportunity we now had before us. The French economy minister and the finance ministers of Italy and Spain had agreed wholeheartedly that Alexis should immediately call the German chancellor with my proposition. They would never take the lead themselves of course, but if Alexis did, they would support us, at least from behind the scenes.
By the time I landed in Athens, the Plan of Greece had been finalized. Jeff Sachs had beautifully edited the draft I had sent him a couple of days before; Norman Lamont had added some important vignettes; the people from Lazard had refined the debt-swap proposal, and Larry Summers had provided his endorsement. There were other contributions too, including sterling work on a debt sustainability analysis and a bad bank policy. Jeff suggested that the title of the paper should make it sound boring and modest, the way the IMF liked it, and it accordingly became A Policy Framework for Greece’s Fiscal Consolidation, Recovery and Growth. Co-signed by policymakers who combined exceptional pedigrees with experience of the highest levels of governance from across the political spectrum, it was a powerful weapon.3
That Saturday morning, two days before flying back to Brussels for the 11 May Eurogroup, I had my office print out copies of the Policy Framework, placed a few in my rucksack, got on my bike and headed over to Maximos to see Alexis. There I told him of the encouraging reception of my proposition in Paris, Rome and Madrid and handed him copies of the Policy Framework with firm advice that it was his only remaining weapon if not to win the war, at least to prevent annihilation.
Without even pretending that he wanted to read it, Alexis pushed the Policy Framework aside. ‘This is not the time to antagonize her,’ he said, referring to Merkel.
