Greece’s Solidarity Movement: ‘A Whole New Model—and It’s Working’
Posted on Jan 23, 2015
There are accounts of Greeks pulling together to support themselves and each other ahead of an election that polls predict will result in a leadership firmly opposed to austerity policies imposed by the European Union.
The Guardian takes stock of the damage done during the post-2008 recession:
Few in Greece, even five years ago, would have imagined their recession- and austerity-ravaged country as it is now: 1.3 million people – 26% of the workforce – without a job (and most of them without benefits); wages down by 38% on 2009, pensions by 45%, GDP by a quarter; 18% of the country’s population unable to meet their food needs; 32% below the poverty line.
And just under 3.1 million people, or 33% of the population, without national health insurance.
Community medical facilities staffed by professionals who suffered reduced employment in the crisis are among the organizations Greeks have formed in a vacuum of help from official leaders:
The Peristeri health centre is one of 40 that have sprung up around Greece since the end of mass anti-austerity protests in 2011. Using donated drugs – state medicine reimbursements have been slashed by half, so even patients with insurance are now paying 70% more for their drugs – and medical equipment (Peristeri’s ultrasound scanner came from a German aid group, its children’s vaccines from France), the 16 clinics in the Greater Athens area alone treat more than 30,000 patients a month.
The clinics in turn are part of a far larger and avowedly political movement of well over 400 citizen-run groups – food solidarity centres, social kitchens, cooperatives, “without middlemen” distribution networks for fresh produce, legal aid hubs, education classes – that has emerged in response to the near-collapse of Greece’s welfare state, and has more than doubled in size in the past three years.
When members of the ascendant, radical-left Syriza party were first elected to the legislature in 2012, 72 MPs voted to give 20 percent of their monthly salary to a fund that would help finance Solidarity for All, a group that provides logistical and administrative support to the popular movement. Theano Fotiou, a member of Syriza’s central committee who is standing for re-election in the capital’s second electoral district, told The Guardian in the presence of a dozen or so exceedingly enthusiastic young volunteers, “The only real way out of this crisis is people doing it for themselves.”
“If people don’t participate, we will be lost as a country,” Fotiou said. “This is practice, not theory, a new social ideology, a new paradigm—the opposite of the old passive, dependent, consumerist, individualist model. And the solidarity projects we have now are its incubators.”
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