Posted on February
27, 2016 by yanisv
Old Regime is Dead. But the
New Regime is Struggling to Be Born
Click here
for the Irish Times site. By Damian
Mac Con Uladh
Ireland
has rejected Fine
Gael and Labour’s “dead-end policies” and Michael Noonan’s “cynical” pledge
to renegotiate cuts to Ireland’s banking debt, former Greek finance minister, Yanis
Varoufakis has declared.
Speaking as the Irish General
Election 2016 results began to come in, Mr
Varoufakis said the inconclusive general election result confirmed a
pattern in Europe’s periphery, where the “old regime seems to be debased, but
there is nothing new to replace it”.
Sinn Féin was one alternative
and had made gains, he acknowledged: “But they failed to put together an
alternative programme that attracts sufficient support from the electorate to
make it possible to implement from a position of government.”
Speaking to The Irish Times,
he said: “The old regimes of ‘Bailoutistan’ that were put in place by the
troika, or by their acceptance of the troika programmes, have collapsed in
every country where we had an election during the last twelve months, beginning
with Greece,
then Portugal,
Spain
and now Ireland.
“The old regime is dead but
the new regime is refusing, or struggling, to be born and a coherent
alternative to this failed sequence of programmes has not emerged,” said Mr
Varoufakis, who served for five months as finance minister in the Syriza-led
government last year.
In a widely reported
intervention in the Irish general election a fortnight ago at a Right2Change
meeting in Dublin, Mr Varoufakis urged Irish voters to “send Michael
Noonan packing”.
“And he has been sent packing
in that he’s no longer going to be Ireland’s finance minister,” Mr Varoufakis
said.
His singling out of Mr Noonan
had not been personal, Mr Varoufakis said. Rather, it was based on what had
transpired in the five years since the 2011 election.
“What has been rejected are
dead-end policies and the cynicism with which Michael Noonan won the last
election on a promise to renegotiate the promissory notes and a serious debt
restructuring for Ireland when in reality, in my experience, he never even
tried.”
Commenting on the performance
of Sinn Féin and the left, Mr Varoufakis said it was clear they needed to do
more to convince voters that there is a way out of the crisis.
“They are an alternative, but
they failed to put together an alternative programme that attracts sufficient
support from the electorate to make it possible to implement from a position of
government.”
But he pointed out that the
“defeat of our government” last summer, when the Syriza government signed a
third bailout memorandum with its lenders, was instrumental in depressing the
potential of parties like Sinn Féin.
“The reason why the troika was
never interested in discussing Greek recovery and insisted on policies which
they knew would return the Greek economy to further depression, was because it
was their considered opinion that a defeat of our government and the
continuation of the Greek depression would help arrest the growth rate of
Podemos and Sinn Féin,” he said.
“It’s a very sad day in Europe,
when economic depression, which is detrimental to the chances of the EU
consolidation process, is being utilised for such petty political purposes,” he
said.
While there was no official
reaction from the Greek government on the results, sources in the office of
prime minister Alexis
Tsipras said that Athens welcomed “every step in Europe that is opposed to
austerity and supports the protection of the social state, both domestically
and in the EU”.
Giving his reaction, Dimitris
Papadimoulis, Syriza’s leading MEP, said the results showed that the
“radicalisation of the Irish society was taking shape in more striking way”.
“The former coalition
government has counted huge losses, with its support slumping almost 50 per
cent. Sinn Féin has grown impressively, setting itself as the party that will
define mainstream politics in Ireland from now on,” said Mr Papadimoulis, a
vice-president of the European United Left, of which Sinn Féin and Luke ‘Ming’
Flanagan are members.
“Syriza, Sinn Féin, Podemos
and other left-wing political forces are part of a great realignment in
European politics. The vision is common, but domestically political balances
are different, demanding multiple strategies,” he added.
Acknowledging that this
realignment has “moved faster” in Greece, where Syriza grew from a party of 4.6
per cent to around 35 per cent in six years, “the pace of success for the left”
was determined by the domestic political balances in each country, which
required “multiple strategies” by the different parties.
“The composition of the new
parliament and the next government will only prepare the field for Sinn Féin to
rise even stronger and take advantage of the new balances being formed both in
Ireland and the EU,” he said.
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