He'd rather destabilize the country to no end, than face the voters in a clean fight.

(for no crimes greater than tax evasion by the rich and a slightly early retirement age)than HER country was offered after losing a war in which it reduced much of Europe to rubble and after exterminating millions of "non-Aryans".

Like many people, I had almost forgotten about that. She has heaped some bad karma on herself, as it were.

The report by which Greece showed the ECB that they were ready for the Euro. Fake. Full of made-up numbers.
There are Greeks who helped falsify that report and gave interviews: In some cases they didn't even falsify numbers to make Greece look better: In some cases they simple didn't have the statistics that the ECB was demanding because the greek financial ministry was so shoddy. So they made something up.

Every single economic report the greek government sent to the ECB from 2000 to 2009 was falsified.
Not a single of those reports contained accurate numbers.
Greece lied to its closest allies for 9 f**king years.

The legendary greek tax-evasion, the legendary corruption, the legendary nepotism, the legendary waste, the totally ridiculous and extremely expensive arms-race with Turkey... Greece was fucked up. And Greece lied to the EU how badly fucked up the greek economy was.



So, when the greek economy finally crashed, the EU had two options:
a) Give Greece the money they need and trust them that they won't waste the money despite their track-record of wasting money and that they won't lie to the EU again despite their track-record of lying to the EU.
b) Demand that Greece get their shit in order.



And don't F**KING dare to tell me that the ordinary people of Greece are somehow the victims here. Greece has been this cesspool of corruption, waste and tax-evasion since the 1970s.
Every single greek voter knew what's going on.
Every single greek voter knew what's going on.
And they never stood up against the tradition of tax-evasion, because it allowed them to evade taxes themselves.
They never stood up aganst the corruption, because it allowed them to grease a dysfunctional bureaucracy.



Greece wouldn't be where Greece is today if the greek voters had F**KING done something about it before Greece collapsed.

After which, the debts of the Third Reich were essentially taken off the books.

There is nothing the people of Greece did that could possibly be worse than that.

Certainly nothing that could justify essentially abolishing old-age pensions and driving the elderly poor to commit suicide so they wouldn't have to go through the agony of death by starvation..

(btw, there was nothing ordinary working-class Greeks could do to stop the wealthy evading taxes, other than to elect the SYRIZA government that Germany went on to humiliate and neuter and then send sales representatives down to Athens to try to get them to buy additional military supplies that Greece was never going to need)

And there was no way Greece could "get its shit together" when the "bailouts" imposed cuts in government spending that have essentially made it impossible for the Greek government to function in any meaningful way-and which have left essentially no funds to prosecute the crime of tax evasion.

The things that happened were done by previous right-wing Greek governments, in collusion with Goldman Sachs No working-class person should have had to suffer and nobody who voted SYRIZA should have had to suffer.

Who were the greek politicians and voters who stood up against tax-evasion before 2009?
Who stood up against waste and nepotism before 2009?
Who stood up against cooking the books before 2009?
Who blew the whistle on their shady Goldman Sachs deals before 2009?

After the crisis, suddenly everybody's a victim and nobody is at fault.

and Goldman Sachs played a significant role.

Elderly pensioners weren't to blame for it.

For the love of the gods, you don't punish the 99% for what the 1% did.

And nothing any Greek did was remotely comparable to what Germany did before the Nazi debts were essentially forgiven in the early 1950s, so why should Greece be treated worse than a society in which the vast majority were fully onboard with everything Hitler and his mob did?

Where were the whistleblowers?
Where was the media?
Where were the voters?
Where was the public outrage?

Remember, before 2009 there had already been extensive cuts in the social wage and the introduction of "labor market flexibility"-that is, the bosses had been once again given the poor to make mass layoffs at will, to throw huge numbers of working people on the scrapheap.

Before 2009, the power of the economic-political elite(which included not only the comically misnamed "New Democracy" party but the right-wing remnants of the once-socialist and by-this-millennia reactionary PASOK) were united in blocking any efforts to fight tax fraud.

(btw, as I understand it, one of the conditions of the so-called "bailouts" was that no measures be taken to make the wealthy actually start paying taxes, so you really need to dial back your self-righteousness on that).

The Greek people themselves were trying to stop the wealthy tax evaders, and that's why they eventually elected PASOK.

It was the old Greek elite who took the country into the EU-that wasn't something the people themselves were demanding.

It was the elite who made tax evasion into the country's favorite indoor sport.

The majority of the population couldn't have done anything to stop any that-the political structure was rigged against them being able to do so, with PASOK's leadership taking the side of the wealthy tax cheats against the working class-and nothing that happened could possibly have justified "bailouts" that bailed out nothing and forced old-age pensions to be cut below the level of human survivability.

CDU+FDP
conservatives+free democrats
Could work, both are pro-business. However Merkel is more to the left than her own party and the FDP might go down too far the road to laissez-faire capitalism.

CDU+Greens
conservatives+Greens
Could work. It worked on a state-level before. The negotiations would be tricky, but doable.

SPD+Greens
socialdemocrats+Greens
Could work. The formed a coalition-government 20 years ago. The negotiations would be fairly easy.





CDU+SPD
conservatives+socialdemocrats
TheSPD doesn't want that, because playing junior-partner to Merkel has robbed them of the option to show their own political ideas. The SPD was massacred at the polls.

SPD+Left
socialdemocrats+Socialists
That is very, very tricky. The Left is essentially a more extreme offspring of the SPD. (It's more complicated than that.) The SPD still hates the Left for stealing their party-members. I don't see a scenario where them two would get along, especially as the Left loves to chastise the socialdemocrats for not being left enough.



And nobody wants to form a coalition with the AfD. They are basically Neonazis and people voted for them because they wanted to stick it to the establishment, not because they agree with the political program of the AfD.
The Left used to be the party you vote for if you are angry at the establishment. Now it's the AfD.
Voting for the AfD was a warning-shot.
As soon as the voters are sure that the establishment has been sufficiently shocked by the AfD's victory, they will leave the AfD and vote by their personal interests again.

in causing the creation of the Left(Die Linke). It wasn't a question of the Left "stealing" anyone...what had happened was that Gerhard Schroeder, even though his party won a much larger victory than anyone expected in the 1998 , insisted on staying with a Third Way-Blairite program rather than listening to the advice of his party's left and using the landslide to implement a genuine social democratic program.

Schroeder then compounded his mistake by cutting back the social welfare state(something a social democratic government should feel a moral obligation NEVER to do, since the creation of the social welfare state was what right-wing social democrats proposed as an alternative to giving the working class control of the means of production)and by reducing the protections workers had against layoffs under German law. All of this led to most of the SPD demanding that Schroeder stand down as chancellor and as leader so that someone else could take over and undo the damage. Schroeder refused to do this and, instead, called an early election in which the SPD was defeated.

Since that time, the SPD has refused either to join coalitions with Die Linke OR to do the only thing that could cause Die Linke voters to throw their support to the SPD and actually become an anti-austerity party that seeks some sort of alternative to the "market values" status quo. There's never ever going to be a time when the people who now vote Die Linke will just go crawlng back to the SPD without getting any concessions in exchange for their support, and there's no possible route to a SPD-led government without the acceptance of the Left fact.

Personally, I am left and I would never-ever vote for Die Linke. The reason is simple: They still have politicians from the socialist regime of the GDR in their midst. As long as Die Linke harbors politicians of that dictatorial regime, they are 100% unelectable to me.

Die Linke has always been a protest-party, secure in the knowledge that they can make outlandish demands and that people will vote for them anyways because Die Linke was the anti-establishment party. Now, all those anti-establishment voters have switched over to the AfD. And I think THAT will shock Die Linke into finally contributing more to the political process than hissing and booing from the sidelines.

What difference does it make if they have a handful of old DDR types when those people are irrelevant within the party? As I understand it, the "Communist Platform" group(which is what I think you're talking about)makes up maybe 100 people. They would have been minor functionaries. Why would you even care about them when the Wall is down and large-c Communism is extinct?

I hated the Stalinist(Not socialist, Stalinist-socialism as a concept is not to blame for it)era myself...but it's over and done with. Why can't you move on about that?

Even if you can't vote for Die Linke, you really need to accept that it's not possible for the SPD ever to go into government without working with them. They're never going to just disappear and no good comes of trying to wait them out or whatever it is the existing SPD leadership is trying to do.

And it's not reasonable to expect Die Linke to simply give up on opposing austerity and challenging capiatalism. It isn't possible to do anything social democratic or even anything distinguishable from what the CDU stands for while accepting the balanced-budget fetish and the primacy of "market values". No party can make any meaningful "contributions to the political process" by being more like the SPD and the CDU than different from them.

(btw, Die Linke actually made a slight gain in seats and votes in this election. It was the CDU and the SPD who lost most of the ground the AfD gained).

Most of the people who voted AfD(not all, but most) are poor and have been convinced that none of the existing parties will do anything that makes any difference in their lives.

You either accept former members of an undemocratic, dictatorial regime in your party, or you do not.

My OP wasn't "nihilistic glee". It was simply a news story.