''Greece is once again on the brink. After six years of recession and
five years of draconian, externally imposed austerity, Greek voters go
to the polls Sunday in yet another early election, and the stakes for
the country couldn’t be higher.
The radical Syriza party,
overwhelmingly favored to win the contest, has moved to center-stage
from the political margins it occupied in 2010 by offering a vociferous
critique of Greece’s bailout program. The unreconstructed leftists of
Syriza are committed to write off a major part of the country’s public
debt, 80% of which is now held by the country’s eurozone partners, the
European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—the so-called
troika. Syriza has promised to massively increase spending, cut taxes
(except on the rich) and loosen fiscal targets imposed by the current
program, though it is unclear by how much.
Syriza has also
displayed contempt for the structural reforms in the labor and product
markets designed to open up Greece’s sclerotic, overregulated economy to
competition. The party wants to reinstate industry-based collective
bargaining, increase the minimum wage to precrisis levels (more than
twice as high as that of some eurozone countries) and put an end to
privatization..''
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