Here we are nowhere …yet

I have no doubt that yesterday’s parliamentary vote was a good thing for Greece. Had the medium-term programme not gone through, Greece would have entered into an even deeper political, social and economic crisis, that would have made what the country has seen so far look like a minor hick-up. But this is not a victory. Irrespective of how critical one may choose to be of the opposition parties and the “infuriated” demonstrators, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they both have a very valid point: these measures will throw the country deeper into recession and will do very little to address the long-run fiscal problem – while the vast majority of them are also regressively distributive.