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| Crisis is the new normal for weary Greeks | Crisis is the new normal for weary Greeks |
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| As the “last-chance” talks rolled on towards another “last-ditch” summit possibly at the end of this week, weary Greeks have deadline fatigue. | As the “last-chance” talks rolled on towards another “last-ditch” summit possibly at the end of this week, weary Greeks have deadline fatigue. |
| “Unfortunately, we’ve become hardened and accustomed to all this, including the never-ending talks,” said Christos Griogoriades, a physics and IT teacher in Greece’s northern second city of Thessaloniki. | “Unfortunately, we’ve become hardened and accustomed to all this, including the never-ending talks,” said Christos Griogoriades, a physics and IT teacher in Greece’s northern second city of Thessaloniki. |
| Panic about so-called “knife-edge”, “life-or-death” negotiations has become so commonplace that it is almost meaningless to a population whose major concerns are still making ends meet and scrimping for enough to eat. | Panic about so-called “knife-edge”, “life-or-death” negotiations has become so commonplace that it is almost meaningless to a population whose major concerns are still making ends meet and scrimping for enough to eat. |
| Griogoriades, 42, has friends who have lost good jobs and are now living back in their parents’ rural northern villages, supporting their young children on €40 a month and homegrown vegetables. “We’ve got to the point where people here look at others, saying: ‘OK, I think I’ve got it bad but that man over there is eating from a garbage can.’ This is going to be our reality for many years, and I think the worst is yet to come.” | Griogoriades, 42, has friends who have lost good jobs and are now living back in their parents’ rural northern villages, supporting their young children on €40 a month and homegrown vegetables. “We’ve got to the point where people here look at others, saying: ‘OK, I think I’ve got it bad but that man over there is eating from a garbage can.’ This is going to be our reality for many years, and I think the worst is yet to come.” |
| His parents had lived through extreme post-war poverty and knew how to live very frugally. He felt the younger generation now felt condemned to live through an economic crisis that could stretch on for decades. | His parents had lived through extreme post-war poverty and knew how to live very frugally. He felt the younger generation now felt condemned to live through an economic crisis that could stretch on for decades. |
| This crisis has gone on for years and, for my generation, it feels like it’s going to go on forever | This crisis has gone on for years and, for my generation, it feels like it’s going to go on forever |
| With the Greek crisis now dragging on longer than the first world war, there have been at least a dozen emergency summits since 2009. The nation has so often been described as perched “on the edge of a cliff” and “staring into the abyss” that it has become part of the depressing new normality, just like cash-strapped hospitals, rocketing unemployment or the families with children living in flats with no running water or electricity because they cannot pay the bills. | With the Greek crisis now dragging on longer than the first world war, there have been at least a dozen emergency summits since 2009. The nation has so often been described as perched “on the edge of a cliff” and “staring into the abyss” that it has become part of the depressing new normality, just like cash-strapped hospitals, rocketing unemployment or the families with children living in flats with no running water or electricity because they cannot pay the bills. |
| Thessaloniki, which has long had the country’s highest jobless rates, now has 65% youth unemployment and around a third of the general workforce out of work. But unemployment is only part of the picture. Greece has around 1.5 million jobless, but a further one million people get up every day to go to work in jobs where bosses fail to pay them promptly. Salaries can trickle in three months late or even take a year to arrive in bank accounts. This means half the Greek workforce has no income. | Thessaloniki, which has long had the country’s highest jobless rates, now has 65% youth unemployment and around a third of the general workforce out of work. But unemployment is only part of the picture. Greece has around 1.5 million jobless, but a further one million people get up every day to go to work in jobs where bosses fail to pay them promptly. Salaries can trickle in three months late or even take a year to arrive in bank accounts. This means half the Greek workforce has no income. |
| Membership Event: Guardian Newsroom: Can Greece be saved? | Membership Event: Guardian Newsroom: Can Greece be saved? |
| Meanwhile, whole families can depend for survival on grandparents’ shrinking pensions. While the emergency talks focus on immediate debt and repayments, many Greeks feel that little will help their daily struggle in the grim economic landscape. The uncertainty of the recent months, with people still unsure whether there could be capital controls, have left businesses in limbo, worried about payments to suppliers, and a general mood of exhaustion. | Meanwhile, whole families can depend for survival on grandparents’ shrinking pensions. While the emergency talks focus on immediate debt and repayments, many Greeks feel that little will help their daily struggle in the grim economic landscape. The uncertainty of the recent months, with people still unsure whether there could be capital controls, have left businesses in limbo, worried about payments to suppliers, and a general mood of exhaustion. |
| “The problem is that all these solutions being offered are not long-term solutions, and in the long term there seems to be no way out of the mess of a constantly shrinking economy,” said Eleanna Ioannidou, an environmental lawyer and Green councillor in Thessaloniki. “All the solutions are based on how to get more money not how are we going to create money and create our own growth in the Greek economy.” | “The problem is that all these solutions being offered are not long-term solutions, and in the long term there seems to be no way out of the mess of a constantly shrinking economy,” said Eleanna Ioannidou, an environmental lawyer and Green councillor in Thessaloniki. “All the solutions are based on how to get more money not how are we going to create money and create our own growth in the Greek economy.” |
| She said she felt that in a sense, despite round after round of crisis talks, the country was still stuck in its old ways. She said she found it disappointing that the radical left Syriza, for example, had not increased taxes on the church. | She said she felt that in a sense, despite round after round of crisis talks, the country was still stuck in its old ways. She said she found it disappointing that the radical left Syriza, for example, had not increased taxes on the church. |
| With four children and a husband who is unemployed, Ioannidou has had her electricity cut off twice because she couldn’t pay the bill. She used to work mostly in environmental law, but said clients now couldn’t afford to pay or to fight big corporations, and she was handling an increasing number of divorce cases, particularly couples with young children whose breakups were rooted in financial trouble and the economic crisis. | With four children and a husband who is unemployed, Ioannidou has had her electricity cut off twice because she couldn’t pay the bill. She used to work mostly in environmental law, but said clients now couldn’t afford to pay or to fight big corporations, and she was handling an increasing number of divorce cases, particularly couples with young children whose breakups were rooted in financial trouble and the economic crisis. |
| Related: Creditors offer Greece six-month bailout reprieve as Tsipras weighs response | Related: Creditors offer Greece six-month bailout reprieve as Tsipras weighs response |
| Her husband used to run a small hotel catering to Greek tourists on the island of Evia, but after a drop in internal tourism by Greeks it had made no profit for the last three years and now only opens two months a year. “I don’t know how much longer Greeks can hang on,” she said. | |
| Panos Gramatikopoulous, 19, a politics student from Lefkas, shrugged at the thought of another few days of summit wrangling. “This crisis has gone on for years and, for my generation, it feels like it’s going to go on forever. I can’t see an end to it,” he said. | Panos Gramatikopoulous, 19, a politics student from Lefkas, shrugged at the thought of another few days of summit wrangling. “This crisis has gone on for years and, for my generation, it feels like it’s going to go on forever. I can’t see an end to it,” he said. |
| “The economic crisis is present everywhere, every day in anything I do – from shopping to studying. I do follow the talks but we’ve been here so many times before and no solution seems to be an improvement on the last.” | “The economic crisis is present everywhere, every day in anything I do – from shopping to studying. I do follow the talks but we’ve been here so many times before and no solution seems to be an improvement on the last.” |