AFP
Athens
Greeks took to beaches, cafes and churches yesterday, just like they do every week – but the mood was downbeat as the country teetered on the brink of a default that could see it crash out of the euro.
“Everyone is very sad, very upset and depressed,” said 42-year-old Anna Apostolopoulos as she sipped a coffee on the terrace outside the trendy Balux cafe in Glyfada, a well-heeled resort half an hour from Athens.
It will be a “miracle”, she added, if Greeks vote in favour of the creditors’ bailout proposal when it goes to a referendum next Sunday – and she blasted her government as “immature children” for putting it to a public vote in the first place.
“They are terrible negotiators,” she said. “The prime minister is very irresponsible. He was elected to make decisions.”
Greeks were nevertheless refusing to let the crisis ruin their weekend entirely, and all the deckchairs on the beach were occupied.
“Yesterday I didn’t want to go to the beach,” Apostolopoulos said. “I watched TV all day and I felt down. But I promised my son we would go, so we went.”
A short stroll away, laboratory chemist Joanna Avayanos said that she was worried by talk of a return to Greece’s former currency, the drachma.
There have been queues at some ATMs amid growing signs of a bank run – and like other jittery compatriots worried that the government may introduce capital controls, Avayanos has been trying to withdraw cash.
“Yesterday with my mother we went to two cash machines and it said there was a problem,” said Avayanos as she walked her daughter along the beach in a stroller. “In the supermarket, we could not use our card.”
Since Tsipras announced the referendum early on Saturday, about €1.3bn ($1.45bn) have been withdrawn from Greek banks, according to the head of the bank workers’ union Stavros Koukos.
According to an anonymous banking source in Greece, only 40% of the nation’s cash machines currently have money in them – purely because they cannot be restocked with banknotes quickly enough.
Tsipras’ governing radical left party Syriza, which rose to power in January on an anti-austerity ticket, slammed the creditors’ latest offer, arguing that it would hurt workers, pensioners, young people and farmers, and has urged Greeks to vote against it in the referendum on July 5.
But Andreas Nikolopoulos, waiting outside a church in Athens with her daughter, described the referendum issue as “tricky”.
“It (would be) a yes to Europe, not a yes to austerity measures,” she explained.
She added that a Greek exit from the eurozone would be “painful, very painful. I have family in Australia, Canada ... I have a job opportunity in Munich. But the neighbours, my friends, my family, are trapped”.
Among other demands, Greece’s creditors want public sector wage cuts and higher taxes on food and restaurant meals, in return for five-month, €12bn ($13.4bn) extension of the bailout programme.
Retired nurse Fotini expressed anger at six years of economic downturn and austerity measures demanded by previous EU-IMF bailouts, including cuts to her pension.
“We have had too much (of the) bad times,” the 76-year-old told AFP as she sat on a bench in Syntagma Square in central Athens, waiting for a friend.
“The money the government gives me is down every month,” she said in reference to her pension, an area which creditors had targeted for cutbacks. “Greek people want good lives, work ... we have too many men and women without jobs.”
By the time Greeks vote next Sunday on whether to back the proposed bailout package, Greece may have already defaulted on the IMF payment that is due tomorrow.
Marina Stoianovitch, 17, said people would simply have to put on a brave face.
“We are going to be a different country. We are going to control our economy,” she said as she stood outside a church in Athens. “This is not good, but I don’t see another way. We will find a way.”