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Greeks Welcome Debt Deal, but Reservations Linger Greek Merchants Fear a Way of Life Is Disappearing
(about 11 hours later)
ATHENS — Jubilation, almost immediately followed by wariness, filled the streets as Greeks learned of the agreement in Brussels early Monday. ATHENS — Fifteen years ago, Spyros Kyriakopoulos and his partner took over a small pastry shop on a side street near downtown Athens and began selling the braided loaves called tsourekia and traditional Greek dipping cookies.
Many people were having their midmorning cafe frappé, while others were standing in the ubiquitous bank lines, as the news spread that after a week of agony — a tense referendum, sparring political rallies, bank closings — and a weekend of all-nighters in the Greek Parliament and among the eurozone leaders, a deal to address the country’s debt crisis and keep it in the eurozone had been reached. At the time, Athens was booming, the Greek standard of living had leapt ahead in just one generation, and Mr. Kyriakopoulos’s customers were about to become even more prosperous as Greece joined the euro currency.
The mood was ambivalent, but still hopeful. Even some critics of the maverick young prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, now granted him a “Nixon in China” moment, suggesting that having come from the left, he was the right person to reach a deal with an intransigent, fiscally conservative Germany and to dismantle an entrenched Greek system of patronage, tax evasion and bureaucracy. On Monday, as the Greek government reluctantly agreed to a deal to address the country’s debt crisis and keep it in the eurozone, people like Mr. Kyriakopoulos were bracing themselves for a wide range of economic changes that are certain to touch on virtually every aspect of Greek life.
Others said they worried that, despite some compromise, the next few years would prove punishing for ordinary Greeks. The changes surpass government austerity measures like reeling in pensions and raising the valued-added tax, and include elements like the deregulation of closed markets and professions.
Miltiades Macrygiannis, an antiques dealer, said he was relieved Greece’s departure from the eurozone appeared to have been avoided. But he was also disgusted. “It’s simple, we wasted five months,” Mr. Macrygiannis said. In the end, he said, the austerity measures that had to be taken appeared worse than what the creditors had been willing to give five months ago, when the new Greek government took office. For Mr. Kyriakopoulos, it means he would no longer be protected from competitors by a special license he holds to sell bread — one of many changes he saw as suffocating not just to his profession, but to a way of life.
But many others saw the glass half-full. They said that the tumult of the last week had served a valuable purpose: It had woken up the rest of Europe and the world to the fragility of the European Union, and the urgency of working collectively to preserve it. It had also fostered a sense of unity among the Greek people, which would make them more willing to make sacrifices for the common good. “Not as a professional, but as a person, I think it’s better for the bakery to sell bread, for us to have pastry, for the supermarket to sell its products,” said Mr. Kyriakopoulos, 49, a soft-spoken man in a brown apron with gray hair tied back in a ponytail and several small rings in one earlobe.
Ippolitos Papantoniou, 55, a businessman, said he was depressed by the prospect of more austerity, after having gone through five years of tough measures with rising unemployment and poverty. Greece is a land of small businesses. On just about every block, there is a carefully tended pharmacy marked by a green cross, a florist, a bakery, a pastry store, a fruit and vegetable shop and often a butcher shop.
“I feel very bad, because fundamentally we’ve been humiliated, and we are going somewhere that is not sustainable,” Mr. Papantoniou said. “The austerity will begin again. I don’t know the details of the deal, but of what I have seen, I see that we have a dead end in front of us.” More than a third of Greeks, by some estimates, are self-employed, a way of life that suits their anti-authoritarian natures and independent streaks. But it is also a way of making a living that many critics say has preserved the culture of the Ottoman bazaar, where bargaining on price is a good-natured sport and anyone who does not evade at least some taxes is a sucker.
Mr. Papantoniou said he had kept on his 72 employees in spite of shrinking business because he did not want to be responsible for adding to the 25 percent unemployment rate. But he questioned how much longer he would be able to do it with deepening austerity measures. During the banking crisis, he has been paying them electronically, but they are not able to access more than their 60-euro a day allowance. To the austerity proponents of the eurozone, of course, seeking to collect every penny of taxes and to open Greek business to the international marketplace, the legacy of the Ottoman bazaar is anathema.
He said he did not blame Germany. “Germans are watching out for their interests,” Mr. Papantoniou said. “I hope those who brought us here will pay — the Greeks who acted like Germans, who took their money out of the banks, who evaded taxes, who got welfare grants without being entitled, who are on political party lists, who have benefited while bringing us to the point where we are today.” The new austerity package that the Greek government agreed to in Brussels on Monday includes measures that would allow stores to open on Sunday, deregulate milk and bread, open closed professions, and seek to provide one-stop shopping for services that now force Greeks to navigate multiple offices of the government’s byzantine and overstuffed bureaucracy.
On the positive side, he said, what he described as Germany’s imperialist colors had been revealed, and that might help other weaker countries in the eurozone. “I hope that because of what happened in Greece, the rest of the world will wake up and realize what we are dealing with,” Mr. Papantoniou said. “After that, good luck and courage to all of us.” Perhaps it will all turn out for the best, Greeks said Monday as they absorbed the specifics of the new package, but they said they feared that it would change Greek culture from a highly personal, neighborhood-based society to one dominated by faceless corporate interests.
Some critics in the political classes have accused Mr. Tsipras of executing “toumbes” — “somersaults” — over the last week, first calling on Greeks to vote no in a referendum on the creditors’ bailout conditions, then agreeing to conditions that may well be worse than the ones they repudiated in the vote. ”We are a family, neighborhood, personal business,” said Marilia Skarlatou, looking immaculate in her white coat, at the counter of a corner pharmacy. “I know I can tell my customer what not to buy, because I know what other drugs he takes and I know his history.”
But on the streets of Athens on Monday, many ordinary Greeks saw those reversals as an expression of pragmatism. “It was a retreat in many areas, that’s just the reality,” said Yiannis Kotsis-Giannarakis, 56, general manager of the Hellenic Association of Mobile Application Companies, who had voted no in the referendum. Unlike CVS or Walgreens in America, she said, she sought to win return customers through intimacy and personal service.
“But sometimes doing and accepting a retreat in order to save more important issues is part of the wise policy,” he said. “A somersault means he changed his mind willingly. This, of course, was not a willing situation. He was forced to do it, knowing the consequences if he didn’t. He chose to put the interests of the country as they were understood by the majority of the Greek people above his government program and his party position.” Her colleague, Anastasia Goumenou, agreed, but noted that there could be a silver lining in the opening of professions, in that competition might lower the cost of doing business, and people like her might be able to afford their own small businesses.
Mr. Kotsis-Giannarakis said it was too soon to know how history would judge the Tsipras government. “The past five days were very intense, and sometimes strong feelings are not healthy,” he said. But he echoed the view that Greece, by standing up for itself, had changed the picture for all of Europe. “The main issue is that five months ago, almost nobody was talking about that Europe needs to change course,” he said. “That’s No. 1 for me.” “We have a secret hope that there will be opportunities for those who don’t have so much capital to open their own place,” Ms. Goumenou said.
Filippos Sanas, 35, a doctor in a private hospital, said that he was relieved there had been an agreement, but that it would be hard for him to pass judgment on its merits before understanding the details. On the other hand, she said, wages would almost certainly drop under the new austerity measures, and people would no longer be able to afford little luxuries like organic hair dye and fancy lip gloss that pharmacies now depend on for their bottom lines.
The most important thing now, he said, was not to assign blame but to find a way to move forward. One of the most radical changes proposed by the European Union would be the liberalization of Sunday trading laws. As it is, Greece comes almost to a standstill on Sundays. In the summer, people crowd the beaches and sit on their balconies. Some large chains, like Ikea, stay open, but only on selected Sundays.
“Did we have to go through all this, the banks closing and the rest?” he wondered. “If there were mistakes, we have to learn from them. But to do that, we have to be able to achieve some unified state in the Greek government so we can move forward together, to stop the petty disagreements between parties over who did this and who did that, and to find the best solution for Greece and for the Greek people.” Alexandra Yousef, 22, a saleswoman at an international discount clothing chain, said she would be sad if Greece lost its Sunday day of repose.
Stathis N. Kalyvas, a political-science professor at Yale teaching in Greece for the summer, said there was no doubt that the Greek economy was in worse shape than it was five months ago. But perhaps, he said, Greece needed to go through all the turmoil to shatter the illusion that the country could return to past prosperity without making structural changes in its economy. “All these years we’ve been accustomed to Sunday being a family day,” she said. Her employer, whom she asked not to name so as not to violate company rules about public speech, required her to work the odd Sunday and be paid overtime for that, she said.
“That perspective was delegitimized because the chief proponent, the actual prime minister of the party, is going to implement all the necessary changes,” Mr. Kalyvas said. He compared the scenario to Nixon opening China or to de Gaulle deciding to give up Algeria. “But it doesn’t whet my appetite for more,” Ms. Yousef said. ”Sunday is a family day, a day of God, because in theory we are a religiously observant people.”
“No doubt the austerity is going to be harsh,” Mr. Kalyvas said. “But Tsipras is still very popular with the people, so I think he has the ability to sell this project with his constituency, at least the bulk of his constituency, because they trust him.” She added that the opening of businesses on Sundays would help only rich people. “Those rules were started to help small stores, but in reality they don’t,” she said. “People go to the big stores anyway, and being open on Sunday would just give those with money another day to scatter it around. I’m a person who needs money; that’s why I work. But I would not prefer it this way.”
Mr. Kyriakopoulos said he understood what the Europeans were talking about, because as a pastry maker, he needed to have a special license to sell bread, which he does not make on the premises.
However, he said, liberalizing those laws would not help him. “I already have the permit,” he said. “I don’t know the details, but it sounds possible that any store, even the newsstand on the corner, would be able to sell bread.” That, he said, would be bad for his business, which has already suffered over the last five years of austerity.
Over those years, he said, as Billie Holiday’s voice wafted over the sound system, he expanded from selling tsourekia and cookies to ice cream, tarts and a variety of other pastries. People had less money to spend, and were spending less, and it was the only way for him to make ends meet, he said.
Supermarkets have already been allowed to sell bread, and that has cut into the profession he has been pursuing for 30 years. “Just a few years ago, people could still afford to buy a lot, and there weren’t so many chain stores,” he said.
A way of living, he said, may be on the way out.