Tsipras in El Pais: Austerity is destroying us like a war

Fiscal austerity has caused an economic disaster on a scale equivalent of a war while it has failed its objectives, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras argues in his article in «El Pais».

"Overcoming the crisis in Europe and saving the common currency requires equal cooperation, democracy and first of all political and ideological defeat of adhering to the doctrine of austerity," Tsipras states inter alia, in his article entitled "The Alliance of the European South," and characterizes the concretion of a broad alliance of peoples and progressive forces in southern Europe as a "strategic goal".

He adds that the Greek experience is an example of a wider problem: the effort made by a dogmatic, political and economic elite to overcome endogenous institutional and economic imbalances of the European monetary union with unilateral compression of wages and living standards of the countries of southern Europe.

And in order to highlight the devastating effects of austerity in society, he makes a specific reference to the 6 million unemployed in Spain, and in the course of Portugal, Ireland and Italy.

He also says that no successful monetary union in modern economic history has attempted to, and in fact cannot, correct endogenous macroeconomic imbalances by imposing an asymmetric and destructive austerity against its deficient country-members.

Austerity is a fundamental political choice and its reversal requires its defeat in the field of politics, Tsipras adds and declares that SYRIZA’s strategic objective is to contribute to the development of a genuine and substantive dialogue with all Left and progressive forces of Europe "to jointly form an effective line of resistance to neo-liberal elites and a positive proposal for a way around which will allow the widest possible alliance of the forces of the people."