The abject surrender of the Greek government demonstrates the growing irrelevance of democracy, not only in Europe, but across the West:
Less than a week after they triumphantly gave international creditors a bloody nose by rejecting a harsh austerity plan, angry and bewildered Greeks are left wondering how they now find themselves swallowing an even worse deal.
In a nationwide referendum just last Sunday, nearly 62 per cent of voters rejected an austerity deal that had been offered by the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.
There were scenes of wild jubilation across the country.
In Athens’ Syntagma Square, the Greek answer to Trafalgar Square, thousands of joyous ‘No’ voters hugged and kissed each other, waved Greece’s national flag and swigged cans of beer.
“It was an expression of the will of the people,” Manos Agelidis, 27, a biomedical engineering PhD student, told The Telegraph as he celebrated with friends.
Fast forward just a few days, however, and Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, did the unthinkable.
On Thursday, with a deadline imposed by the creditors looming, he buckled.
His radical Left-wing Syriza government, which came to power in January on the unrealistic promise of putting an end to austerity and the country’s six-year long economic nightmare, put forward a plan that promises spending cuts of €12 billion in return for a third international bail-out, this time worth €53.5 billion (£38.4bn).
The European Union is not only post-democratic, it is openly and avowedly anti-democratic. It has continued to override the expressed will of the Irish, French, British, Italian, and Greek people by putting pressure on the elected representatives to subvert the will of the people.
This is why direct democracy is the only form of democracy that may still be considered viable. The idea of representative democracy is that the limits it places on democracy will be in the long term interests of the nation, but the way it has easily been subverted in the interests of the financial powers demonstrates that representative democracy is actually more susceptible to corruption and subversion than direct democracy.
Mob rule has its own flaws, but it is certainly to be preferred to creditor rule, or daneistocracy. And that is what representative democracy now amounts to, as the elected representatives of countries such as Greece agree to give up their national sovereignty just to keep the credit money spigot flowing.
Zerohedge add that the Eurozone is no longer a voluntary union:
Despite the euphoria in global equity markets, The FT’s Wolfgang Munchau – once one of the keenest euro enthusiasts – warns regime change is coming in Europe. The actions of the creditors has “destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union,” Munchau exclaims, fearing they have “demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order.” He concludes rather ominously, “we will soon be asking ourselves whether this new eurozone, in which the strong push around the weak, can be sustainable.”