YV

Before saying more on this, it is important to distinguish between Grexit and Brexit, two situations that people wrongly conflate. Brexit became prominent, and successful, because it was a home-grown campaign, reflecting opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Union from both Left and Right.

Grexit, in contrast, became big news not because of a domestic campaign to get Greece out of the European Union, or the euro, but as a threat from the Troika to a succession of Greek governments: submit your people to stringent austerity and sell us your family silver for a pittance, or we shall reduce you to a pulp by throwing you out of the euro.

So, there are two fundamentally different propositions. One concerns the eurozone and one concerns the European Union. From where I stand, a left-wing campaign to exit the EU is a terrible idea, even if one agrees — as I do — that it was a mistake to enter the EU. Why not exit if you should not have entered? For two good reasons: First, exiting will not return you to where you would have been had you not entered. Secondly, as Brexit has shown, any attempt at Lexit [an exit from the Left] will only blow an inauspicious wind in the sails of right-wing exiters. Turning now to the membership of the euro, which is quite different from membership of the EU; I am vilified by the Right and Syriza as someone prepared to get out of the euro — a charge that I am confessing to. Yes, in 2015 I was prepared to exit the euro (and to reissue a national currency) if the alternative were debt bondage. I still am ready to exit the euro, and so is MeRA25, even though it is not our proposal.

Our proposal, that we put to the electorate with some success last July, was simple: we shall unilaterally (i.e., without negotiating with the Troika) legislate the minimum that needs to be done to stop the majority of Greeks from falling deeper into hopelessness. If the Troika, in its wisdom, chooses to throw us out of the euro, let them do their worst. Even though it will cost us dearly in the short run, in the long run our people will be better off. Moreover, if we believed this and acted defiantly, the Troika would most likely hold back as Grexit would cost them around €1 trillion.

That’s our stance more generally: on policies regarding nonperforming loans, on primary surpluses, on taxation, on what to do with debt, we are not going to negotiate with the Troika or with Brussels. We shall legislate the minimum requirements for making the Greek political economy sustainable again — and leave it to the Troika to decide whether they want to punish us, and themselves, via Grexit. This is not a bluff, for a simple reason: whether they proceed with Grexit or not, the majority of Greeks will be better off in the longer run than if we capitulated like Syriza.

To recap, we are not naïve. We have no doubt that the Troika or Brussels will thoroughly reject every single proposal we make. But we are not going to negotiate them. The mistake in 2015 was to negotiate these things. A MeRA25 government will legislate unilaterally those minimum requirements for making Greece sustainable again. If they want to throw us out of the eurozone for that, we invite them to do so, without ever proposing it ourselves.