THE unelected and EU-imposed Greek ‘interim’ PM, Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank who played a major part in getting Greece into the single currency and who is not even an MP, was sworn in yesterday as the Greek Prime Minister along with the personnel of his National Unity government, made up largely of members of the ‘left’ Pasok, and the right New Democracy and Loas parties.
Papademos and his ‘transitional government’ has only one mission. That is, to push through the EU-imposed savage austerity measures to make the Greek workers and small farmers pay for the crisis of capitalism caused by the bankers and bosses.
There is no date set for a Greek general election. This is due to take place once the austerity measures have been accepted by the Greek parliament and are being imposed on the Greek people.
Since the Greek masses are violently opposed to these measures, they will be resisted all the way by a revolutionary struggle of at least 90 per cent of the Greek population, led by the working class.
The prospect, therefore, is that we have seen the last of the Greek bourgeois democratic elections, and that this ‘transitional regime’ will act as a vehicle behind which will assemble the Greek colonels and the fascists to have at the working class in huge class battles on the streets.
Greek bourgeois democracy has been snuffed out by the Merkel-Sarkozy axis, who were horrified and shocked when the outgoing Greek Premier, Papandreou, announced that he was putting their austerity programme to a referendum and that the Greek people were going to decide the issue in a democratic ballot.
They insisted that the essence of the bourgeois order is the dictatorship of the capitalist class. There was to be no choice given to the workers. Papandreou’s mind was changed within 48 hours and his political career terminated.
It is now recognised throughout Europe that the measures required to save European capitalism are so drastic that they can never be carried out by some consensus – by a democratic and elected political party.
The issue therefore facing the Greek workers and youth is building up the revolutionary leadership to organise the socialist revolution that will place the working class in power and signal the beginning of the European socialist revolution.
The unthinkable alternative of a failure to carry out this revolutionary strategy is the Greek ‘transitional’ regime passing the power to a new regime of colonels.
The same revolutionary issue is being placed in front of the working class of all of the EU states, from Italy to the UK, France and Ireland.
In Italy, the bourgeois senate is now poised to vote on austerity measures designed to avoid a bailout at the cost of the jobs, wages, pensions and education of the working class, the middle class and the youth.
Once the measures are approved, with the lower house voting at the weekend, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is due to resign.
A Greek-style unelected technocratic government, led by former EU competition commissioner Mario Monti, is being created. Monti has just been made a senator for life by the Italian President, Napolitano, the first President of Italy to have been a member of the Communist Party.
It is certain that an Italian austerity programme will be met by a gigantic revolutionary fury, as will its French and British versions.
In Britain, the ‘democratic’ coalition has just been revealing to the working class and the students the plastic bullets, water cannon, taser weapons, and armoured vehicles that it has equipped its state, its bodies of armed men, with to tackle the masses.
They have dispensed with the velvet glove and are prepared to use mailed fist, from plastic bullets to new anti-union laws, to further undermine basic rights and bring in state dictatorship.
All over Europe the tocsin is being sounded.
Its message is that the European Union of the capitalists is being destroyed by the crisis of the EU ruling classes and must be replaced by socialist revolutions that will usher in the Socialist United States of Europe.
This will replace bankrupt capitalism and its bankrupt EU with a socialist planned economy across Europe that will be organised to satisfy people’s needs, not provide super-profits for the bosses.
