The first and most essential reason is that the proposed program is simultaneously inhumane and ineffectual. Both of these adjectives are supported by a wealth of evidence. In the first place, in 5 years we lost 25% of our GDP, our rate of unemployment went from 7 to 27.7% (60% for young people), wages and pensions were reduced by 35% and more than 6000 of our fellow human beings committed suicide because of the crisis.
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The situation has deteriorated so much that it bears comparison with the effects of a war without a war. We have devised a situation of disastrous peace. This assertion is not just abstractly humanitarian: we point to international treaties which protect peoples from humanitarian crisis brought about by debt repayment, as the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muižnieks also highlights in his report. We don’t know if there exists some economic outcome which might prompt someone to claim that such sacrifices have been worth it, but it is clear that they haven’t even been good business. The question of the debt’s viability amounts to a tabletop exercise, where permanently unattainable goals are set over and over again. The result is even more austerity, in perpetuity.

Do we have the moral right to refuse to pay?

We believe that we have the moral right to survive economically, without sinking even more deeply into poverty.

The lending countries and those of their citizens who are paying attention to the accusations being levelled at our own country need to listen to us. The handoff of lending obligations from private banks to tax-paying citizens was a policy decision. For this the Greeks were not to blame; it’s just that banks have the bad habit of loving capitalism only amidst profitability, not in the face of losses. Moreover, of the amounts earmarked for Greece, only 10% made it to Greeks. The rest was credited directly to the lenders. Our country essentially accumulated debt so as to repay pre-existing debt.

But Germany made millions from the Greek crisis, by issuing bonds, in interest, and through risk premiums (credit default swap/CDS transactions). At the time when they were negotiating with us – without really giving in on anything – they reaped the fruits of the Greek economy’s dissolution, which they themselves had caused by means of delay and through the disappearance of 60% of Greek deposits into European (primarily German) banks.  Finally, loans yield profits precisely because they entail risk. The risk is that the borrower might not be able to repay the loan. Not because the borrower doesn’t want to, but – as in our case – because the borrower has been reduced to poverty.

The IMF long knew that the debt was not viable, and that it needed to undergo a haircut (information kept hidden during the negotiations). This means, quite simply, that we cannot vote for the implementation of a program in which they will seek to impose measures on us that will not result in the end of the crisis. Let us therefore hold out to our lenders an unexpected gift: let us provide them with the political legitimization for the implementation of policy that does not allow us to mend our economy.

The fact that this decision is being made democratically may be of little significance for some people. They believe that it is their money, and thus that the issue of whether it will be paid back to them is not a matter for a national democratic decision.

Yet this is not the issue: the IMF has a longstanding tradition of collaboration with antidemocratic regimes. And the EU is being evermore given over to unelected representatives who make life-or-death decisions without democratic legitimacy. Just as when they were asked why the Greek minister was not invited to the meeting of the Eurogroup, and they responded that the Eurogroup is an informal body. That, however, does not hinder it from determining our fortunes. Thus when it comes to imposing harsh measures, at some moment a decision may also be made to consult with those who will be subject to them.

It is said, quite reasonably, that the referendum fails to mention an alternative proposal. Which measures will be implemented once the ones put forward by the troika have been rejected? Nothing will be over after the likely victory of the NO vote; once again we will have ahead of us a very difficult struggle against people who speak for the dead-end policies of austerity.

Despite the fact that the referendum calls us to vote YES or NO to a specific package of measures, many European leaders – including the political powers who support a YES vote in Greece – have transformed the issue into one of whether Greece will remain in our common currency.

The only topic of conversation in Greece is the closure of the banks and the imposition of capital controls. This was a decision imposed on our country by the ECB the week that the referendum was announced, obviously with the aim of creating a climate of suffocation. The central bank had been facing the same risk one week earlier, when it was using 5-7 billion euros to fund the disappearance of capital from the Greek banking system into the European and – especially – German banks.

And yet those who support the YES vote call on us to vote for a reduction in the heating oil allowance that was granted to our country’s poorest citizens after three people lost their lives in recent years trying to heat up their homes with braziers. To accept the 50% reduction of the social welfare state. To lose 1/3 of free prescriptions from the health system. To accept automatic seizures from wage accounts even of 500 euros and to negate the protection of homes in cases where loans had been taken out in a different time, when Greece’s GDP was 25% bigger and there weren’t 1.5 million people unemployed and 3 million people living below the poverty line in a country of just 10 million.

None of the above is mentioned in the public discourse, neither in Greece nor internationally. The only topic of conversation is how Greece could have dared to delay the negotiations with its obstinacy.

We therefore insist on answering the question as it is posed on the ballot, and on regarding the issue of remaining or not in a common currency to be of secondary importance in relation to the people’s actual living conditions.

Whatever reassurances we receive from the government, this struggle does not end with a single decision, and it will be neither easy nor quick. All that we can seek is not to lay down our arms before trying. Because a YES vote means that they’re asking us to gather wood for the cauldron they’ll be cooking us in. A NO vote means that we insist on asserting that there is indeed scope for a people to shape, with political means, their prospects for a better life.

The accusation launched against the NO side is that it is a vote for isolation, as opposed to the YES that is a vote for Europe. But no one has the privilege of articulating the true Europe. Europe is contradictory: it consists of movements, left and rightwing parties, of social services but also of technocrats, callous banks and economic cutthroats, or just respectable conservative ministers.

Amidst these circumstances, we are choosing sides. This choice is infinitely more critical than that of abstract “Europeanism” or “anti-Europeanism.”

With a NO vote we’re not bidding farewell to Europe. We’re choosing to stay in it with dignity.

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