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RandySF

(57,595 posts)
Mon Jun 29, 2015, 10:50 PM Jun 2015

Greece’s Troubles Attract Little Sympathy From Poorer Neighbors

SOFIA, Bulgaria — Throughout months of acrimonious haggling with creditors, Greece’s left-wing government has cast itself as the victim of an elitist financial and political order beholden to Europe’s stingy rich, notably Germans.

Some of the most resolute opponents of cutting Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza Party any slack, however, have been Europe’s most deprived nations, places like Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest member, and Baltic States blighted by decades of Soviet-imposed penury.

“We are much poorer than the Greeks, but we have performed reforms,” Rosen Plevneliev, the president of Bulgaria, a northern neighbor of Greece, said in an interview. “When you have a problem, you have to address it and not shift it to Brussels or onto somebody else,” he said, deriding Syriza’s complaints that Europe had let Greece down.

The left-leaning Syriza Party has won applause from a host of mostly small left-wing groups in Europe for bucking what they condemn as the tyranny of greed-fueled markets and elitist technocrats. It has also been cheered by right-wing insurgents like Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France, who rejoice at Greece’s troubles and see them as proof that Europe’s established order is crumbling.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/world/europe/greeces-troubles-attract-little-sympathy-from-poorer-neighbors.html?_r=0

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Greece’s Troubles Attract Little Sympathy From Poorer Neighbors (Original Post) RandySF Jun 2015 OP
Hard to argue with that. nt stevenleser Jun 2015 #1
Not really shenmue Jun 2015 #3
"I can hire half the working class to kill the other half" -Jay Gould Fumesucker Jun 2015 #2
I was assured that the Greeks had nothing. Igel Jun 2015 #4

Igel

(35,191 posts)
4. I was assured that the Greeks had nothing.
Tue Jun 30, 2015, 12:38 AM
Jun 2015

Except for the 1%, of course.

Then again, the assurance came in the form of an article that interviewed one couple. It would have been misleading and manipulative for them to have done anything but produce a fairly typical example instead of an outlier.

I guess, though, they had a couple. And when the headline spoke about "Greeks having nothing" those were the two it had in mind. Whatever the headline is likely going to be interpreted to mean.

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