With a third year of harsh austerity measures in return for international bailouts in effect, a survey has found 94 percent of Greeks are against the conditions, although they continue to back the government which imposed them.
The poll taken for SKAI TV and the newspaper Kathimerini was, as is often the case in Greece, contradictory with Greeks not wanting austerity but wanting the bailout monies keeping the country’s economy alive and saying they want to stay in the Eurozone.
When austerity began in 2010, 30 percent of Greeks supported it but that was before a long run of pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions pushed 20 percent of them into poverty and closed more than 68,000 businesses while creating 26 percent unemployment and a deep recession.
More Greeks now have a negative view of the European Union and the euro. In February this year, shortly after Greece secured a new bailout package to prop up its weakened economy, 70 percent of respondents expressed a positive view of the EU and the European common currency.
As the Greek government faces more negotiations and more painful policies in order to receive the next bailout loan this spring, 50 percent of respondents don’t want to be aligned with the EU, while 48 percent still back it and 59 percent have a positive view of the euro.
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