Giorgos Kraloglou, a columnist for the Greek financial newspaper Capital.gr, has cast doubt on economic pledges made by Greece's government and opposition parties at this year's Thessaloniki International Fair, arguing that neither side fully controls whether the promises will be kept.
In a column published Monday, Kraloglou wrote that this year the fair had made things harder for everyone involved. The government now has to prove that what it said will actually happen, he wrote, while the opposition has to show it means what it promised. But he argued the outcome is not entirely in their hands, so long as Greek energy and tax policy remain built on structures of state control, and so long as the country's debt keeps moving with the ups and downs of the value of money on European markets.
Energy pledges called into question
Kraloglou focused first on energy, calling it a structural problem born alongside Greece's financial crisis and rooted in the country's dependence on imported gas, a dependence he said had been ignored, above all in relation to domestic production, for at least three years.
He wrote that government officials were wrong to expect a 30 percent reduction to offset wider market pressures, or to leave ordinary Greeks feeling that everything was fine with the government. Complaints will follow, he predicted, mainly because measures will not arrive when they are supposed to and will likely be applied in ways that fail to justify today's cheers and applause.
According to Kraloglou, the picture is still fluid. The real increases in the cost of imported energy, on which Greece depends heavily because its own reserves do not allow it to keep prices low, have not yet fully, and rather catastrophically, shown themselves, he wrote. He urged a close look at the supply sources feeding the domestic system, arguing the hopes voiced by officials are not built on grounds solid enough to reassure the public and are not convincing. Things are not as optimistic as some government figures try to present them, he wrote, adding that competition over energy is intensifying and will keep doing so, while domestic production is in disarray, and not without reason.
Industry demands and opposition promises
Kraloglou said industry would not be satisfied merely by assurances contained in government announcements. That gap, he argued, is why opposition parties, particularly the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, known as PASOK, used their programmatic declarations at the fair to court industry directly, laying out its demands and pledging, at least in promises, to meet almost all of them.
The Thessaloniki International Fair is an annual trade exhibition that has become the traditional platform for the prime minister's main economic policy address at the start of the political season each September, with opposition parties customarily using the same event to set out their own programs. PASOK is one of Greece's long-established political parties, historically associated with the center-left.
Tax benefits and funding gaps
Turning to taxation, Kraloglou wrote that many popular and welcome benefits had been promoted at the fair, but that their implementation carried gaps officials say will be filled. He argued those gaps run through state finances across all the tax cuts the government wants to make, at a time when it is also maintaining a state apparatus he described as gargantuan. The two goals, he wrote, cannot both be achieved.
Lenders and Brussels reaction
Kraloglou predicted Greece would hear the same criticism from its lenders, forecasting that Brussels would soon respond to the government with a qualified answer, agreeing in principle but attaching conditions. He wrote that the European Union's debt technocrats do not factor the opposition into their calculations the same way, because lenders know that if opposition parties entered a coalition government they would reverse the tax and spending pledges made at the fair, while at the same time reassuring lenders of their willingness to cooperate as Greece's coalition government, which would mean agreeing to shrink the state. That, he noted, has happened before, at least in words.
