The debt crisis rocking their country has brought Greeks to the startling realisation that life could irreversibly change as their government ponders seeking outside help with its loans. Less than a decade ago, Greeks joined a newly-minted, powerful single European currency that promised prosperity and affordable European Union imports that previously carried a high cost in Greek drachmas.
Times were good, for a while. Though the cost of an average basket of goods did not decline as hoped, cheap money gave rise to a generation of Greek customers accustomed to buying everything on credit, from cars and homes to summer holidays.
But easy living frequently came at the expense of a state that had to sustain a growing army of civil servants appointed by vote-hungry politicians and was chronically short of tax and social payments.
Fast forward to this week, when the Greek government set the stage for a possible bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund after being forced to borrow money on world markets at stubbornly high and potentially untenable interest rates.
"We are making all the preparatory moves" required for a possible request, Prime Minister George Papandreou told lawmakers in Athens, referring to fall-back loans running into the tens of billions of euros.
With the global financial crisis casting a pitiless spotlight on sovereign debt, Greece has found itself at the mercy of international markets as it struggles to reduce a debt of nearly 300 billion euros (407 billion dollars).
Many Greeks say the gravity of the crisis is an overdue wake-up call for the country, which has lived beyond its means for years.
"Sooner or later the government will have to adopt measures which seem like science fiction today in the Greek political world. It ought to start preparing public opinion and its own cadres," liberal Kathimerini daily said on Friday. "The time for gabble has passed, the time of painful reality is coming," it said.
For a few, the government's plight has even elicited sympathy. "I've been skimping on my taxes for years but I won't this time round. Given the situation, I just can't bring myself to," says Yiannis, a 70-year-old works contractor who declined to give his last name.
Analysts note that a growing segment of Greek society has come to understand that major sacrifices will be needed to set the economy on the right track. "A large section of the Greek public has accepted measures and policies that would have appeared inconceivable a while back," Thomas Gerakis, head of polling company Marc, told AFP.
The government has already muscled through sweeping cuts in civil servant pay and benefits, and next plans to overhaul the country's cash-strapped pensions systems after announcing increases in the average retirement age. This week it passed in parliament a new tax law outlawing major business cash transactions in a bid to stamp out endemic tax evasion.
The law also boosts taxation on the real estate and property income of the powerful Orthodox Church of Greece, which has long resisted state levies. The austerity cuts have sparked a series of strikes and unions intend to keep up the pressure.
"We will not accept salary cuts and a further downgrading of the social state," the leading Greek union GSEE said on Friday, warning that pension changes would raise a "social storm."
The prime minister has pledged to use the crisis to clean up fiscal mismanagement in the public sector, insisting in recent interviews that corruption is not "imprinted" in the Greek character. But decades of suspicion towards the bloated Greek state, coupled with a tradition of judicial impunity for major offenders who have in the past included even senior ministers, lead many to doubt that the government's efforts will succeed in changing society as Papandreou intends. One measure broadly derided was the finance ministry's recent call on taxpayers to collect receipts worth thousands of euros in order to have access to tax exemptions that were automatic in the past. "They tell us to collect receipts for our taxes but it will be a waste of time, you'll see," says Stathis Zalparinis, a central Athens locksmith. "One person I know asked for a gas receipt from a petrol station, and they gave him one for beer," he told.
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