From WSWS
Wednesday’s vote in the Greek parliament, in which Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras rammed through over 900 pages of European Union (EU) austerity measures dictated by Berlin, completes a devastating betrayal of the Greek people by Tsipras’s Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party.
Virtually overnight, Syriza has embraced austerity as if it were the most natural policy in the world, trampling its electoral pledges to end the EU Memorandum and the 61 percent “no” vote against EU austerity in the July 5 referendum. Its agenda of social cuts, reactionary legal “reforms” and privatizations totaling tens of billions of euros will devastate Greece. The consequences will be horrific for millions of Greek workers already facing hunger, joblessness and lack of medical care.
Tsipras, who was marketed as a left-wing firebrand during the January elections, has proven to be a garden-variety, free-market reactionary. Press analyses are already comparing him to François Mitterrand, the Socialist Party leader elected as president of France on a national reform program in 1981, who then repudiated his program less than two years later, launching an “austerity turn” to attack the working class. As filthy as Mitterrand’s role was, a more accurate comparison for Tsipras, in terms of the starkness of his policies, would be another French politician: Pierre Laval, who went from a nominal socialist to serving as the right-hand man of Marshal Philippe Pétain under the Nazi Occupation.
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