Flash floods turn roads to rivers forcing drivers to abandon cars as a fortnight's rain falls in hours with more torrential downpours on way for southern Britain TONIGHT
But across Europe , the legacy of its crisis is still a factor… Nearly a decade after it required a bailout in 2010, Greece remains one of the most polarizing issues in Europe , and politicians across the EU draw different—and politically convenient—lessons from how European institutions handled, or
As Europe remains in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, one country is slowly winning its battle. In the story of unlikely successes, few could have guessed that Greece would emerge as an outlier. After a decade-long economic crisis , the first signs of a recovery were finally starting to emerge for Greece .
ATHENS—It has been a problem child, a sick man, a canary in a coal mine, a warning sign, and a long-running experiment into where economics meets politics, with a significant social toll. It has become a rallying cry for Brexiteers and right-wing populists, and has revealed some of the deepest fissures in the European Union.
Nearly a decade after it required a bailout in 2010, Greece remains one of the most polarizing issues in Europe, and politicians across the EU draw different—and politically convenient—lessons from how European institutions handled, or mishandled, its crisis.
All-time temperature records for June broken across Europe
Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic have all set new national temperature records for June as a scorching heatwave escalates in large parts of western and central Europe. Thursday will likely see France surpass its previous June record of 41.FC (106F), set on 21 June 2003, according to Sky News' weather presenter Isobel Lang. The country's highest ever temperature, 44.1C (111.38F), was recorded at two separate locations in southern France on 12 August during the same 2003 heatwave.
European Union foreign ministers met to work out a response to the migrant crisis at Greece 's border with Turkey. Germany's Heiko Maas called on EU Greece has said it will protect its frontier and will not allow the migrants in. Turkey is host to some 4 million refugees, including 3.6 million Syrians, and
The head of the European Commission says the EU's first priority is to keep order on Greece 's border. It was proposed as a solution to the migrant crisis in which almost one million refugees and migrants image captionMrs von der Leyen flew over the border in a helicopter with her colleagues.
Here in Greece, a cycle is ending, and the country is returning to political normality and stability. On Sunday, it will hold national elections—its first since exiting a bailout regime last year—in which Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s center-right New Democracy party, a pillar of Greece’s pre-bailout establishment, is expected to defeat the left-wing populist Syriza party, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Syriza came to power in 2015 demanding an end to the crippling austerity Greece was forced to undertake as a condition of its bailout, but ended up having to implement it anyway—at the behest of the European Union and the country’s other creditors.
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Wildfires and power cuts plague Europe as heatwave breaks records
Wildfires and power cuts plague Europe as heatwave breaks records
The announcement helped lift European bank shares and major European stock lists.The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has lowered its growth estimates for the euro area. In Greece the economy has shrunk this year. German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged
Migrant numbers are rising again, but Greece does not want to be seen as a gateway to Europe . The numbers of people coming from Turkey into Greece over land and then through the Balkans towards Western Europe remain well below the exceptional levels seen five years ago, but they have
That apparent tension—between national sovereignty and continental unity—still animates much of the debate in Europe about Greece. It is a dynamic that is as much psychological as it is political, and goes beyond the financial and moral obligations of membership to a common-currency area. It is about how much austerity a country can withstand without breaking, about whether Greece needed to be punished, and about whether being part of the EU (and the euro) is a help or a hindrance.
In Italy, for instance, few days go by without Matteo Salvini, the country’s right-wing populist interior minister and the man widely seen as a leader-in-waiting, saying that Italy doesn’t want to “meet the same fate as Greece.” In Salvini’s rhetoric, winding up like Greece means ceding national sovereignty to the baddies of the European Union, who in turn would impose an emasculating austerity regime on Italy. His party has long flirted with the idea of exiting the euro, or even creating temporary IOUs as a parallel currency—a notion that fires up the base, but is not likely to happen because it’s illegal and would cause the single currency to collapse.
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Greece has agreed a deal with other European countries to try and tackle the huge money It owes billions of pounds to banks and other countries in Europe but some of these countries have agreed Greece is due to pay back 1.6 billion Euros on Tuesday and people are now watching closely to see if
Despite frustration with Brussels-imposed austerity, Greeks see the EU as a essential to strengthening their democracy and ensuring peace on the continent.
On social media and in the piazzas where he’s been campaigning, Salvini frequently cites a figure from the past: Mario Monti, who led Italy at the height of Europe’s debt crisis, from 2011 to 2013, during which the country raised the retirement age in a pension reform that the current government in Rome is working to overturn. For Salvini’s voters, the mere mention of Monti, an unelected technocrat who governed Italy with the blessing of Brussels, triggers a sense of outrage.
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That’s because in Italy, membership in the European Union has always been seen as an external constraint, something that forced the country to get its house in order before the introduction of the euro and that helps keep it in line now. The general perception is that Italy wouldn’t step up on its own unless compelled to. Monti’s government embodied that, and the current populist government came to power as a response to a perceived loss of national sovereignty.
Last summer, when forest fires ravaged an area outside Athens, killing 103 people, Federico Fubini, a deputy editor of Italy’s leading daily, Corriere della Sera, wrote a column asking whether budget cuts to Greek state services might have made the fires harder to contain. “You cannot imagine how viral that article became. I think I’ve never written an article that was received so violently,” Fubini, the author of a new book, Per Amor Proprio: Why Italy Should Stop Hating Europe(and Stop Being Ashamed of Itself), told me.
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Euroskeptics from Salvini’s League party cited his column as evidence of how “austerity kills,” Fubini said, while “the pro-Europeans attacked me very violently because they said my data was fake.” Greece’s so-named troika of lenders—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—is on the defensive about the social and human toll of the austerity it imposed on Greece in exchange for the country’s bailout. After Fubini’s column appeared, a senior European Commission official wrote a letter rebutting his argument. “The minute I provided the data, the whole discussion died out,” Fubini told me. But it showed how sensitive the issue of Greece remains in Europe.
Europe’s handling of the Greek debt crisis also haunted talks last month about creating a common European budget for handling moments of extreme financial stress, something French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for, but which Germany opposes. That’s because in much of the German political and popular imagination, Greece has been the ultimate example of a spendthrift country whose soaring debts got it into trouble and that required thrifty creditor Germany to solve its problems; never mind that for years before the crisis, Germany benefited from Greece buying German goods with money borrowed from German banks.
End 'hateful squabbles' in Europe, says President Michael D Higgins as he continues state trip to Germany
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Half Mediterranean and half Northern, in geography and policy, France has an attitude toward Greece that is more complicated and is connected to France’s relationship to Germany, the de facto dominant power in Europe. “I think we’ve been very ambiguous,” the economist Jean Pisani-Ferry, told me, speaking of France. Part of the establishment in Paris sees France in the same camp as Germany, a country that lent Greece money. But at the same time, there’s been more French sympathy for the plight of Greece under austerity. “Greece is sort of an exaggerated image of what we are ourselves,” Pisani-Ferry told me. In the end, “there’s a sort of permanent hesitation about whether we in fact feel we’re Greeks or we feel we’re creditors.”
In Brexit Britain, Greek lessons also abound, even if there is little consensus on what they mean.
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(Pictured) A pro-Brexit campaigner wears the Union flag colours and holds placards as he demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament in central London, England on April 3, 2019.
British politician Nigel Farage takes the stage to speak at a rally at Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London on March 29.
Demonstrators participate in a Border Communities Against Brexit (BCAB) protest as part of their ongoing campaign against the return of a border to the island of Ireland March 30, 2019.
A young girl waves the European Flag in Green Park, London, during the Put It To The People March on March 23.
Six foreign nationals killed as severe weather hits Greece
Six foreign nationals, including two children, were killed and more than 100 other people injured after gale-force winds, rain and hailstorms struck northern Greece late on Wednesday, uprooting trees and collapsing roofs, authorities said. Television footage showed strong winds sweeping through a restaurant in the Halkidiki peninsula, a region popular with tourists in the summer. Streets in towns in the area were dotted with uprooted pine trees and overturned motorcycles, photographs posted on websites showed.
People hold up placards and European Union flags as they pass Trafalgar Square on a march and rally organised by the pro-European People's Vote campaign for a second EU referendum in central London on March 23.
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage addresses marchers from the top of a bus at the start of the 'March to Leave' walk from the village of Linby to Beeston, Nottinghamshire on March 23 in Mansfield.
EU supporters, calling on the government to give Britons a vote on the final Brexit deal, participate in the 'People's Vote' march in central London on March 23.
'March to Leave' protesters set off from Linby village in Nottinghamshire towards London, England. The 14-day march began in Sunderland on March 16 and will end in the capital on March 29, where a mass rally will take place on Parliament Square.
An anti-Brexit protester holds an EU flag as they demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London on March 14 as MPs debate a motion on whether to seek a delay to Britain's exit from the EU.
Pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit protesters hold flags as they demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London on March 14 as members debate a motion on whether to seek a delay to Britain's exit from the EU.
Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray stands holding placards draped in a composite if the EU and Union flag outside the Houses of Parliament in London on March 4.
A remain in the European Union supporter and member of the "Our Future, Our Choice" (OFOC) young people against Brexit organisation campaigning for a People's Vote second referendum on Britain's EU membership poses for photographs after taking part in a protest against a blindfold Brexit on Parliament Square opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, England on Feb. 14.
A pro-Brexit activist (L) holding a placard and wearing a union flag-themed shirt talks with an anti-Brexit demonstrator holding an EU flagas they protest near the Houses of Parliament in London on Jan. 29.
The Border Communities Against Brexit group hold an anti-Brexit protest on Jan. 26 in Louth, Ireland.
Ahead of a general election in 2010 and just a couple of years after Britain allocated billions of pounds to bail out its banks, sending the country’s budget deficit surging, David Cameron, then the leader of the opposition, warned that five more years of Labour risked turning the U.K. into Greece. The comparison was widely dismissed by economists, but it resonated among voters: Greece had become a byword for chaos and crisis, of reckless overspending and turmoil, and Cameron became prime minister, at the head of a coalition government whose signature policy was to reduce government spending, arguing the country had to get its finances in line.
The warning was still being used five years later, as Cameron’s Conservatives swept to power with their first parliamentary majority in 23 years. By the time of the U.K.’s referendum on its EU membership in 2016, though, Greece had come to represent something else. For Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and the left, the buzzword was “Pasokification,” after the Greek Socialist party, PASOK—the death spiral of the center-left when it supports austerity like in Greece. For them, the Greek example meant fighting austerity.
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While the U.K. right and left drew their own, diametrically opposite, significance from Greece, so too did the new camps in British politics: Leave and Remain. For Leavers, those who supported Britain’s exit from the EU, Greece stands as a warning of the folly of European integration and the national humiliation that Brussels will inflict on those who step out of line. Boris Johnson, Britain’s likely next prime minister, has warned that Greece’s experience is “a lesson in the absolute insanity of any country allowing itself to be bullied by EU negotiators.”
Remainers are also trying to own the Greek experience as evidence in their prosecution of the Brexiteers—particularly the claim by Johnson and others that they will be able to negotiate a better deal with Brussels by threatening to leave without a deal. Britain will be treated just like Greece, they warn.
This Sunday’s Greek elections, which Tsipras called early, after his party’s poor showing in European Parliament elections in May, in some ways mark the end of an era of crisis politics. Tsipras and his Syriza party came to power as a protest vote against establishment parties that had alternated in power, with one technocratic leader in the middle, ever since Greece requested a bailout in 2010. On Syriza’s watch, Greece has exited its bailout program, but the economy has continued to suffer.
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In the hot summer of 2015, Tsipras challenged Greece’s creditors with a referendum on the bailout package, and for a moment, talk of Grexit was back on the table. Greek voters wanted to reject the terms, but keep the euro. After that, Tsipras had to do an about-face and stick to the terms of Greece’s bailout. This time around, a vote for New Democracy, the market-friendly old guard, is its own protest vote against Syriza’s handling of the economy and the country.
To some in Europe, Tsipras’s transformation from leftist radical to austerity-imposing European team player offers a lesson in how populists moderate in power, under the discipline of European institutions and markets. But that is “a dangerous conclusion to draw,” said Catherine Fieschi, the executive director of Counterpoint, a British think tank. The Greek situation was extreme and unique. “I don’t think that situation would be replicable across the board,” Fieschi told me. “It gives us a false sense of security.” Italy’s Salvini would moderate only if doing so was in his own interest, not Europe’s, she said.
While other countries in Europe are now sliding into populism, Greece has already gone through that phase and now looks poised to return to an establishment. This, too, may be another lesson from Greece. Things can change, and change back.
Tom McTague contributed reporting from London.
Six foreign nationals killed as severe weather hits Greece.
Six foreign nationals, including two children, were killed and more than 100 other people injured after gale-force winds, rain and hailstorms struck northern Greece late on Wednesday, uprooting trees and collapsing roofs, authorities said. Television footage showed strong winds sweeping through a restaurant in the Halkidiki peninsula, a region popular with tourists in the summer. Streets in towns in the area were dotted with uprooted pine trees and overturned motorcycles, photographs posted on websites showed.
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Six foreign nationals, including two children, were killed and more than 100 other people injured after gale-force winds, rain and hailstorms struck northern Greece late on Wednesday, uprooting trees and collapsing roofs, authorities said. Television footage showed strong winds sweeping through a restaurant in the Halkidiki peninsula, a region popular with tourists in the summer. Streets in towns in the area were dotted with uprooted pine trees and overturned motorcycles, photographs posted on websites showed. 
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