Day 2. Tuesday June 30.
The battle for the Greek Referendum for a "Yes" or "No" vote on July 5 to the new barbaric “austerity” measures, demanded from the impoverished Greek people by the recent ultimatum from the IMF/EU/ECB as the only way to “avoid” collapse and Grexit, is escalating every day.
The class lines of the confrontation have become very clear. All the leaders of world imperialism–Obama, Merkel, Hollande, Renzi, Rajoy, Cameron etc., all the institutions of finance capital and their world-wide mass media are intensifying their threats and intimidation, while they try unsuccessfully to “minimize the dangers for the world capitalist economy". Obama, in his last statement, claimed that a Grexit will not affect the US economy, although most bourgeois analysts, including his own Treasury Secretary, have the opposite view. Jack Lew, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, has warned the EU on several occasions that a Grexit represents “a global systemic risk”.
In Greece, all the bourgeois opposition parties, local government leaders of the Right and of the “extreme center” Potami, the capitalist owners of the big companies, and nearly all the TV, radio, and press mass media are united not only in terrorizing the population, blackmailing it to vote “Yes”, but also in mobilizing a counter-revolutionary “civil society” petty-bourgeois pro-EU “We stay in Europe” movement, having as a model, as themselves say, the “Euro-Maidan” in Ukraine.
Today, these reactionary forces of the ruling class have organized their rally in support of the Yes, in Syntagma Square. Large businesses, even as they withhold salaries from their workers, blaming that on “the communist government that has closed the banks”, blackmailed their employees into participating in today's rally, making it clear that otherwise their jobs were in jeopardy.
The reactionary pro-yes rally was massive but obviously had less people than yesterday's pro-no popular mobilization. Furthermore, as a well known atheist said, “even God is against the right wingers" because during their rally, a torrential summer rain started to fall, dispersing the assembled petty bourgeois “warriors”!
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, feverish secret negotiations have started again between the EU and the Tsipras government to find an agreement of the last moment. Yesterday’s mobilization of the popular masses against the troika—reviving memories of 2011 and 2012—has frightened the imperialist institutions but also the government, which does not stop repeating that “a victory of the No does not mean a break but a new round of negotiations with the EU”!! In any case, the referendum was a clear expression of the pressures of the masses themselves against the capitulation of the government.
A previous proposal by Juncker was resurrected and now presented by the Greek government asking for a new 2-year loan from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) with softer austerity terms to avoid a full meltdown of the Greek economy with uncontrollable implications in Europe and internationally.
The previous “bailout program” with the troika expired today, June 30, and officially Greece is without any “safety belt”. There was no payment of the 1.5 billion euro for the debt to the IMF—a first for a European country. The biggest challenge for the institutions will be a probable non-payment of a 3.5 billion-euro installment due to the ECB on July 20.
The EEK continues its campaign for a No vote throughout the country. We held a demonstration in Volos under the slogan “We will not pay for the crisis of the capitalists!”. Tomorrow, we have a central rally in Athens--let's hope without rain!