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Greek Crisis, Eurozone Crisis, Global Capitalist Crisis
The economic crisis in Greece is in its 9th year in 2018. Along with it, an un-precedented and polyvalent socio-political crisis has also emerged (Tziovas, 2017). Estimations show that austerity may last for more than fifty years; the repayment of Greece’s growing debt may take much longer. In 2017, after eight years of neoliberal austerity reforms, the Greek sovereign debt had reached a staggering 179% of gdp (Table 1) (which amounts to about 317 million Eu-ros), with the International Monetary Fund (imf) estimating that it will reach 275% by 2060 (Basu, 2018: 140). In 2009, right before the bailout pro-gram’s start, the Greek sovereign debt was at a 126% of the country’s gdp at the time (amounting to just above 301 million Euros). Besides the augmenta-tion of Greece’s sovereign debt, during the crisis years, the country’s gdp also plummeted. Greece’s unemployment also accelerated to over 20% of the total working population. Poul Thomsen, the notorious imf’s director of the “Euro-pean Department” and its representative in Greece’s “Troika” mechanism until 2015, stated in early 2017 that “it would take Greece twenty-one years to return unemployment to pre-crisis levels” (Keep Talking Greece, 2017). According to Eurostat data from 2017, 35.6% of the Greek population is at risk of poverty and social exclusion. In 2007, this number was at 20% (Eurostat, 2009). The so-called “structural adjustment reforms” imposed on Greece through the bailout programs produced an unprecedented economic, social, political and humani-tarian decline in Greece.Greece entered a prolonged economic crisis in late 2009, when the inter-national financial rating agencies downgraded the Greek government bonds. Accordingly, its sovereign debt was assessed as “unsustainable”. This meant that Greece had difficulty borrowing credit from financial markets at low inter-est rates. After revealing his predecessors' false statistics, the time’s “socialist” Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou Jr., requested financial assistance from the EU, which created the so-called support mechanism headed by what came to be known as the Troika, an institutional framework consisting of the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ecb) and the imf. In return for a colossal loan provided by the Troika, Greece had to implement