Greece votes to decided whether to stay in the eurozone - Daily Telegraph
Opinion polls show Greeks, weary after five years of deep recession, overwhelmingly favour remaining in the euro, but there is bitter anger over repeated rounds of tax hikes, slashed spending and sharp cuts in wages.
Many voters are also furious with New Democracy and the other traditional ruling party, the now severely weakened PASOK, blaming them for decades of corruption, waste and inefficiency.
"It's the first time I feel depressed after voting, knowing that I voted again for those who created the problem, but we don't have another choice," said 66-year-old English teacher Koula Louizopoulou.
"I voted for the bailout because these are the terms that will keep us in Europe," she said.
A win for Greece's national soccer team in a game on Saturday at the Euro 2012 championships provided some lift for voters but there was little sign of enthusiasm at the polling booths, which close at 5pm UK time. Exit polls will follow soon after voting ends.
"It's obvious the country is now staring into the abyss," leading Greek daily Kathimerini said in a front-page editorial on Sunday, calling for the creation of a New Democracy-led "unity" coalition to keep the country in the euro.
The party gaining the most votes wins an automatic 50-seat advantage but neither New Democracy or Syriza is expected to win an outright majority and whoever emerges as top party will have to hold coalition negotiations with smaller groups.
European leaders weighed in on the eve of the vote - a re-run of an earlier election on May 6 that produced no clear winner - some of them openly urging Greeks to reject SYRIZA or risk undermining the very foundations of the single currency.
But whoever wins power may find their tenure is short-lived and, despite the insistence of EU politicians, some adjustment of the bailout terms may be inevitable if Greece is to cut a public debt amounting to 165pc of gross domestic product.
"It is a scenario I see as likely and if that is the condition presented for Greece to stay and then move on, I would say it is probably something that should be attempted," Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told Reuters in an interview.
Central banks from Tokyo to London are readying arsenals to defend banks and national currencies against any post-election turmoil. The result will dominate a meeting of the Group of 20 world economic powers on Monday and Tuesday in Mexico.
Finance officials in the eurozone have discussed limiting the size of withdrawals from ATM machines, imposing border checks and introducing eurozone capital controls as a worst-case scenario.
Eurozone officials have hinted they might give a new Greek government some leeway on how it reaches debt targets set by the EU/IMF bailout package, but there would be no change to the targets themselves.
Eurozone paymaster Germany warned Greeks on Saturday the bailout would not be renegotiated.
"That's why it's so important that the Greek elections preferably lead to a result in which those that will form a future government say: 'Yes, we will stick to the agreements'," Chancellor Angela Merkel told a party conference of her Christian Democrats.
A Greek exit from the single currency would heap further pressure on two far larger European economies - Spain has already received up to €100bn to save debt-riddled banks and Italy could be next to seek a bailout.
Anger with the establishment parties New Democracy and PASOK propelled Syriza and its youthful leader, a former Communist student protest organiser, from the obscure radical fringe to a shock second place on May 6.
The far-right Golden Dawn party also won seats in the first election, underscoring the fragmentation of a stressed society wrestling with unemployment of almost 23pc and plummeting living standards.
Five years of recession and more than two years of acute crisis have started to fray the edges of Greek society, undergoing its severest test since the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1974.
The streets of central Athens are scarred by repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are short of vital medicines and reports of suicides caused by the crisis have become routine.
Five opinion polls published before a blackout two weeks ago put New Democracy narrowly ahead. Two other polls had Syriza leading.
But analysts say Samaras, 61, will find it hard to govern for long with an empowered Syriza protesting at the gates. Tsipras, if he wins, will inherit a country on the verge of bankruptcy. He has ruled out a government of national unity and promised to nationalise banks and halt privatisations.
Some global businesses and banks are already in retreat.
Europe's biggest retailer Carrefour said on Friday it was selling up in Greece, a day after French bank Credit Agricole moved to take direct control of its Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian units from its Greek bank Emporiki.
Lamenting the money chase while chasing money - Philadelphia Daily News
President Obama's voice echoed in the majestic rotunda of the Franklin Institute as he lit into the Republicans with fierce urgency.
"We want to move forward and make sure that elections aren't just about $10 million checks being written by folks who have vested interests in maintaining the status quo," Obama said, to applause. "The other side, they don't have any new ideas. . . . What they do have is, they'll have $500 million worth of negative ads."
In a note of irony common to modern politics, Obama was in the process of raising campaign cash while decrying its corrosive effects. Three events in the Center City science museum raised nearly $2 million Tuesday night for the president's reelection effort and Democratic committees supporting it.
And that was just after three similar events in Baltimore; by Thursday, Obama was at a star-studded gathering of donors in actress Sarah Jessica Parker's Manhattan home. The insurgent candidate of 2008 who promised to change our politics is now outpacing his modern predecessors in the amount of time raising money.
The people standing in front of the president beneath a marble statue of Benjamin Franklin had paid $250 to $2,500 to hear a fired-up stump speech. Meanwhile, in the Fels Planetarium, some 90 people waited for Obama to address them at a $10,000-a-ticket dinner. And earlier, about 15 people who had each pledged to raise or donate $40,000 got to sit at a table and talk privately with the president for 45 minutes.
"I was pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm and the seriousness with which our donor base took this," said lawyer Kenneth M. Jarin, a cochairman of Obama's 2012 finance committee in Pennsylvania, who helped sell tickets. "They know what's at stake. People understand how much money is being spent by the other side, and that our side has to step up."
But all the hard work of Obama supporters in the months leading up to the Philadelphia events, overseen by Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen, seemed puny the next day - when casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson gave $10 million to Restore Our Future, a "super PAC" helping Republican Mitt Romney.
Court and regulatory decisions in the last few years have led to unprecedented levels of money as corporations and wealthy individuals pledge to spend hundreds of millions, mostly in support of Republican candidates.
The amount of time presidents spend asking for cash has risen sharply in recent decades, according to Brendan Doherty, a political scientist at the Naval Academy and author of The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign, to be published in July.
Obama has attended more fund-raising events in the second half of his first term than any of the last six presidents - 166 such events through Friday. In two years before Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection, Reagan attended just three fund-raisers for the Republican National Committee, zero for his own campaign. Bill Clinton, once lionized and derided for his fund-raising prowess, attended 70 campaign-finance events in 1995 and 1996, when he was reelected.
Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, the sums flying around are enormous. Adelson and his wife have given $35 million this year, mostly to a super PAC that backed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's presidential run.
"It's the Wild West, an entirely different dimension," said Larry Makinson, former head of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "The bottom line is, it magnifies the power of the 1 percent who've got all the money."
In a sense, Obama kicked off the latest installment of the political arms race in 2008 when he chose to spurn public financing for his campaign, Makinson said. Obama raised about $750 million and swamped the GOP.
This time, Obama got ahead of Romney, out-raising him $197 million to $87 million by March 31. But Romney's donations have outpaced the Democrats since he sewed up the GOP nomination. And that doesn't count super PACs' funds, where Republicans dominate.
People raising cash for Obama here say it is a little harder than four years ago, when the campaign to elect the first black president felt like a movement; one dinner at Cohen's home that year, for instance, raised $6 million. The weak economy has also hurt.
Still, enough donors are eager and able to write big checks. Among those at the $40,000 event, according to several attendees: Jarin; former State Sen. Connie Williams of Montgomery County; Cohen and his wife, lawyer Rhonda Cohen; developer Ron Rubin; Mark Alderman, a lawyer and cochair of Obama's state fund-raising committee; Joseph and Marie Field, who founded the radio broadcasting giant Entercom; and Richard Horowitz, president of RAF Industries, a Jenkintown private-equity firm.
Businesswoman Marsha Perelman attended the $10,000 dinner. She thinks Obama's approach to government, promising investment in education and other public goods, will be better "in the long run" for business than Romney's promises to slash regulations, government, and taxes.
As is customary, a few reporters were ushered in to record Obama's opening remarks. Then the press was shooed away as the president said he'd take questions.
Perelman, who chairs the Franklin Institute board, said Obama didn't drop any bombshells in the planetarium dinner, but it was still revealing.
"One of the questions asked referred to how difficult it is to get the president's message across," Perelman said. "He made a terrific reference to how hard it is to cut through a news cycle that is a nanosecond long: During the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy did not announce the invasion until 13 days later. He had time to figure out what happened, and 70 percent of the nation tuned in when he went on television.
"President Obama said that if that happened today, within two minutes somebody would have tweeted about it. And the highest audience he ever gets for a speech, the State of the Union, is 10 percent of the population."
Contact Thomas Fitzgerald
at 215-854-2718, tfitzgerald@phillynews.com or @tomfitzgerald on Twitter. Read his blog, "The Big Tent," at www.philly.com/bigtent.
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