Greece and the eurozone: what’s left? by Tom Vouloumanos It was almost a year ago that Europe elected its first radical Left government since WWII: the Syriza government in Athens under Alexis Tsipras. Syriza was supposed to signal the beginning of the end of neoliberal hegemony in Europe and begin the wave of a Mediterranean pink tide. Within its first months in power, Brussels tightened the screws on Athens. The Troika (EU-ECB-IMF) could not afford to cave into a single demand as Madrid and Lisbon would follow. Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis was ridiculed for making elementary economic demands: Greece was bankrupt and in order to pay back its creditors, it needed growth and debt restructuring, not austerity. But the creditors did not care about being paid back, they were in fact subsidizing bank loans to Greece via taxpayers’ money, so that Greece could pay back older loans to those same private banks with the caveat that it implement an ag