ATHENS, greece — At the dinner table, in the coffee shop, on the street corner, the one constant as Greeks prepare to vote once again is concern, and even fear.
Depending on the outcome of Sunday’s election, Greece could be forced out of the European joint currency, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy.
“Everyone now is in a dilemma, just like me. … We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. The future is uncertain now,” said Paraskevi Thoma, an unemployed Athens beautician struggling to support a 5-year-old son and 6-month old twins.
Greeks cast ballots Sunday for the second time in six weeks, after May 6 elections left no party with enough seats in Parliament to form a government and coalition talks collapsed.
The debt-ridden country’s two-year financial crisis has left much of the nation in tatters, tearing at its social fabric. Hospitals have run out of supplies, suicides have increased and unemployment has skyrocketed to above 22 percent as tens of thousands of businesses shut down.
The protracted crisis also has overturned Greece’s political scene, hammering the two parties that have dominated for decades and whom Greeks blame for sending their country from boom to bust in the space of a few years.
“We want something better for the country and for ourselves, but we don’t know who to vote for,” Thoma said. “With what criteria should we vote? Whoever you vote for, I don’t believe that the day after it’ll be paradise and we’ll be eating with golden spoons. … I don’t expect it, no matter who wins.”
If Greeks reject the strict austerity measures taken in return for billions of euros in rescue loans from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund, they could be forced out of the euro, which in turn would probably drag down other financially troubled countries and rip apart the euro itself.
“In these elections, the survival of the Greek economy and its integration in Europe is at stake,” said Dimitris Sotiropoulos, associate professor of political science at Athens University. “There’s nothing more and nothing less to it.”
The last opinion polls published before a two-week pre-election ban showed the anti-austerity radical-left Syriza party neck-and-neck with the conservative New Democracy party. Neither was projected to win enough votes to form a government alone, leaving a coalition as the only option to avoid yet another election.
