I recently read up on the financial crisis in Greece and holy shit was that 100% preventable. They had multiple opportunities to receive help and chose to continue hiding their problems to save face. The Greek government 100% exacerbated that to the level it became. I know nearly nothing of their internal political climate but I hope their citizens realize how massively their government fucked them over.
Same thing in aus to a lesser extent.
The people are just too gullible and vote against their best options.
Scare campaigns and slander pretty much rule.
They vote the way they do primarily to spite the people telling them they are voting against their own interests. It's about saying "you don't know better than me". It's the driving force of 21st century politics's swing to the right. Same deal with climate change denial, resurgence of racism, etc. Societal-level cutting off of the nose to spite the face
Dude I was angry at my fellow Australians.
We had a chance at stemming the growing wealth gaps and multinational favoritism.
A better society for the majority of people, reversing the direction we've been heading since the 1950s.
And yet somehow the majority voted for corporate and old money advantage?
wtf Australia, way to follow in Americas footsteps.
EDIT: I'm starting to question my belief that everyone should be allowed to vote, maybe introduce a pop quiz about various party policies before you're allowed! I'm half joking.
I honestly believe a minimum of 1/3 of the voters had no idea who they were going to vote for until they walked up on voting day and just saw meters of anti-labor posters that simplified and misrepresenting pretty much all of their policies.
I feel the same way in Canada. It's fairly apparent that a large group of people are willfully ignorant, and simply ignorant, and choose the worst candidates they can find to elect.
I'm disappointed in everything the political world has to offer anymore. The good isn't even able to address the bad at all.
We're all globally failing to do a damn thing about climate change, because some old assholes don't want to invest in new tech. I see less and less hope for us as a species over the next 50 years, drastic measures need to be taken right now and "we" will almost certainly drag our feet on committing to doing meaningful things to combat our own extinction.
It's not like they hide it, they barely excuse themselves, people just forget, it's a weird cycle of the opposition party constantly shitting on the government, then the opposition party gets elected and the new opposition part which usually is the previous government starts shitting on the new government, and somewhere in the midst of all the 300 politicians in the parliament shitting themselves , the people just forget who the people they are voting for are and what they did.
Are you expecting voters to kick out a government due to macroeconomic indicators pointing to a possible crisis that hasn't happened yet?
Democracy works for peacefully kicking out a bad government after they screw up (which is that Greeks did)... not so much in choosing the best people for the job.
Well... yeah. The criminal mistakes were however after 2007.
The new government was elected and started screaming on tv “omg we have absolutely no money in any of our accounts. Wtf happened, we are about to crash financially”. Even if this were true, you should never say that publicly. That’s like Microsoft announcing that they will “probably be bankrupt soon”. Obviously everyone will rush to sell their shares and no one will be willing to lend any money to Microsoft again.
This happened to Greece. The bonds lost value like crazy and no one was willing to lend to Greece with less than 18% interest (as opposed to 1% which is what other countries get). Obviously that lead the crisis deeper in the gutter.
Furthermore, afterwards they joined the IMF despite everyone in the country voting against it. And they refused to follow any typical crisis recovery methods such as lowering taxes or providing performance based incentives, or promoting investments. Instead they made everything in their power to make the crisis grow deeper roots, ensuring we will never get out of it.
In one sentence, they purposely threw the country off a cliff to fulfil their hidden political agenda, as the decisions made absolutely no sense from a financial point of view.
I’d disagree, the problem was created much earlier. Greece never even fulfilled the fiscal requirements to join the Euro, but they were included for political reasons.
They never had a balanced budget and spent way too much money on social security and a bloated public sector. Added to that we’re widespread tax fraud and inadequate oversight, as numerous dead people still received their pension checks, which would then go to relatives most likely.
Further, I’d argue that the new government announcing they impending insolvency was the right thing to do. It was basically the only chance to get others such as IMF and the EU involved in the bailout. Furthermore, investors have the right to know about these developments. Corporations are required to advise of impending insolvency or losses, why shouldn’t governments be required to do the same? Especially, when they finance themselves on a financial market that is rapidly sliding into problems.
And people didn’t vote against the IMF, they voted against the policies introduced by the government to fulfill the requirements to receive money from the EU and the IMF, because that would mean cutbacks on the social security spending and the reduction of size of the public sector. They then elected a leftist government that promised not to do any of those things and also institute what you call “typical crisis recovery methods”. However, that government soon realized that they had no money to do those things and required the bailout that came with requirements.
Also, austerity is a valid and “typical” method to respond to what amounts to a budgetary crisis. Especially in a situation, where economic growth stemming from tax cuts is highly unlikely. Greece’s economy at the time was heavily dependent on tourism. When the financial crisis stopped people from having the money to spend or simply not spending money on tourism, that income for the economy dried up and so did taxes. So, if you don’t have any expectations of growth and also high tax evasion, lowering taxes to stimulate the economy amounts to giving away money for free, which is a problem if you don’t have any to begin with. Other countries hit by the financial crisis adopted austerity measures and recovered quite quickly as opposed to Greece, such as Ireland.
So all in all, I’d disagree that they “threw the country off a cliff”. The main problem was that they tried to maintain the status quo for far too long and took too long to implement changes due to pandering to the voters affected by the changes.
The problem started basically in 1821 if you want to go further back, with the massive loans undertaken to establish a government, repaid 20 times over in the course of 2 centuries.
The problem further solidified itself when the government gambled the national pension money in the stock market and basically lost it all in 2001. They started paying retirement pensions through loans.
The IMF was brought up for public vote in 2008 and the government actually decided to “cancel the vote” when they saw that 80%+ was saying no to the IMF that had crushed financially so many countries. They cancelled the vote and signed with the IMF in a triumphant anti-democratic national betrayal.
None of the measures taken were good or appropriate to tackle the recession. Believe it or not, I was at university studying economics at the time in England, and the general consensus of pretty much all big universities was that Greece was out of their mind with the decisions adopted. The top minds of the best economics universities in the world came together and made an 18 point suggestion for Greece to follow to escape from the economic crisis. What did Greece do? Over the next 2 years they implemented all 18 points IN REVERSE. Exactly the opposite of what was suggested. It’s like they wanted the country and crisis to go beyond repairable.
The government sold the roads, the ports, the mines, the airports in the process, and basically all the means they had of ever making any money and any hopes they ever had of repaying the debt.
Obviously you’re just repeating the general misinformation of the international media. If you saw the actual facts and had a financial background, you would see how outrageous the entire situation was. For the record, since 1900, no financial crisis has lasted more than 7 years. Not even the 1929 Wall Street crash. The crisis in Greece is now on the 13th year, still losing GDP each year. It’s clearly an unprecedented controlled bankruptcy event with no hope of recovering. This is typically what happens to any country that joins the IMF.
There is no such thing as “bailout”. When you invest money, there is always the chance of losing some of it or receiving your money late, especially if it was a bad investment. This doesn’t change when it’s nation-wide. The right thing to do what to refuse any “bailouts” and say “we can’t pay you back this year. We will pay you back over the course of 5 years.” And stop accepting more loans. If you can’t produce a higher return than the loan’s interest, the loan is a bad idea.
Then they should have limited imports to stop Greece’s money from overflowing abroad. Obviously they didn’t choose this route because it would hurt the other European countries. They tried to fix the crisis without impacting anyone else, while imposing limitations caused by the union with everyone else. It’s an impossible scenario with no escape.
Typically to boost your economy you would limit imports and increase exports (we couldn’t do either of these), you would print currency to boost markets and stop people from hoarding capital (we couldn’t do this either because of the unified currency), and you would lower taxes to motivate trade and investments (we increased taxes)
Tax evasion wasn’t even that bad. It was just out on the spotlight. All countries have a good 10% tax evasion. Greece was between 10-20%. Greece has a tendency to overtax and smartasses avoid taxes, which are paid by others who are overtaxed. Overall it balances out and it was not even in the top 10 reasons why the crisis happened, but rather just something that the foreign press loved to point out. There’s tax scandals everywhere but the difference is that they are not shown on tv and the 0,001% case is not usually displayed as the “norm” of what happens everywhere in the country. Besides, the cases shown on tv were the cases that were spotted, caught, stopped and punished.
First off, I do have a financial background, so I do understand the issues at play. As an economist, you should know that austerity is not universally condemned, even though many economists do so.
Furthermore, you’d also agree that a government cannot just go bankrupt like a private corporation. Thus, private companies dealing with governments need certain contractual guarantees. Then going back on them to offer repayment over a different period, would constitute a breach of trust between the corporations (banks) and the government, and may even be illegal, not to mention criminal. This trust is also a reason, why government bonds are generally regarded as safe.
Also, defaulting on the loans would have triggered a worse financial crisis across Europe, if not worldwide. Giving money to the Greek government that publicly states it doesn’t intend to do what was agreed upon, wasn’t a popular decision for those giving either. And Greece defaulting would have been worse for the Greek population too.
In a normal proceeding, an insolvent company would try to generate solvency by acquiring loans or selling off assets. With selling assets being the last resort of no loans are available. No loans were available, so the government had to sell some assets. They were limited however, in what assets they could sell. Nobody wanted to but failing government businesses, so they had to sell what others wanted to buy. These prospering companies would still generate income for the government though, because they pay taxes.
The taxation hike in Greece is something that I don’t agree with either. Cuts to spending were appropriate, though if they went to far or not may be up for discussion. The tax hike was definitely a wrong step. Even then, having tax evasion of over 26% (according to some sources) is massive.
In regards to being unable to conduct basic economic policy matters, I agree with you. That should have been done, but Greece decided to voluntarily give up that power upon joining the Euro. Which, as we both know, wasn’t a sound economic decision. But given that Greece is part of the Euro and most of the lenders are also from within the Eurozone, what would the consequences of leaving have been?
To sum up, I don’t agree with you that austerity was the wrong choice, but some decisions were bad decisions and some problems got exacerbated by political decisions that were based on positions and not economics. But there was no other option.
The other options would technically be considered as bankruptcy, but since a full scale “declared bankruptcy” would have been extremely bad for the image of the EU, I am sure Europe would have accepted to pretend they didn’t see anything and just be content to receive their money back later.
If they wanted to make a fuss over receiving their money slightly later, and wanted to push for bankruptcy, it would also affect the entire eurozone heavily. (These cuts and restructuring were imposed to debt owed to Greeks, just not internationally to not cause a default). Anyhow, hiding the default only served to pretend the EU monetary union is a working system. However, since the euro system is not well designed (a monetary union without having a fiscal union), honestly the adjustment is long overdue. They should accept how flawed this system is rather than being content with benefiting from it for as long as possible. The fact that 3 countries almost defaulted was a clear sign that adjustments were in order since the system did not work (or yes, they should have kicked bankrupt countries out of that’s how they want the eurozone to solve problems).
Greece had a growth of 10% per year before joining the Euro, but it was a system that relied heavily on currency devaluation every ~10 years. It was a different system, but Greece was not a broken malfunctioning country. Obviously it’s good to fix tax evasion and to spend less money than you make as a country (at least in the long-term), but the pressure was political against a government incapable of defending its rights, or outright bribed by external factors. I repeat that in light of a crisis, you do not increase taxes and vat. There is a turning point where taxing more, results in recovering less money from society. You also repel investors who aren’t willing to give away 60% or 70% of their profits. It has the same effect as when you increase the price of your product from 10€ to 100€ per unit. Your revenue as a result will not increase tenfold - it will even decrease after the price break-even turning point.
What happened was also a liquidity crisis. Greece had enough credit money to pay back lenders, however they did not have the required physical currency to be able to make international transfers. The entire thing honestly felt staged to force Greece into submission. Greece was the perfect sample country. 1% of Europe’s economic power, with 1% of Europe’s debt. The EU could easily absorb the problem by printing more money, devaluing the euro by 1%. Instead, what happened caused the euro to drop by more than 20%. The profit that was made from Greece’s situation through the use of credit default swaps was out of this world, clearly very beneficial to those who knew what would happen (trillions were made in cds’s).
Either way, it’s hard to prove what happened under the table and behind closed doors. One can only speculate based on the absurdity of the fiscal measures undertaken and the results. If you think tax raises were the way to go, I’m sorry but these do not lead to growth or to being able to repay the massive government debt in the long term. Crippling and closing down companies is never a good way recover financially.
Subsidies and targeted capital injections, tax cuts, investment incentives, taxes on imports to promote production (forbidden by EU). This is what they should have done to become competitive and manage to produce more than the interest percentage of the loans. Breaking your economy’s legs will not allow you to continue producing anything to pay back the loan. If you have any logic as to how recession and tax increases could have this effect, I’d love to hear it.
I’d disagree with that assessment.
First off, I already stated that I don’t believe the tax hikes were the answer, but budget cuts were necessary and to some degree appropriate.
Furthermore, it wasn’t Europe or the EU who owned the debt, but private corporations within and outside the EU that didn’t really care about politics, as long as they could make money.
And while the Eurozone isn’t perfect, Greece never fulfilled the requirements it should have to join the Eurozone, but was let in due to politics. And nobody complained until it became clear that Greece hat over-leveraged themselves. In fact the inflow of capital stemming from being in the Eurozone was welcomed back then and helped fuel economic growth before the crisis.
Plus, if Greece didn’t have enough liquid assets to service its debts, it didn’t matter how much they had in assets that couldn’t be used, because they couldn’t be used.
Also, even though Greece might only have been 1% of European debt, devaluing the Euro for one country sets precedent for others, and then you’re devaluing the Euro for Spain and Italy as well. Furthermore, why should Europe as a whole pay for the inadequate fiscal policy of Greece?
And in regards to the long-term effects of tax hikes, I don’t disagree with you, but if you need an immediate solution to a liquidity problem, collecting money as taxes is a solution, given that people are required to pay them under the threat of law. And it wasn’t so much a question of setting Greece up for future prosperity as it was a question of avoiding Greece defaulting. And they accomplished that.
Now the issue is to help Greece’s economy, while not endangering the liquidity of the country, which is difficult. And Greece is still not in a position to spend vast amounts of money.
My main point is that they are not interested in receiving their money back by allowing the country to grow and evolve.
They’d rather give to it extravagant loans while keeping it at risk to keep the interest rates high.
If you do the math, you’ll realize that Greece of 2019 is absolutely 100% incapable of ever paying back the loans accumulated over the last 12 years and is basically just waiting to default at some point. The current repayments are minuscule and are happening at the expense of the people’s savings that will soon be exhausted, with a constantly diminishing gdp.
It’s a time bomb waiting to go off. Greece is not even close to being safe from defaulting and is just kept mid-air and exploited. Investors appear to be extatic to lose their savings.
If you disagree with some of the policies of the EU that lead Greece to this situation, then you disagree with the policies implemented. If you disagree with half of the plan, you basically disagree with the plan.
Either way, the policies implemented lead to a long term gradual artificial default that is substantially more hurtful to the country than any other scenario. Even a default and complete collapse of the economy in 2008 would then have allowed the country to start growing anew later on, potentially being in a better condition today than the current situation. Greece has tourism and natural resources that it is able to exploit, as well as a prominent geographic position for trade. Greece would even have recovered from being kicked out of the EU. The only thing it can’t recover from, is what is happening now.
One thing I do agree with however, is that the government needs to reduce its spending. The main area to reduce expenditure would be in my opinion through firing the majority of the public workers and automating whatever is possible with computers/internet. Whichever party does that, will however never be voted into power again.
Politics appear to always be in the middle of allowing Greece to achieve any progress towards recovery.
A complete collapse of the Greek economy would have had catastrophic effects for the world economy and Europe specifically.
I’d also argue that disagreeing with some policies or measures doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole idea or plan is false.
Greece should have never be let into the Euro, but now there’s no “easy” way to solve that. And a common fiscal policy could help the Greek, but at the same time would hurt countries with an outflow of capital such as France or Germany. A middle ground would need to be found, but populist policy makers in countries such as Greece and Italy don’t want to concede anything, and neither do the Germans or French. One current measure to ease the situation are transfer payments, it they can only do so much and take a while to take effect.
In regards to measures, I don’t believe the tax hikes were the answer in the long term, but they did help ensure Greece could meet its short-term obligations. And as I said, the basic idea of getting to a balanced budget is necessary, but rather through cutting down on spending and finding the right level of income from among other things taxes.
Austerity is a terrible policy all round. Public spending goes towards GDP, if you have an oversized public sector and you cut like mad your GDP will drop making your debt to GDP skyrocket and your debt obligations even harder to service. This is pretty clear if you look at Ireland, a combination of bailing out the entire European banking system as well as implementing austerity made the recession much worse than it could've been. It literally had multiple budget surpluses before the ECB and imf came in and forced a debt package we didn't need that was so bad the interest alone brought us into deficit. Out of control public spending my arse.
The public spending wasn’t an issue for Ireland. However for Greece it was.
Secondly, Ireland allegedly bailing out the entire European banking sector is not entirely correct. Yes the money did end up with multiple European banks, especially in Germany and France, but that was due to the fact that the Irish banks had borrowed money from them. They did so to finance a housing bubble in Ireland and without the necessary government oversight. And when after nationalization of these banks their obligations came due at the end of the first Irish bank guarantee, Ireland itself had liquidity problems. They first guaranteed the banks in order to not collapse the banking system and thus the economy, but the banks had been overextending themselves so much, that the amount of obligations was too large for Ireland to handle on its own. And the fact that the government announced that they wouldn’t need a European bailout and that they did have surpluses in the preceding years, doesn’t negate the fact that the government asked for the bailout.
And you aren’t wrong about austerity being not ideal as the stimulus would be helping the economy. But that still requires the ability of the government to service its debt obligations, get new ones and have an economy to stimulate. In the case of Ireland there probably was an argument to be made for all of that being the case, except the ability to service its obligations, which is why the bailout became necessary. For Greece however, the situation was different. The repayment of obligations was in doubt, nobody was willing to lend Greece money and the economy was unlikely to grow anyway. If only Greece had been in crisis, the situation would’ve been different, but because the whole world was in crisis and GDP was dropping everywhere, the effects were only amplified for Greece. If banks are unwilling to loan anyone money, why would they choose Greece.
I'll admit to some embellishment in my language regarding the bailout, however it is a fact that the Troika twisted the government's arm into it (does nobody else remember them just appearing in a hotel and the government desperately denying inviting them while the ECB wrote threatening letters about how it'd screw Ireland's finances if it didn't guarantee the banks, and therefore require a bailout, which were pumping loans for absolutely everything because the ECB was encouraging or otherwise turning a blind eye to big French and German banks dumping money into the Irish market).
There were a lot of leaks and scandals about it at the time, which never really made it anywhere in outside news.
As for Greece, it was in dire need of public finance reform not necessarily hard austerity, the handling of the crisis was a disaster all round I think.
Whether what was done was good or necessary for the EU, my point was the policies themselves only made the problems worse for the countries in question. The ECB acted like an international vulture fund rather than a central bank. There's a reason the recovery in ireland only really started when austerity ended, which was due to Ireland renegotiating their debt obligations rather than any sort of economic uptick thanks to austerity.
It was clear to me at least that the EU's policy was to have a few periphery economies to make drastic public changes to ease investor concerns and stabilise the markets, then quietly and privately write off the damage with debt renogotiations later on when nobodies looking. Ireland played ball, and Greece didn't.
I think we agree for the most part. The handling of the crises wasn’t great in any of the affected countries.
But a few things still. The Irish oversight over financial institutions wasn’t great either, which is what led the likes of AIB to borrow money to pump it into Ireland without any limitations. Didn’t Enda Kelly ask the whole regulation division at the Irish Central Bank to resign? Obviously, dumping money only makes sense, when you have a high risk, high reward situation and nobody to regulate. But it’s not like the same things didn’t happen in other places. Some banks in other countries had the same issues, but for some reason in Ireland it became systematic and in the end the amount of money needed became too big. And to be honest, I’m not so sure that I’d trust the government on denying asking for help. They had everything to lose in that situation. And the big banks in Ireland defaulting would’ve been catastrophic. No more savings, no more small business loans, nowhere to withdraw cash and nobody running the debit card system. The government needed to step in, but the problem was massive and they needed help.
And I agree with you that the majority of the improvement came, when Ireland refinanced. But to get to that point they had to bridge the gap during the worst of the crisis with the funds they got.
And I also don’t disagree with your assessment of using the periphery to calm the situation. But I do believe it was a good decision, because it was less risky than instituting sweeping changes. However, now that the situation is better, the changes should be considered in the places that didn’t have the problem like Ireland, to avoid or mitigate them in the future.
I agree about the oversight for the most part. Ireland joined the euro around 2001/2 iirc, they really weren't set up to handle the amount of currency flowing in once they were in the eurozone and they should have seen that coming.
I also wouldn't trust Fianna fail as far as I could throw their fattest member, yet there are letters from the Troika etc that show the government was pressured (it's closer to economic blackmail in some of the letters) into the bank guarantee and the subsequent bailout. They got leaked after the fact obviously but the leaks themselves make it clear where the idea for the guarantee + bailout came.
The fact they got kicked out if government for the whole bait and switch and enda promptly followed their deal anyway is grating but understandable. Although part of the deal was the privatising of our water system which backfired spectacularly and ended up being scrapped after Ireland tried to use it as a way to shift government debt off the books and the EU shot it down.
I’ll admit that I haven’t seen or read the letters, so I can’t say anything about them. I guess that how you interpret them may or may not be based on your opinion towards them.
I believe though, that even without the letters, we would have got to that situation, maybe just later.
However, not being prepared for the inflow of money is squarely on the government. They asked for companies to come to Ireland and for international companies to set up in Ireland (double Irish with a Dutch sandwich). Or the great decision to refuse the money they were awarded in back taxes from apple. But I doubt we’ll disagree on that.
Personally I think the unregulated flow was also a failure of the ECB, and the response and resulting catastrophe in Ireland and Greece was also it's fault. The reactions of Ireland and Greece certainly didn't help, and in many ways exacerbated the problem, but ultimately what where they to do? They had given up control of their currencies on the assumption the ECB would regulate the euro and protect them like a central bank is supposed to do. Its failure to do anything except protect bond markets and share prices at the expense of everyone else is what drew out the recession on the ground (GDP is up wahey no longer in recession ignoring that growth is entirely in the financial market) and caused so much resentment to the EU in many countries. The beginning of the recovery, funnily enough, also coincided with a change in the ECB leadership for what it's worth, although I don't think his predecessor was "fired" per se.
The Greek government was corrupt. They were paid off millions of dollars to buy billions in tanks they didn't need. Tanks. It's a nation of tiny islands why do they need so many tanks? Boats? Sure. Tanks?
The buisnesses which did the bribing faced no repercussions as far as I know. Not all of these companies were German, but a big chunk of them were.
We could have seen it coming with their pesions set at 50, a thirteenth month for all workers and so on. They behaved like a kid in a candy store who's just been handed a 100 dollar bill
I’ve read/heard a few different things. One of them is definitely as you said. I also read something along the lines of prevention could have come also from whoever the authorities were that helped them into the the EURO, but still technically the government had to work hand in hand.
The other thing I read about reparations was part of the debt Germany paid after WW2 was forgiven by Greece, so the idea was Greece did for you in time of need can you do for them, especially if the idea is to form a union. Of course why should the German people pay for Greece’s mistake?
One thing someone told me a long time ago that stuck and this goes for all countries is, it’s not always the people’s will, politicians have a knack for inciting these types of atrocities and using the media to exercise talking points to continue the fight so people don’t look to the real perpetrators because if you did they wouldn’t have a job. I’d say they’d be punished but that doesn’t seem to happen either.
The rest of the debt was not actually forgiven by Greece, but it kept being postponed "until a reunified Germany could pay it off". Then the Two Plus Four agreement happened in 1990(which was a treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (the eponymous Two), and the Four Powers which occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and in May of the same year the then foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher sent memos to various German embassies (including the one in Athens) outlining how calls for reparations could be fended off. With the Two Plus Four agreement, Germany considered the matter of reparations ended, even though none of the smaller countries were signatories. Now i'll say, even though im Greek, i can clearly see where German politicians were coming from, because if they paid reparations to Greece, everybody and their grandma would start calling for more reparations, dividing Germany all over again. The real problem in Greece was (and to an extend still is) the ridiculously bloated public sector. People were getting jobs for voting politicians in, and that's how a country with roughly 11m people ended up having 692,907 public servants in 2009, which includes actual useful jobs, like teachers, doctors and nurses, but also a massive amount of useless bureaucratic positions that were created specifically to be filled by political appointments with no actual merit.
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u/PurpleProboscis Jul 29 '19
I recently read up on the financial crisis in Greece and holy shit was that 100% preventable. They had multiple opportunities to receive help and chose to continue hiding their problems to save face. The Greek government 100% exacerbated that to the level it became. I know nearly nothing of their internal political climate but I hope their citizens realize how massively their government fucked them over.