Athens, Greece – When the conservative New Democracy party came to power in Greece in 2019, it promised a work-driven economy that would grow by 4 percent a year and elevate living standards after a decade of austerity.In an appeal to the productive, non-state economy, Kyriakos Mitsotakis became prime minister, asking Greeks to “work together to build a new compact of trust based on meritocracy, industriousness, security, justice, opportunities for everyone”.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listFive years later, Greeks had the second-lowest annual salaries in the European Union after Bulgaria, according to Eurostat, the EU statistical agency.Every other Eastern European country that had become a free-market democracy in 1991 and an EU member in 2004, almost a quarter-century after Greece, has leapfrogged ahead of it.From 2019 to 2024, “Bulgaria rose 11 points whereas we rose 3 points,” said Yiorgos Christopoulos, spokesman for the General Confederation of Workers in Greece (GSEE), the country’s private sector umbrella union. “If this goes on, Bulgaria, too, will overtake us in the next two to three years,” he told Al Jazeera.GSEE’s latest report found that during these five years, Greek living standards rose from 65.5 percent of the EU average to just 68.5 percent, despite the fact that the economy has grown at almost twice the EU rate since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.What went wrong?When New Democracy was re-elected in 2023, it promised …
