ATHENS // For a country teetering on a financial and political precipe, life in the capital of Greece went on pretty much as usual yesterday. The normal throng of weekend shoppers filled the streets of Athens and people enjoyed their coffees in the autumn sun.
Most appeared oblivious that just a stone's throw away prime minister George Papandreou was repeating warnings of impending disaster and a possible exit from the single currency euro zone after he met president Carolos Papoulias to discuss forming a new unity government.
His days as prime minister may be numbered even though hours earlier he had survived a no-confidence motion on his handling of the debt crisis. The main conservative opposition party, New Democracy, refuses for now to participate in a badly needed coalition to push through the international bailout deal in parliament. And it keeps insisting on snap elections.
But talk among a small group of left-wing intellectuals in a cafe in the bohemian quarter of Exarcheia quickly turned to the impact of the economic crisis on the lives of ordinary Greeks, rather than politics. "It is the middle classes who feel it now," said one artist. "The mother of an actor I know committed suicide last week because she fell into terrible debts."
A soaring suicide rate, up 40 per cent in the first half of this year, according to the Greek health ministry and much more according to others, is one of the very tangible results of the crisis that has hit the population over the last couple of years. An endless parade of beggars accosting patrons in the cafes is another, as is the growing army of homeless people.
But Greece is still a relatively rich country and the poverty and desperation exist side by side with avid consumerism and a first-world infrastructure. In the various economic indexes, Greece still was about the 32nd biggest economy in the world in 2010, ahead of the UAE and also of Finland and Singapore.
A lot of the misery is real but some of it is also comparative. "I have seen poverty increase 30, maybe 40 per cent in my parish," said father Paul Apostolous, an orthodox priest at Athens's church of St. Anna.
Many churches, who still often play a prominent role in Greek society, have over the past two years increased handouts of food and clothes to the poor. "It used to be mainly to immigrants, now also to the Greek," said father Paul.
The desperation was on show not far away, at the edge of Thisio park where couples strolled on their Saturday afternoon outings.
Giorgos Laios was poking a metal rod into a garbage bin to fish for aluminium soda cans. "I get 20 cents per kilo. It is not much. I can only find three or four kilos a day."
Until two years ago, the 60-year-old Mr Laios said, he worked in construction, mostly laying floors, but then the jobs dried up. "Now, no more house and no wife. But I have to go on."
Jobless rates in Greece have soared over the last year and now stand about 17 per cent. It is the result at least in part of austerity measures that were implemented to try get the country's burgeoning debt under control. It also explains why the population has very little appetite for more of the same under the international rescue package put together by Mr Papandreou and European leaders at the end of October.
"We don't believe in more money from Europe because it will all be eaten up by those 300 useless bodies in there," gestured an anarchist writer who publishes under the pen-name Alef Shepard, in the general direction of parliament with its 300 deputies.
"I am sure that within the coming months we will see the people go into the street. It will be a battlefield," said Mr Shepard while sipping a glass of red wine at a bar in Exarcheia.
The neighbourhood is renowned in Greece for the start of days of massive rioting against austerity and the then right-wing government in December 2008.
Mr Shepard has his fingers on the pulse of the city's anarchist movement. "I have detected a scary development," he said. "Some anarchist groups are seeking contact with extreme, extreme right-wing groups, even some that are armed, to go for violent resistance."
In Greece, the left and the right seem to have found each other in their distrust of, particularly foreign, capital. Resentment among some groups towards their own political class and towards the rest of Europe is high.
"They sell us out, the politicians give away all our national treasure to the foreign bankers," said one nationalist who protested Thursday night outside parliament. "I was for the euro but now I say we have to leave."
Nearby, one of his fellow protesters, a 23-year-old unemployed physics graduate, strongly disagreed. "I am against the economic measures but we have to stay in Europe. I cannot imagine not being in Europe and not having the euro."
foreign.desk@thenational.ae