ABSTRACT
The 2009 Greek debt crisis led to the adoption of an austerity programme supervised by the IMF and the EU (Featherstone, 2011). Austerity took effect when the Greek economy was already in recession and made it much deeper. The GDP in 2013 had contracted by 23% relative to 2007, amounting to a dramatic fall in living standards. Such a recession has very few precedents in modern economic history (the 1929 Great Depression in the United States led to a fall in GDP of 30% within four years) (Matsaganis, 2014, p. 112). Joblessness rose steeply: in 2008 the unemployment rate stood at 7.5%; five years later it was at 27.8%. For 14% of Greeks, poverty was, by developed country standards, extreme: about 1.5 million people were unable to purchase a basic basket of goods (Matsaganis, 2014, pp. 114–15). Policy responses to the social effects of the crisis were at best inadequate. For example, only one jobless worker in ten had access to unemployment benefits (Matsaganis, 2012). In turn, the ineffective formal welfare provision ate into the liquidity of the informal residual family-based support system, transmitting the crisis from the state to the family (Lyberaki and Tinios, 2014). Economic misery, combined with a pervasive sense of impotence, led to the polarisation of domestic politics and a rise in political extremism.
