During the recent Greek crisis, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaueble made it clear that what Greek voters wanted was irrelevant. Greece would bow to the Troika or the Troika would strangle the Greek economy, period. In essence, national governments should restrict themselves to things like what color park benches should be painted -- provided the paint is affordable.
If this "soft coup" stands, taxes, interest rates, public ownership, investments, and economic strategies to control inflation and unemployment -- long the battleground for conflicting ideologies -- will no longer be issues to be decided democratically. Unelected bodies, like the Troika, will make those decisions, in spite of the fact that many of the Troika's policies -- like austerity -- are highly controversial and have an almost unbroken track record of failure.
Democracy is what is at stake in Portugal, and it is a crisis that cuts to the heart of the European Union experiment. Do people still have the right to make decisions about policies that have a profound impact on their lives? Or do they only get to quarrel about the color of park benches?
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