Editorial: Foreclosure auctions

It is not only its erstwhile slogan “No home in the hands of a banker” that the SYRIZA-Independent Greeks government has forgotten. It also forgot its much more recent commitment – which it essentially used as an excuse – that lower income families’ homes will be protected from auctions of foreclosed properties. That belies the government’s claim that auctions only concern villas of the wealthy, who can pay but do not.

Reality belied the government once again. By the end of 2019, according to press reports, 5,000 primary residences of debtors will be auctioned off. That involves homes worth 150,000 euros or less. By April, 2019, 17,400 homes will have been auctioned off.

That reality of daily auctions of foreclosed properties was not what SYRIZA and the Independent Greeks were promising before they came to power. It is not the Greece that they described when they sought the vote of the Greek people. Yet, that is the daily reality that they brought to the Greek people, burdening them with yet another bailout memorandum. For all this, the government has not recognised a single error, and has not offered a single apology.

Surely, one cannot expect the government to do that in an election year.

Still, reality will always clash with the government’s grandiose pledges, and it will remind one of everything that SYRIZA and the Independent Greeks are trying to forget.