When the economic crisis broke out, and in the ensuing years, there were voices in Greece that remained clear-minded. They were voices that preferred a rethinking to fanaticism, and a calm examination of the causes of the crisis rather than irrational shrieks and easy slogans.

Those voices, which were a minority in an environment of furious intensity, noted, among other observations, that the country should use the crisis as an opportunity for structural reforms, precisely in order to avert yet another crisis.
As it turns out, these voices were like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. In August, the eight-year cycle of bailout programmes will close. The annual report of the German Institute of Economic Research, which is featured in Ta Nea today, indicates the train of basic structural reforms was lost.
The Greek state remains bureaucratic, with an unstable taxation framework, and an extremely slow justice system. It is essentially hostile towards investment and lacks a plan for entering an economy of innovation.

The calm voices had also underlined that the crisis that battered the country was not only economic. It was also political, in the sense that the political system, with the warlike climate that it cultivated, extended the economic catastrophe.

Hence, it bears all the more responsibility to do whatever is necessary to achieve a rapid restructuring of the state and the freeing up of productive forces from practices and mentalities that have nothing to do with a modern state.

This opportunity must not be lost.