It seems that the Greek government has sacked all of the military chiefs of staff. Greek military leadership changes spark opposition outcry
A bit of a reshuffle isn’t unusual - a comprehensive one is, and certainly creates the appearance that the government doesn’t trust the military. Do you think that this is because the government fears another coup? Or because it may refuse orders in the event of wider protests? Or is there some more innocuous explanation that I’ve missed here?
The opposition has declared it doesn’t recognize the shuffle, either, which could make things very interesting.
Yeah, that looks pretty bad. The next seven days could be very exciting.
The demos is restless!
It’s probably just political appointments as clarified in this article:
The Socialists must not be confident of their remaining in power via democratic mechanisms.
Yeah, that’s about it.
They more or less admitted so by complaining that the the opposition (then party in power) did something similar in 2009.
It is more common though to see these changes when parties come into power, when they appoint their cronies in the various ministries by replacing the other guys’ cronies.
Do you ever think that is part of the problem with Greece and its finances? I’m asking because although this political behavior is fairly common in democratic countries, those seem like extremely high level posts to replace with your party affiliates.
Oh definitely so. The endemic corruption and cronyism at all levels of the State is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons Greece has her finances in such a shitty condition.
It is almost impossible to overstate how bad corruption really is. From the social worker who, without any compunction, asks for a bribe in order to approve an adoption, to the health and safety inspector who asks that you buy him a coffee (a 2000 euro coffee) in order to give your gym the certificate it needs to operate.
As far as cronyism is concerned, this ranges from appointing friends and friends’ family members to various state owned enterprises where they get paid (well, got paid) princely sums and are not expected to show up for work, to replacing and reappointing high level officers with party members whenever the government switched hands. This is a way of life here, I’m sad to say.
That must be some damn tasty coffee.
Ermm, look, this is whoosh? Is it not obvious to everyone here how Greece’ status as an EU member and a whole lot of other things about the international situation make any coup d’etat in Greece problematic, and unlikely to be tolerated or succeed, and therefore unlikely to be attempted?
Revolution, OTOH, might not be so easily discouraged. If the people are not confident that they’re wielding enough power through democratic mechanisms . . . 
Gee, and normally all the fun stuff happens at the top of the Balkan Peninsula.
No threat of a coup. The US and Europe are not financing any dictators this time.
Whatever happens from this, ou have to admire Papandreou for having the balls to pull off what he did… Let the people vote!
Maybe a few dozen other major global-impact decisions of other countries should have been put to a referendum too in the past 100 years… like some wars maybe, or what have you.
It could just be budget cuts.
Actually, it could easily make it quite certain. I’m unaware that EU countries must be or remain democratic, and given the right circumstances the opposition could easily claim that the ruling party itself must be deposed. Once done, the rest of Europe would have a hard time dealing with it - what are they going to do, invade their own ally?
EU members must indeed be democracies, and there are a host of other requirements involving human rights and the like that would also be unlikely to be respected by a military dictatorship.
Granted, the EU could just kick Greece out in the event of a coup, but as a practical matter, I doubt they’d tolerate even a former member regressing away from democracy. The European Projects great success has been coaxing former Soviet states into becoming liberal democracies instead of dictatorship by ex-Communist strongmen. I don’t think the EU leaders would tolerate that being rolled back.
And as others have said, its all hypothetical. The current shuffle in the military leadership isn’t a prelude to a coup.
I probably should have said “effective democracy”. There is, after all, a world fo difference between the USSR and England, even if both supposedly were democratic.
There is also a world of difference between the USSR and the EU.
I know, and that was a major part of my point. The EU might kick Greece out - or any nation - if it underwent a coup. But deploying military force would be very unappealing. I doubt the EU would willingly go that route, so the success of a coup would tend to come down to “Do we care whether the French and Belgians frown at us?”
The USSR, they’d just kill ya.
The requirements are fairly robust. The USSR certainly wouldn’t have met them. From the wikipedia article on the Copenhagen Criteria:
If the frowns come with sanctions I think they would. Greece’s economy is pretty dependant on shipping, tourism and trade with other EU members + the US. I doubt any gov’t there would last long under an embargo.