New York Times: Greece’s Troubles Attract Little Sympathy From Poorer Neighbors
SOFIA, Bulgaria — Throughout months of acrimonious haggling with creditors, Greece’s left-wing government has cast itself as the victim of an elitist financial and political order beholden to Europe’s stingy rich, notably Germans.
Some of the most resolute opponents of cutting Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party any slack, however, have been Europe’s most deprived nations, places like Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest member, and Baltic States blighted by decades of Soviet-imposed penury.
“We are much poorer than the Greeks but we have performed reforms,” Rosen Plevneliev, the president of Bulgaria, a northern neighbor of Greece, said in an interview. “When you have a problem, you have to address it and not shift it to Brussels or onto somebody else,” he said, deriding Syriza’s complaints that Europe had let Greece down.
WNU Editor: In comparison to what I had to go through when the Russian financial crisis hit in the 1990s .... what Greece is going through does not illicit much sympathy from me. But I do feel for the pensioners and for those who due to no fault of their own are dependent on social assistance .... and were led to believe that the state would be there for them for life. Sadly .... everyone is now learning that this is not the case.