Dutch and German politicians like to blame Greece for refusing to stick to the agreements — but, in truth, the Greeks are doing more than they should. By Ingeborg Beugel.

Everyone who talks about Greece these days — even well-intentioned liberals — seems to assume a priori that Greece is somehow “opposing the reforms” and “refusing to stick to the agreements”. With Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the forefront, of course. Greece does not deserve respite, not a second of extra time and not a single penny more, simply because “the country keeps breaking its promises.”

First of all, the problem is that it’s impossible for a country as a whole to stick to any agreement whatsoever as if it’s some kind of ‘person’. In Greece there are countless people — the majority of the population — who have been struck by austerity measures that have been forced down their throats as if they were some kind of natural disaster; measures that are the result of those aforementioned “agreements”: a 40 to 50% reduction of salaries and pensions, an unbearable series of extra taxes, layoffs on a gigantic scale, a massive increase in unemployment and poverty, the destruction of labor rights, the implosion of healthcare. All these things are utterly unthinkable in a country like Germany or the Netherlands, yet nobody seems to give the Greeks who bravely carry this burden any credit whatsoever.

Julian Assange has been granted asylum in Ecuador, two months after he sought refuge at its London embassy. But this doesn’t mean he can escape arrest in the UK for violating his bail conditions. 

Assange risks arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy building – which he will have to do in order to get to the airport and hence to Ecuador.

Nor does remaining in the embassy guarantee the Wikileaks founder immunity from prosecution.

Back in 1988, Carl Islam explained, with some rigour, the basis of immunity afforded to diplomatic and consular premises in Britain. The subject seems dry, until you realise the serious implications it poses to individuals such as Assange.

Islam begins with the principle of inviolability. “Inviolability guarantees the sanctity of diplomatic and consular premises.” Then, the warning: “While it does not place premises above the law, anybody who remains on diplomatic or consular premises can take refuge from the law.” Hence the need for changes to rectify such abuse.

In the extreme social climate that permeates everyday life in today’s Spain, what seems to be changing is more than just some political affinities. By Carlos Delclós.

On Tuesday (7 August), some 200 members of the Andalusian fieldworkers’ union (the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores, or SAT) went to two supermarkets (the WalMart-esque Carrefour and Mercadona), filled up ten shopping carts with milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta, rice and other basic necessities, and walked out without paying. They proceeded to donate that food to 26 families in La Corrala Utopía (Sevilla) and three civic centers in three towns in the province of Cádiz.

Described by the SAT as an expropriation, the action is a spectacular example of the type of civil disobedience people all over Spain are engaging in to resist the government’s simultaneous imposition of neoliberal austerity and their pardoning of financial criminals and kleptocratic elites. Citizens refusing to pay outrageous fees for public transportation and toll roads, doctors refusing to deny free health care to undocumented immigrants, and police refusing orders to assault protesters are just some examples of how, like the budget cuts, the Spanish regime’s crisis of legitimacy extends to all sectors of Spanish society.

In French, the phrase is “Carrément dans le rouge,” meaning “squarely in debt.” That’s why hundreds of thousands of students and union members involved in Quebec’s education strike have taken to pinning little red squares of cloth to their clothes.

They’re wearing them everywhere now, in New York, in London, anywhere that student and anti-austerity movements have been struggling to reorganize themselves after months of police repression. In New York’s Washington Square Park, hundreds of young people gather in a solidarity march with Quebec students wearing the red squares pinned to their bags, sewn on their shirts, dangling as earrings and drawn on their faces. If you don’t have a red square, an earnest young woman with felt and craft scissors will be happy to cut one for you as you both march between rows of NYPD police on motorcycles.

Something important is happening in Quebec. In an age of relentless visual stimulation, modern protest movements have largely avoided twee iconism so far, but the red square has a history. It started in the Quebecois workers’ movement over a decade ago and was taken up by the militant wing of the student power movement, but in recent weeks and months it has been widely adopted by all striking students and their supporters worldwide as police violence and repressive anti-protest laws have brought international attention to the movement.

The Greek people voted in favour of a simple proposition: Bow to a loan agreement that is commonly known to be unsustainable but which Europe insists upon. Why? To buy time in the hope that the rest of Europe will, in the meantime, find some workable solution within which Greece may have a future.

Paul Murphy MEP has been in Greece for the past week, writing daily reports for Politico in the run-up to and aftermath of Sunday's election. You can find his first three reports here, here and here, and the final one is below.

So after four days campaigning in Greece, the elections are over and I'm headed to Brussels, where a vital vote on ACTA will take place at the International Trade Committee. I watched the election results with some members of Xekinima, the Socialist Party's sister organisation in Greece, before going to the Synaspismos (the biggest organisation in Syriza) offices where big crowds were gathered.

Although there were a few nailbiting moments, like when the first exit polls came out that put New Democracy's range of votes only 0.5% higher than Syriza, and with rumours circulating that Syriza might just do it, in the end the private polls circulating over the past days were accurate and ND beat Syriza by about 2.5%.

Getting the ball rolling in the right direction for Greece requires a government in Athens that is capable of looking its German partners in the eye and not blinking for a few minutes. But New Democracy won the day on a promise to blink from the outset. By Yanis Varoufakis.

Greek voters gave their contradictory verdict: While 55% voted for parties that stood explicitly against the ‘bailout’ terms and conditions, a pro-‘bailout’ government is about to be formed – such is the nature of Greece’s electoral system (which rewards the largest party with a bonus of 50 additional MPs in the 300 seat chamber). The New Democracy party will lead the government even though it is utterly clear that at least one in three of the voters who backed it think very little of the party and its leader, but felt they had no option but to vote for them simply because the alternative, a Syriza government, might bring upon the nation the combined wrath of Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels. This is as inauspicious a beginning for a new government with a mountain range of challenges as one could have imagined.

Paul Murphy MEP is in Greece this week, campaigning with Syriza in the run-up to Sunday's election. He'll be writing daily reports of his experiences for Politico. The third of these is below and parts one and two here and here.

Because of a moratorium on any political activity the day before the election, yesterday was very quiet. Athens seemed to empty out somewhat as people went home to vote. However, the relative silence was punctured by sustained cheers and horn beeping when Greece beat Russia and progressed into the quarter finals of Euro 2012. I want to use this blog to give some impressions of the other side of the struggle against the Troika and the memorandum – the massive social and workers' struggles, and to explore the consequences of some of the possible outcomes from the election.