Who’d be young and Greek? Searching for a future after the debt crisis

Who’d be young and Greek? Searching for a future after the debt crisis

The crisis has hit Greece hard, but none are harder hit than its young people. With nearly 60% unemployed, many are living in limbo, waiting for their lives to start. Daniel Howden and Yiannis Baboulias report from Athens on the stark choices facing a generation

Daniel Howden, Yiannis Baboulias

Sunday 26 July 2015 07.30 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/jul/26/greece-youth-unemployment-debt-crisis-eurozone

Sometimes Greece’s long crisis has been like a distant storm, an explosive light show whose full sound and fury takes longer to arrive. At others it has had the immediacy of a car crash. Christina Tsimpida was at her family home in Karditsa, the concrete capital of the agricultural plains of central Greece, when news broke on 27 June that a referendum would be held that could imperil the country’s future in the Eurozone. She returned to Athens the same day.

By the time she made her way into the office the next morning, the banks had shut and lines had formed at the cashpoints as capital controls were imposed. When she arrived at the lawyers’ office where she worked, near the high court in the Ambelokipi neighbourhood of Athens, everyone was talking about an emergency meeting that had been called by the partners. The practice worked on resolving cross-border disputes over unpaid debts and unresolved inheritance issues. Typically it worked with counterparts in Germany. Without much fanfare they were all told that they were being placed on leave with immediate effect and the office was being shuttered.

“At first I felt numb. I was thinking about the other people there with families and responsibilities,” says the 28-year-old, who lives alone in a rented apartment. In the month since, there has been no news. The period of paid leave she was entitled to ended almost three weeks ago. She’s no longer expecting a call, or any money. “Now I’m looking for a job, and there is nothing. Will there be any kind of jobs market on the other side of this?”

For all the talk of Greece’s nepotism and the importance of connections, Tsimpida found work through an online job board, after five months’ searching and countless applications. With long, straight dark hair and a pale complexion, she sits forward when she speaks, confidently rattling out sentences in quickfire Greek, occasionally throwing in phrases in accented English with a hint of Geordie, the legacy of a post-graduate degree at Newcastle University.

When Tsimpida graduated last year it might have seemed a better choice to stay in the UK. The Greek depression was already entering its fifth year and she came home with few illusions about how hard it would be to find work. “I wanted to make a start here in Greece. I felt that if I made a start abroad I would stay abroad and that it would be harder and harder to come back. I had to try. This is where my life is, that emotional connection we all have to the country and culture we’re born into.”

There is little patriotic encouragement to be found in the official statistics. Greece’s jobless army now numbers more than one million, according to July figures from Greece’s unemployment bureau, the OAED. The numbers are bleak from almost every perspective. Unemployment among those aged 25-30, the age by which almost everyone has formally joined the labour market, has climbed to more than 25%. Greece’s economic descent has been deeper than the United States’s during the Great Depression, with the main difference being that, as it has lost more than a quarter of its economy, there is little prospect of a recovery. It has swept away old certainties, including the ambition of a safe job in the public sector.

When she was in her early 20s, before the scale of the debt crisis had made itself felt, Tsimpida could have been confident that a degree in political science would open up a civil service job, either in the justice ministry or the prison service. Along with her elder brother and younger sister, the family has survived on her mother’s pension since her father, a cotton farmer, died in 1994. By the time she graduated the pool of appointments had dried up. Even now, with a relevant postgraduate degree, the closest she has come to working in the correctional system is volunteering with a nonprofit that offers training and counselling to female inmates.

‘Even to get a job at the supermarket I now need a diploma’: Maria Armakola Photograph: Yiannis Hadjiaslanis for the Observer

For a country that endured a 20th century of unrelenting catastrophes – stretching from Balkan wars and a vast population exchange with Turkey to world wars, German and Italian occupation, Europe’s worst famine, a civil war and a dictatorship – Greece has bitter experience of migration. The current brain drain of young and capable university graduates, estimated at anywhere between 170,000 and 200,000 people, has left the promise of the European Union seeming hollow.

Fenia remembers feeling that determination to stay, but now it has left her. The 29-year-old lives in a modest flat with her boyfriend in Exarcheia, a chaotic bohemia in central Athens where artists, communists and immigrants crowd the squares and anarchists fight frequent street battles with the police. Next to her apartment door hangs the maple leaf flag of Canada with a chalk legend that reads: “OK LET’S GO”.

A tall brunette, Fenia is cloistered inside, the air conditioning battling the intense summer heat. Her partner, Alex, still has work as a shop assistant in Syntagma Square, where he works weekends and takes as many shifts as he can. After studying psychology in Rethymno, in Crete, she came back to Athens determined: “When I was 24, I decided to stay and fight it here any way I could. But now we’re seriously thinking about going.”

In 2011, following the first bailout, things had already become tough, and she struggled to even find relevant volunteer work to put her studies to use. Midway through 2012 she got a break thanks to a seven-month stint with the Greek police working as a psychologist.

“It was good money – the programme was mainly funded by the EU. We would provide support and psychological evaluation for migrants.” As the number of migrants increased and the Greek state’s response creaked badly, the work which used to take place in holding cells dotted around the capital was moved to a detention camp in Amygdaleza, outside of the city. Fenia lost her job as a result. She kept looking and almost a year later was rewarded with a five-month contract at a primary school, where she earned €490 (£340) per month with no sick leave or vacation pay. Now even that has ended.

She is disarmingly honest about the regular bouts of depression that have haunted her since her early 20s; prolonged bouts of unemployment have not helped. “[The crisis] made things worse for me and everyone else dealing with depression and anxiety. All these people who deal with mental illness need a structure to help maintain their mental state. But here you’ll wake up and clean the house once. Then go to the supermarket another day. Some days you wake up and you have nothing to do. And what do you do then? Even if you weren’t susceptible to depression, you’re bound to be affected.”

Since her father died last year, and the money she had put aside from her work with the police ran out, Fenia has tried to stop spending altogether. She has stopped seeing her therapist and can no longer afford a course she was doing in psychotherapy. She doesn’t want to lean on her mother, with whom she lived until last year.

She and Alex have discussed trying a pop-up restaurant on one of the tourist islands in the Aegean, but the bank closures and new taxes have made it all but impossible. “Leaving the country is something we only thought of recently,” she says, “and our heart isn’t in it. I don’t have big dreams when it comes to family and stuff. I just miss a routine.”

Word on the street: anti-austerity protesters protest new measures as parliament debates the bailout deal on 15 July 2015. Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Word on the street: anti-austerity protesters protest new measures as parliament debates the bailout deal on 15 July 2015. Photograph: Orhan Tsolak/Demotix/Corbis

Over the Past six years Greece has often appeared to be drowning in numbers: more than 10,000 suicides; a 25% loss of GDP. But perhaps the starkest of all the statistics came a year ago, when youth unemployment reached 60%. The figure has since dipped to nearer 50%, but the intensifying of the crisis in recent months, for which there are not yet figures available, will almost certainly push it back up. This statistic represents the number of 15- to 24-year-olds who are not in education or a formal training programme and who are available to work.

Perama, a working-class neighbourhood that sprawls down to the Saronic Gulf, offers a glimpse of what this workless future might look like. A single one of its shipyards used to provide 10,000 jobs. The same docks now provide work for fewer than 150 people. The approach to Perama along the sea road reveals ranks of red-daubed political slogans. One of them, from an offshoot of Greece’s splintered communist party, calls for: “Alliance with Russia, no to hunger and dictatorship”.

On a quiet residential street that offers steep downhill views towards the sea, the Perama social assembly gathers every Monday. They hand out free food to anyone with an unemployment card. Much of it is grown in their own vegetable patch or received as donations. The assembly organises cultural outings and offers people a place to go to let off steam and be heard. The walls are plastered with solidarity posters from left-wingers in Germany and tributes to Pavlos Fyssas, a rapper who was stabbed to death by members of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

At 20, Maria Armakola is by far the youngest person to poke her head into the assembly. Mainly she has come because her mother, her aunt and her godmother are there. She is one of the vast number of officially unemployed who don’t receive any benefits. More than one million people are registered as unemployed with the OAED, but fewer than 180,000 qualify for assistance, as they have not paid sufficient social security contributions, or ensyma.

Armakola has been working since she was 14 and points proudly to the kiosk across the road where she got her first job: “I like to work. In fact, I preferred it to school.” She has noticed both that work pays less than it used to and money disappears a lot faster. “I used to get €20 [£14] and not really know what to do with it. Now it’s gone straightaway.”

In Armakola’s six years in the workforce she has never been able to get a job that offers ensyma, as employers have always paid her under the table. She wants to contribute at home, where her retired father’s pension has been cut and her mother can only find occasional work as a cleaner. She has been working uninsured in a local café where nine hours earn her just €20. But that is a good day, she says. Most of the time they tell her to go home after six hours so they can get away with paying her only €10. The work is hard and the customers are freer with their hands than they are with tips. But even this job is better than the situation for her cousins, all of whom live in the same area and are unemployed. Short and shy but with a bright smile, she is now going to evening classes at a local school to get the high-school diploma she missed out on.

At sunset Perama has the feel of an urban village, with people sitting out on the pavements. But there is little to do here. The only new development has been an enormous outlet of the discount supermarket Sklavenitis. Leaving the assembly, with her older relatives still talking, Armakola says she has given up on her past dream of a job as a kindergarten teacher for more realistic horizons. “To get a job at the supermarket I need a diploma. Even for you to be a babysitter they want a diploma and foreign languages. No one used to care as long as you could work.”

For much of ITS first decade in the Eurozone, Greece’s modest birth rate remained stable, at near 10 births per 1,000 people per year, but in recent years that figure has fallen to 8.5. The population decrease has accelerated with it. According to the latest figures from the Greek Statistical Authority, in 2013 deaths outstripped births by 17,660 in a population of roughly 10 million – nearly four times the 2011 amount.

It is in this environment that Melina Panagiotidou, 29, has come to see having a family as “heroic”, as almost an act of resistance. Living in the middle-class Athens neighbourhood of Papagou, she finds herself disappointed, single and relying on her mother. At college in the attractive lakeside city of Ioannina in northern Greece she studied childcare and had expected to put those skills to use at home as well as work. “I thought that by the time I was 25 or 26 I’d have a steady job and a partner to start a family with. I was thinking about it very seriously. The crisis stopped both.”

When she returned to Athens in 2009 she found that 12-hour days for a monthly salary of €500 (£350) was all that was waiting. The closest she has come to working with children are the irregular stints as a babysitter where she’s paid cash in hand. After six years of job hunting, she has walked the streets handing out leaflets for companies and kept shops. She has been studying Russian, funded in part through occasional shifts at a shop where she earns €3 (£2.10) per hour. The goal is to do a masters degree at the University of Rhodes, but the annual tuition fees of €2,500 (£1,750) may prove beyond her means.

She blames the broader crisis for the loss of her last relationship. “The way things work these days, you can’t even coordinate with someone to see each other. A lot of tensions surface and it’s very hard to find the time and space to resolve them and stay with a person. What my generation has lost is that moment when you are about to begin, to set up a life for yourself. Well, that never happened.”

Young voters: members of the Syriza youth celebrate the ‘NO’ result at the Greek referendum in Athens on 5 July 2015. Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Young voters: members of the Syriza youth celebrate the ‘NO’ result at the Greek referendum in Athens on 5 July 2015. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Angelos Leventis, unlike so many of his contemporaries, was continually told of the approaching crisis. He grew up on the island of Euboia, an hour’s drive from the capital. His father, an architect, noted as early as 2008 that work was drying up and pushed his son towards a career in computing. “I started as a musician, mainly piano and music theory. But everyone insisted that IT was the future, so I got into Piraeus University.”

It did not last. After a chance meeting with popular musician Stamatis Kraounakis, he saw an opportunity to be on stage but instead found himself as a roadie in a job he describes as “lots of work, very little money”. Bit parts as an actor on TV followed, some of them paying just €15 (£10) per appearance. The high point came with a minor role in a popular drama that brought in €100 (£70) a time. But his run lasted just three episodes.

“I realised I couldn’t live as an actor,” says Leventis. “So I worked as a floor manager for a few months each year, living on benefits for the rest.” The first year he earned €520 (£365) per month. The second €450. Then €380. Then €300, until finally the production company went bust. Meanwhile the crisis had leaked into every part of life. “The most striking thing is that I stopped going out. I started counting every penny. Every coffee, cinema ticket, drink. My quality of life started waning.” Then friends began leaving. One friend went back to her village outside Athens, one to America, one to Australia, one to Germany. His brother, who is 36, now lives and works reluctantly in Germany. “He wants to come back but it’s impossible for him to get the same sort of income and quality of life in Greece.”

There are few signs of the constant dead ends he has encountered in Leventis’s demeanour. Taking a break from the baking heat of a July afternoon at a café in central Athens he is all smiles. His clothes are reminiscent of a children’s TV presenter: a floral patterned shirt, some shorts and bright blue trainers. And he has recently put his good humour to use volunteering in an institution which helps people who have been badly hit by the crisis to socialise more. “My parents want me to leave,” he says, “and I feel like the last of the Mohicans, saying: ‘No, I’m going to stay and I’ll try to find a solution and help here in Greece’, because I love this place too much. And if we all leave, no one will be left here to fight for something better.”