Is your country still functioning under austerity measures?

14 comments

1. [removed]

2. It’s even worse, the government has decided to declare war on austerity and is spending more and more every year without any care at all for inflation or debt. Austerity will eventually come, either as a government meassure or as a natural consecuence of this uncontrolled spending. And the worst about it is that at least from my point of view I’m not noticing any of that spending on my daily life, not better streets, not better education, not better public administration and no price reductions (on the contrary, prices increase in everything). It’s like knowing I’m going to have a terrible hangover tomorrow but without the part where I get drunk today.

3. I don’t think so; at least it isn’t presented as such. Rather, successive governments, both liberal and social democratic governments have been quite open about cutting budgets, centralising power, attacking public workers working conditions and so on, not because of a needed austerity, but rather, as a political goal in itself. It is, for many Danish political parties, _desirable_ to downsize the public sector and attack welfare. And they aren’t shy to say so.

   There was a taste of what was to come during the last conservative government—Poul Schlüter, cabinets I-IV, 1982-1993—with the so called “potato diet,” named after the autumn vacation, popularly called “the potato vacation” in Danish. Schlüter’s policies were more in line with what people could consider austerity in the true sense of the world, and had the stated goal of reducing debt and so on and so on. Many of the various welfare projects started by preceding social democratic governments were halted, de-funded or the likes, and various policies aiming to help the working class maintain a standard of living, were simply stopped.

   After Schlüter, like in Britain, it can be said that the greatest political project of the conservative government, was that it completely destroyed the social democratic foundations of the social democratic party, and we saw a development towards a neo-liberal social democratic party, that in the nineties ruled rather across the middle, than with the rest of the left, continued the policies of Schlüter, and so on. But the potato diet wasn’t enough; in 2001, the liberal party along with the rest of the right, and the young Danish People’s Party, managed to secure a majority in parliament, and the liberals, with their program of establishing a _minimalstat_ was able to continue the attacks on the Danish welfare state, in return for tightening of refugee and immigration policies demanded by the DPP.

   In 2011, after three liberal electoral victories, the social democrats managed to claw back a majority, now with an even _more_ liberal leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, aka. “Gucci-Helle.” While her first government had members from the Socialist People’s Party, it wouldn’t last, and would be near-fatal for the latter. The Socialist People’s Party almost disintegrated over internal disagreements regarding the coalition, and especially the trouble that the Social Liberal Party’s demands caused. Basically, they had blocked any form of fundamental change to the way economical policies were handled, in return for entering government. It was under Helle Thorning-Schmidt that the minister of finance, now a prominent commentator in the most conservative capital-mouthpiece in Denmark, _Berlingske Tidende_, Bjarne Corydong stood for large privatisations, among other things, of energy.

   After only 4 years with Helle Thorning, the liberals in 2015 managed to once again build a right-wing coalition, basically the same formula as in 2001, and the liberals maintained their course until 2019, where the social democrats again managed to secure supply and confidence to build a one party government, which has functioned largely as a crisis-government due to Covid and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But during the current government’s stint, we have seen the same attacks on workers, the same attacks on the quality of welfare, and so on and so on, not to mention blissful ignorance and inaction in terms of climate change—basically they had this “hockey stick” idea, that technology would save us in the 11th hour, not understanding that the 11th hour is *now*—and a continuation of the anti-refugee and anti-immigration policies we’ve seen the last 20 years, not to mention a good squeeze of anti-intellectualism.

4. No, we made bank. We usually do when things turn to shit internationally. Currently we’re expecting to make at least 1.500.000.000.000 NOK extra this year because of gas and oil prices.

5. Only temporary VAT raise to 21% is still in force.

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   However, now Lithuania has nationalwide state of emergency for the first time since 1992.

6. Not only I was not negatively impacted, the quality of life for me improved considerably. Same for all the people I know. I dont know how generalized this is. This is also because Romania joined the EU in 2007 and it has been getting better since then. Of course we were hit by 2008 and 2020 crisies, but overall, things are getting better. If anything, the problem is we did not improve as quickly as we could have without the governmental incompetence and corruption.

7. The whole economy was literally strangled to a slow death, magnifying the problem and making sure the repercussions will be there forever. Mine and at least the next generation are basically done for

8. From what I understand, it was a long time coming. In Amsterdam, over 50% of homes were social housing until the sector started being liberalised in the mid-1990s. Then with economic crash after economic crash and barely any incentive to build affordable housing, the housing market has never recovered. Every few months house prices seem to rise by an amount never seen before. Owning a home now just seems so unobtainable.

   Jobs in my sector disintegrated after the crash for a good few years afterwards and have slowly recovered. Now is actually the best year for it for years apparently.

9. Yes. The taxes are even higher than when things were really bad (2011-2013) and budget cuts still continue

10. Hey I’m just a lurker from America… but what are austerity measures? Does that mean like cutting programs and gov spending? Trying to learn thx 🙂

11. Shortly after I moved to Germany from the UK, the financial crisis came up in a conversation… One German asked “what’s that?”, another German answered “something that happened in America 10 years ago.”

12. Yes. The conservative government ruling between 2010 and 2013 was notorious for harsh austerity measures, some of which had to be withdrawn due to protests, but most have stuck around. Beyond the typical jazz of cutting government expenses, slashing public funding of services, weakening regulations and worker protections, privatizations from the national to the municipal level, etc., there’s also been a gradual shift in attacking the welfare system, and essentially trying to make it as hostile and hard to navigate as possible, aided by a mostly astroturfed moral panic about misuse of welfare funds. Think about Reagan era “welfare queens”, essentially the same stuff.

    None of this has really gone anywhere, and has in fact been essentially baked into the dogma of the mainstream political spectrum. The 2013 – 2017 government was social democratic led, which meant some of the cuts were reversed, but the serving Minister of Finance was oligarch Andrej Babiš, who had a personal stake in not letting things get too out of hand.

    After the social democrats self destructed in 2017 trying to get rid of Babiš only to pathetically join his new government, not much had changed until COVID broke out, aside from some partial improvements, like teachers finally winning proper wages. During the crisis the government, as most across Europe, embraced the money machine, spending billions of euro on support programs for institutions, businesses and individuals, as well as rolling out the vaccination program. The socdem minister of social affairs used this opportunity to sneak in some expansions in social welfare, much to the scorn of the liberal-conservative political and media blob. While all of these new expenses were largely necessary, they also left a huge hole in the budget, which became one of the main topics of the upcoming elections.

    In the end, the center right bloc managed to barely edge out Babiš, despite him throwing any fashy or populist rhetoric he could think of at the wall in the last months, including (very justified, to be fair) fear of upcoming cuts. Both of the center right coalitions which ended up forming the government based their campaign on reducing the deficit without raising taxes, so it was pretty clear what was gonna happen.

    And lo and behold, a slew of cuts across the entire society has already been announced, including a pay freeze for all government workers (but notably not MPs or senators, curious!) which in high inflation amounts of a significant pay cut, in funding for regions and municipalities, in investments and funding for any forms of public or alternative transport, in welfare, in healthcare, which is a particularly egregious fuck you to the workers who had to carry the pandemic on their shoulders since fall 2020 because both governments gave up on trying to actually control the spread. On the left we’ve dubbed these “tupé škrty”, or mindless cuts, because it’s just reducing expenses without any thinking about potential consequences. These kinds of cuts tend to be broadly unpopular, so the Ukrainian war has been kind of a godsend to the government in this aspect because it drove anything else out of the news. But even here we’re seeing the impact, since the influx of refugees is being offloaded onto desperately underfunded and understaffed social services and NGOs with the hopes of not having to spend a cent extra, which will obviously be impossible to keep up. So we’ll see about that!

    TLDR shit’s fucked, I’m moving to Norway

    Sorry for the wall of text lol I didn’t realize I was rambling this much.

13. It’s great, for people who are already rich. Inequality has been rising ever since the Schröder government under the SPD and Greens crippled our social security system and forced people into very low wage work. And during the worst inflation since the birth of the BRD the SPD, Green and FDP government thought 4€ a month more would be plenty for people who can’t find work.

14. From the UK, but live in Greece. I got married and gave birth to both my kids during the economic austerity. For sure there have been a lot of difficulties but we managed through. We work in tourism and saw a massive change in attitude from tourists and collaborators from Northern countries, taking advantage of the austerity, forcing lower rates etc in contracts, depending extra services for free with the onus that “we should be grateful seeing as we are broke”. The island I have has limited public services, so we didn’t really see much of a difference compared to the mainland.