Greek anger at the devil called "Angela" (Feature)

By Christine Pirovolakis May 4, 2010, 4:08 GMT

Athens - Angela Merkel's picture has been all over the newspaper kiosks in Athens, the capital of debt-ridden Greece, where many openly criticize her for having stood in the way of help.

On one magazine cover, she is in combat gear - standing in front of the Acropolis - with military helicopters flying overhead. 'We will pay you - but you will have to bleed,' Merkel is saying on the front page of a top-selling newspaper.

The German government's hard line on aid for Greece has been a sore point in Greece, where many believe the country is paying too tough a price for its membership of the eurozone.

On the weekend, Athens unveiled a deal with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund that relies on a more drastic government-driven austerity plan that aims to save 30 billion euros over the next three years.

Cuts are to be made in a bloated public sector in Greece, which has been the scene of corruption and free-spending for decades, with debt in 2009 swelling to 115 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) and putting the euro on shaky ground. Greek pension payments are to go down and taxes up.

Merkel fuelled Greek resentment by holding back approval of bail- out deal while markets fell over fears that the Athens' unprecedented debt crisis could spread to other eurozone members, such as Portugal and Spain.

On Monday, six months after Europe's leaders first convened to discuss the Greek crisis, German lawmakers concluded there was no alternative to the 110-billion-euro credit package for Greece in trying to save the credibility of the eurozone.

Although Berlin will now be contributing the lion's share of the package after all, the perception among Greeks of being punished for mistakes, lingers. Some are even wondering whether it is still worth being part of the eurozone.

'We were better off when we had the drachma,' says Fotini Solomonidou, who owns a clothing shop in central Athens. 'No one was dictating to us, now we have some devil woman named Angela who is telling us what to do.'

It is a decade since Greece joined the eurozone, a feat some financial experts have attributed to 'creative accounting' in getting budget deficits down far enough to qualify. Today, the average Greek will argue that the country is suffering heavily from that membership.

Greeks had a flash of the past recently, when the National Mint in Athens began re-circulating commemorative drachma coins.

Solomonidou says: 'Perhaps this is a sign of what is yet to come.'

'Of course we have benefited from being in the eurozone - interest rates are lower than they would otherwise be and having one currency has encouraged tourism,' said Panagiotis Ioannidis, the owner of a taverna owner near the Acropolis, Greece's main tourist attraction.

'If Greece still had its own currency then it would have chosen, or been forced to devalue and thereby received a quick boost to competitiveness - although at the cost of raising inflation as imported goods would have cost more,' said Panagiotis Petrakis, director of the Economics Department at the University of Athens.

Greek trade union leaders have vowed to battle the austerity plan in the country where wages are low and called for further protests by air traffic controllers, port workers, civil servants, doctors, teachers and employees in the banking sector.

Since the weekend, hundreds of armed forces personnel have publicly protested a 30 per cent cut salary cut, while resignations in the police force, the coast guard and fire department followed by the hundreds.

'I have been in this job for 31 years and with these new measures I will be losing 6,500 euros annually from my salary,' said Dimitris Georgantzis, head of the police officers' association.

Berlin and its eurozone partners now aim to approve the necessary legislation to free up German's 22.4-billion-euro portion of the 110- billion-euro financial aid package for Greece.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said insisting on stringent reforms before helping Greece had been the right course of action.

'We are fighting a fire that started in Greece so that it does not spread to Europe and our currency, but at the same time we are fighting the cause of the fire,' he said.

Last month, Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos told a Portuguese newspaper that Berlin's stance on Greece was based on a 'moral, racial approach' and the prejudice that Greeks do not work enough.'

Pangalos, who has in the past accused Germany of not properly compensating Greece for World War II occupation, also told the Jornal de Negocios that Berlin was too focused on catering to voters at a time when the EU required solidarity.

'German wanted Greece expelled from the eurozone,' he said. This was not a scenario his country wanted, but, 'Greece will always exist, as we have existed for 8,000 years, out of the euro and EU.'