After six consecutive years of brutal recession, with homeless and unemployment rates skyrocketing, Greek society is experiencing an “unheard-of fragmentation”, made worse by fierce austerity measures, experts say.
Battered by the eurozone’s three-year debt crisis and four years of austerity, Greece has the highest unemployment rate in the 27-nation European Union, with more than one in four people out of work.
And this economic crisis has now transformed into a social emergency, according to UN expert on debt and human rights, Cephas Lumina.
During a recent visit to the country, Lumina said there had been “an estimated 25 per cent increase in the country’s homeless population since 2009” and the poverty rate for under-17s was close to 44 per cent.
“Adjusted for inflation and using 2009 as the fixed poverty threshold, more than one out of three Greeks (38 per cent) had already fallen below the poverty line last year,” he estimated.
Drastic spending cuts imposed by the country’s international creditors in exchange for multi-billion-euro bailouts has made a difficult situation even worse, many believe.