Excerpted from an interview of Nasos Iliopoulos of the Greek Syriza party, by Alex Nunns for Red Pepper:

“RP: What is the impact on the young generation of the crisis?

There are two aspects of the attack on the youth. One is work, and the second is education.

Among the youth there is a general feeling of having no future. There are a lot of people who find it very difficult to find a job, even if they are highly educated. Among 18 to 25 year olds there is 50 per cent unemployment and rising. For those who can find employment there are now very flexible working relations and people will work for low wages. I personally know qualified graduates who are doing jobs that are ten or more hours a day for 300 euros a week. It is very difficult for them to have a home.

In August last year a new law was passed about higher education reforms. The new policy is supposed to prepare students for the “new realities” of work. Even the elite institutions like the civil engineering and architecture polytechnics or law schools are being turned into universities for the new precarity. They are saying “these will be the conditions for the rest of your life”.

Less people will be educated at university. They can now restrict the numbers and they are splitting the equivalent of the bachelors and masters elements of higher education to be able to charge fees for the masters. And because of the crisis many people are dropping out of school before getting to the university stage, because they have to earn money for their family or because they see that university is no longer possible.

But this education law has been resisted and has not been fully implemented. They haven’t been able to vote in the new boards that are needed. When the law was passed in August it was during the holiday time but there was a big student movement with occupations. Since then there has been a lot of resistance from students and people who work in universities who are against the law, blocking its implementation.

How close are relations between the left parties and the other movements associated with the youth, like the Indignados who occupied Syntagma Square in Athens until they were violently evicted last summer?

Indignados is a term borrowed from the Spanish, but in Greek the word has negative connotations associated with the right-wing after the civil war. People prefer to call it the Squares Movement.

In the crisis we find a lot of new movements and struggles that it would have been impossible to predict before, involving new people, like the Squares Movement. So you have to learn from them, and also teach them and transform them, and in that process you are transformed yourself, through the shared struggle. In the Squares Movement there were very good connections between the People of the Squares and some political forces which amounted to a very powerful opposition to the government. Many people in the Square were also in a political party, but many were not and many were new to politics. The relationships were sometimes difficult but in the end they benefitted all.

Take the June 28-29 vote in parliament last year, which brought the second phase of the austerity policy. There were huge demonstrations outside involving different parties, unions, and movements, and there was tremendous repression from the police. 10 members of the youth of Synaspismos were injured. Where our bloc was standing in Syntagma Square we happened to be one of the first blocs hit very violently. The police used 2,000 rounds of tear gas in two days. And the excuse for this was tourism – that the protests and occupation were bad for tourism because there are some hotels around the Square! But the repression did have a positive side-effect because lots of people were educated by this terror.

After the new austerity package was voted through it was very difficult to keep the movement united. People felt like a very great struggle had come to nothing. So after Syntagma Square was cleared you cannot speak about the same movement. But it has evolved in different forms. We now have over 50 popular assemblies in Athens that are the places of struggle for the local situation. The Squares Movement has transformed into something more original.

In the popular assemblies everyone represents themselves – not on a party basis, although people from parties are involved – and it works by consensus. This tradition came after Syntagma. There are conflicts but we work together in ways we could not have understood two years ago.

We organise not just in opposition to the government but about local issues, everyday life. It’s another level of fighting austerity. For example there is a new tax on all residential property and the government has connected the payment of it to the electricity bill. It’s blackmail, saying if you don’t pay the tax your electric will be cut off. All the popular assemblies have taken up the struggle. Many people refuse to pay. There are many little victories in this process. The government has not managed to cut off people’s electricity because people have the solidarity to stop them. Even the union of the workers in the energy company have resisted by occupying the building where the bills are processed.

So they can’t actually achieve austerity because of two aspects: the resistance which is slowing down the measures; and because even on their own terms the policy is impossible because the recession is so big it becomes a downward spiral.”