You can vote as bankers dictate, but is that democracy?

Voters in Greece sort of voted as they were ordered to by European financiers and banking officials. Or least enough voters did so for them to declare victory.

The stability that financiers and banking officials cherish, however, appears elusive. Greece will have a new austerity government although anti-austerity parties won a majority of votes. For, to put it in the current Greek terminology, the pro-“memorandum” parties earned only 42 percent of the vote between them. Yet those two parties, New Democracy and Pasok, won a majority of seats in Greece’s parliament.

Those parties, along with coalition partner Democratic Left, will govern for now, but they will not rule.

Banking officials realize they have to “reward” Greeks for voting as they were told, and will make minor concessions, mostly likely by extending some repayment periods. The basic program, however, is not going to change, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel made clear in a proclamation at the Group of 20 summit a day after the election: “There can be no loosening of the reform steps.”

The translation of Chancellor Merkel’s statement is that the “markets” — financiers in the form of investment bankers, bond traders, hedge-fund managers and other speculators — will be making the decisions. That is consistent with her insistence that further “relief” from mounting debt depends on a willingness to subordinate further to financiers and central banks. Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation as she is often portrayed; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that any eurozone harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany has that tightest policy. The “markets” insist on it.

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