The Greek government wins support from Brussels—but can the country stick to austerity?

RARELY do chickens come home to roost with such precision. George Papandreou, Greece’s Socialist (Pasok) prime minister, is struggling to stop the country “falling over a cliff”, as he put it in a gloomy television address on February 2nd. Yet it was his late father Andreas, a spendthrift Pasok premier, who sowed the seeds of Greece’s crisis with a borrowing spree in the 1980s. The younger Mr Papandreou must now act quickly to curb Greece’s “triple deficit”—swollen budget and current-account deficits, plus a soaring public debt—or risk a humiliating loss of sovereignty to the European Union institutions in order to escape a sovereign default.

Mr Papandreou, a sociologist who dislikes figures, would much prefer to talk of Greece’s “credibility deficit”. As he made clear this week at a conference in Athens with Joseph Stiglitz, an American economics Nobel laureate, organised by The Economist, he blames unnamed “speculators”, including hedge funds, for the punishment that the country’s bonds are taking on financial markets. He and Mr Stiglitz also both attacked those whom they termed “deficit fetishists”. …