Was 2015 as dark as you think it was?

By Allison Pearson

The Greeks continued to blame “austerity” for their woes, while fellow EU members pointed to the country’s reckless spending as well as pay and conditions that more productive countries could only dream of. Top fact of the year was that Greek hairdressers could retire at 50 on a full pension because hairdressing was classified as a “hazardous occupation”.

Not surprisingly, Horst, for example, who was required to work on a Leipzig car assembly line till he was 65, grew increasingly restive at the thought of subsidising the sunbathing, 51-year-old Vasia, who had already hung up her curling tongs in Athens. If northern Europeans took the pragmatic line that they could live without this feckless southern freeloader, that was not the view of their nervous leaders.

The consequences of keeping Greece within the Eurozone were bad, but those of Greece leaving might be even worse. William Hague’s description of the euro as “a burning building with no exits” had never seemed more prophetic than it did in 2015.

Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s lean, wolfish, sexually charged Minister of Finance, acquired a cult following as he mischievously played the grey men of the IMF and the European Central Bank off against each other. Varoufakis invented an exciting new game of Greek Roulette: this involved Greece pointing a loaded gun at its own temple till its EU partners begged it not to shoot and came up with another haircut to its debt.

The Grexit impasse grumbled on for months. Most significantly, the crisis revealed a grave faultline in the European Union: it was tricky, to say the least, that a union found it so very hard to be, well, united. By summer, that faultline would become a chasm when the refugee crisis was in full flood.

From the air, it looked as if a vast column of ants was making its way across Europe; each ant being a dispossessed, sometimes desperate human being entirely convinced that the Promised Land was to be found in “Germania” or “Ingerland”.

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