Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens on Tuesday came at a critical moment for Antonis Samaras and the junior partners in his three-party coalition government. Under pressure to agree to new, socially wrenching austerity measures, his government faces enormous odds in navigating the country through its worst crisis since the collapse of the colonels’ junta in 1974. At stake is whether Greece can remain in the eurozone, but of greater importance in the long run is whether, in doing so, it can again find its footing as a polity, renewing the struggle that began after the Second World War to emerge as a modern European democracy.
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