Spain's 'We Are All Greece' Video and the 2015 Greek Debt Audit

In June 2015, as Greece edged towards a showdown with its creditors, a group of Spanish citizens recorded a short video for the Greek people. Standing in public squares and holding handwritten signs in Greek, they spoke in Greek too, with one message running through it: you are not alone, we are all Greece. The video came from Spanish activists who campaign for citizen audits of public debt, and it was made to support the Greek Parliament's own investigation into the country's debt. You can watch it below, with subtitles, and read the background that makes it meaningful.

The video and who made it

The clip was shared under the name Auditamos Grecia, Spanish for "We audit Greece". It was a campaign of the Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana de la Deuda (PACD), a Spanish citizens' platform that argues ordinary people have a right to know how public debt was created and who benefited from it. In mid-June 2015 two of its members, Javier Soraluce and Sergi Cutillas, wrote in the Spanish daily Público that the platform would follow the Greek audit closely and publish its report in English with a Spanish summary on the AuditamosGrecia.org blog. Cutillas himself sat on the Greek committee.

The video is simple and personal. Spanish participants read out lines of greeting in Greek, often with careful pronunciation rather than fluency, and hold up cards written in the Greek alphabet. It opens with a message sent "from the squares", a deliberate nod to the plazas of Madrid, Barcelona and other cities that filled with protesters during Spain's 15-M or indignados movement in 2011, and to Athens' Syntagma Square, which saw its own mass protests that year.

Spanish citizens' message of support for the Greek people and for the parliamentary audit of Greece's public debt.

(Turn on the subtitles in the player)

Greece's Truth Committee on Public Debt

The audit the Spanish activists were cheering on was real and official. On 4 April 2015, Zoe Konstantopoulou, then Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament, set up the Truth Committee on Public Debt. Konstantopoulou had been elected Speaker in February 2015 with 235 of 300 votes, a record majority, shortly after the left-wing Syriza party came to power. (Some English versions of the story garbled her first name; it is Zoe.)

The committee brought together around thirty Greek and international experts in law, economics and finance. Its job was to examine how Greece's debt had built up, with a strong focus on the bailout loans of 2010 to 2015, and to judge whether parts of it had been contracted in breach of law or of human rights obligations.

Its preliminary findings, presented in the Greek Parliament in mid-June 2015, were blunt. The committee argued that Greece "should not pay this debt because it is illegal, illegitimate, and odious", and that the debt was unsustainable because servicing it would seriously undermine the country's human rights obligations. It applied those labels in turn to loans from the IMF, the European Central Bank, the European Financial Stability Facility and other eurozone states.

What "illegitimate" and "odious" debt mean

These terms come from a long-running debate in international law and campaigning. Odious debt is the idea that a debt taken on without the consent of the people, which does not benefit them, and which lenders knew to be problematic, should not bind the population that is later asked to repay it. Illegitimate debt is a broader, more political category used by debt-justice groups for loans whose terms or purpose are judged unfair.

Neither concept is a settled rule that courts routinely enforce, and creditors rejected the committee's conclusions. That is why the audit mattered politically more than legally: it gave a parliamentary platform to the argument that austerity had been imposed on Greeks to protect banks and creditors, at great human cost. Supporters abroad, including in Spain, saw it as a model their own countries might follow.

Why Spaniards felt so close to Greece

Spain lived through its own severe crisis after 2008: a collapsed property bubble, a banking rescue, high unemployment and deep spending cuts. Many Spaniards felt they were watching a harsher version of their own story in Greece, and saw Greek resistance to austerity as a test case for southern Europe.

The PACD grew out of that experience. Its members argued that Spain's debt should also be audited, and that ordinary citizens should not carry the cost of private banking failures. Writing in June 2015, Soraluce and Cutillas said the platform would stand with Greece if the audit found the debt illegitimate, illegal, odious or unsustainable and the government chose to stop paying. Learning a few sentences of Greek for the camera was their way of making that solidarity personal rather than abstract.

What happened next

The video circulated in the tense last days of June 2015. On 27 June Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced a referendum on the creditors' proposal, and on 5 July Greeks rejected it by 61.3% to 38.7%, on a turnout of about 62.5%. For a moment the "No" vote looked like the defiance the Spanish activists had hoped for.

It did not last. Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned the next day, and on 13 July 2015 the Greek government signed up to a third bailout whose terms were harsher than the ones voters had rejected. Around forty Syriza MPs refused to back the measures, and Tsipras won a snap election in September on a low turnout. Konstantopoulou broke with Syriza, stood unsuccessfully for the Popular Unity party, and later founded her own party, Course of Freedom, returning to parliament in 2023. The debt committee's findings were never adopted as government policy. Greece formally exited its bailout programmes in August 2018.

Why the video is still worth watching

Looking back, the clip captures a particular moment when many Europeans believed the debt crisis could still be resolved differently, and when citizens in one struggling country reached across borders to encourage another. Whatever your view of the audit's legal arguments, it is a reminder that the crisis was not only a matter of spreadsheets and summits. It touched pensions, hospitals and young people's prospects, and ordinary people in Spain recognised that.

For Greek viewers, hearing their language spoken carefully by strangers in Spanish squares was a small but genuine gesture of friendship. The people of the two countries have often found common ground in hard times, and this short film is one modest record of that.

Sources: Auditamos Grecia: solidarity video (YouTube); Público: España habla griego (15 June 2015); Executive summary of the Truth Committee on Public Debt preliminary report; Wikipedia: Zoe Konstantopoulou; Wikipedia: 2015 Greek bailout referendum.

Related:

• #ThisIsACoup - Paul Krugman & Joseph Stiglitz about Germany's Killing of the European Project
• Germany owes more than €279bn WWII reparations to Greece - more than Greece's debt to EU
• A Parent’s Testimony About Suicide During the Greek Economic Crisis
• Why I will vote “NO” on the Greek referendum (Opinion)
• UN experts welcome Greek referendum, condemn IMF, EU and call for international solidarity
• DEBTOCRACY International Version (Documentary)
• CATASTROIKA Privatization goes public (Documentary)
• Apologies of an Economic Hitman: A Documentary Viewing Guide
• The Money Masters (Documentary): How Banks Create Money Out Of Thin Air
• The Corporation: A Documentary's Argument About Corporate Power
• Owned & Operated - A film about Humanity and the World we've built for Ourselves
• The American Dream - The Story of Your Enslavement
• Ancient Greek Inventions Through Modern Reconstructions
• Ancient Greeks discovered America, according to an Italian university professor
• The 10 Most Famous Personalities Of The Last 6,000 Years
• Top 14 Greatest Philosophers And Their Books
• Socrates Was One Of The Smartest People Ever Lived. Here Are 24 Out Of His Most Important Quotes That Everyone Needs To Read
• The Three Filters: A Story Attributed to Socrates
• MOTIVATION: 15 Best Socrates Picture Quotes
• 17 Of Plato's Most Famous Quotes That Can Help Us Improve Our Lives
• This Animation Will Explain To You Plato's Philosophy In Almost 3 Minutes
• 40 Aristotle's Quotes That Will Make You Think And Can Change Your Life
• 40 Golden Words By Epictetus, The Ancient Greek Philosopher Who Was Born A Slave
• The Key To Happiness, According To 3 Greek Philosophers
• Skopje 2014: Monumental Design and a Disputed Historical Narrative
• Genocide Recognition and the Pursuit of Justice