From every supermarket bag these days jumps the same haunting question: “How does someone on the average salary—about €1,150 net—survive while raising one or two kids and paying rent?”
The uncomfortable answer: they don’t.
I know it’s unscientific, pointless, maybe even a bit ridiculous, but lately—maybe because of a midlife crisis—I convert everything back into drachmas, Greece’s old currency. Not that today’s jaw-dropping prices and the mismatch between wages and costs aren’t obvious on their own. But when you realize that three small tubs of yogurt now cost the equivalent of a thousand drachmas, logic simply short-circuits.
Prices Rising Faster Than Reason
In just one year, according to ELSTAT (the Hellenic Statistical Authority), meat prices have risen 10.6%. Lentils that leave the producer at €0.65 per kilo reach the supermarket shelf at €5.50.
That’s nearly two thousand drachmas, as I was saying…
And again, from every checkout bag bursts the same refrain: “How does someone with the average wage manage to live—let alone raise kids—while renting?”
Again: they don’t.
Just as former Finance Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis bluntly told an elderly farmer in that unforgettable exchange years ago:
“They don’t live.”
And that blunt truth is laid out vividly in the 2025 Report on Poverty in Greece.
One in Four at Risk
One in four people in the country is now at risk of poverty or social exclusion.
The poverty line itself is defined at €6,510 per year—meaning you are considered poor if you live on less than €550 a month.
Unless, of course, you belong to that peculiar category of self-employed Greeks who have somehow managed for years to “live just fine” reporting €3,000 or €4,000 a year to the tax office. Them—and perhaps Ms. Latiniopoulou, a conservative commentator often cited in Greek political satire—aside, the math simply doesn’t add up.
Where Is the Political Response?
Now that Mahmood Mamdani—the Ugandan-born scholar whose work on power, colonialism, and modern political systems is trending—is fashionable reading, and Greece’s Left is wondering why people don’t vote for them, here lies a golden opportunity.
Do any of the parties that don’t believe in free-market self-regulation have anything concrete to say about reducing production costs, fostering competition, and cracking down on profiteering?
Not vague proclamations or symbolic “one law, one article” promises—actual proposals.
If this endless first year of the new American administration has taught us anything, it’s that everything can change. All rules, once thought rigid, turn out soft and flexible when political will exists.
So if that’s true, why can’t the rules of an economy also change—an economy that treats it as normal for people to work endless hours and still fall short every month?
Holidays for Some, Hardship for Many
Now, with the holidays approaching, Greek news outlets will once again run cheerful reports on the full occupancy rates in the country’s “Arachovas”—the mountain resort towns associated with luxury winter weekends.
But what about those who can’t make it to the end of the month?
Poverty doesn’t make noise.
It doesn’t shout “look at me” the way wealth often does.
And behind all the arithmetic lies something no economic index captures: the growing feeling that year after year, even the basics are becoming a luxury for more and more people.
