Rigas Raftopoulos - 10/05/2012

     The profound Greek social and political crisis could not have been solved almost by miracle by a general election that has indeed turned out to be chiefly a way to vent the condemnation of the political class that has governed the country for the past thirty years, and that in the last two has entrusted it to the shock therapy of the troika European Central Bank – International Monetary Fund – European Union. The Greeks have, then, with their vote, sanctioned the political failure of a leadership that has taken the country to the brink of economic failure and chaos. The PASOK emerges from the elections in pieces with a miserly 13% and forty-one MPS, troubled by a serious domestic crisis in which Evanghelos Venizelos claims his leadership for the rebirth of the party, but undergoes increasingly vehement attacks from within his own party. New Democracy, which was aiming at the absolute majority, is at just below 19% and one hundred and eight MPs and overall the party is not pleased, and had never been pleased with, its leader Antonis Samaras, accused of beginners’ mistakes for a leader who aspires to power. 

     The party of the Democratic Left Dim.Ar. is unable to make a mark, with 6.1% and paying for its image as a party ready for a compromise with the (hated) PASOK and at the same time not open to other forms of Left wing alliances. The true winner of the elections is definitely SYRIZA of Alexis Tsipras, which has above all collected the vote of those young people who with the pro-Euro policies at all costs of the PASOK-New Democracy have lost all hope in any form of dignified future. If SYRIZA with 16.78% is now the second political force in Greece, again on the Left the KKE is anchored to around 8.5% paying the price for its usual policy of isolation in a moment when the progressive Greek electorate is seeking concrete solutions to a real and devastating economic crisis. In this context, the really alarming fact is the 7% and the twenty-one MPs of Chrissì Avghì (Golden Dawn), a group of neo-Nazis and Satanists that was founded some twenty years ago and at the 201o elections got 0.23%.

     It has brought a small group of hoodlums, fanatics, xenophobes and nationalists into the parliament who, and this is the fact that is really scary, in the capital got votes in those neighbourhoods where there are no particular problems with the immigrants. This party in actual fact gathers the destruction anti-system protest vote with the paradox of sending MPs to that parliament which, just last year, the same members of Golden Dawn shouted had to be “burnt down” as it was a “brothel.” As opportunely shown by the journalist Stelios Kouloglou, Chrissì Avghì represents a true and proper weapon of mass destruction of today’s Greek political system. The system provides that the president of the Republic, Karolos Papoulias, historical founder of the PASOK in 1974, should confer the first three-day mandate to the leader of the outright majority party to try and form a government; in the case of failure the mechanism would be repeated with the leader of the second party and, ultimately, with that of the third. In nine days at most we shall know if and when there will be new elections.

     In the meanwhile, just one day was enough for Samaras to throw in the towel handing over to Papoulias the task of forming a government. Now it is the turn of Tsipras who is proposing a manifesto of at least five points addressing it to all the Greek political forces, including the PASOK and New Democracy, desiring to abandon the austerity policies. However, the Greeks are already getting ready for a period of reciprocal accusations between the parties over the failure to form a government in a decisive moment for the history of the country and the parties that will find themselves most of all in trouble will presumably be the Communists of the KKE and the Democratic Left. The most plausible and widely expected scenario is that it won’t be in any way possible to form a government and that there will have to be fresh elections in June. In this context a significant role might be played by the victory in France of the Socialists of Hollande who has already declared that the line of rigour and austerity imposed upon Europe by Merkel’s Germany cannot continue.

     The Greek government, led by the banker Lucas Papadimos, committed itself last February to making cuts worth eleven million Euros, cuts that will guarantee the second loan granted by the troika that amounts to one hundred and thirty billion. In the meantime, however, the main rating agencies, economists like Kenneth Rogoff and Nouriel Roubini and newspaper like The New York Times and the Guardian, are certain of Greece’s Euro zone exit within the next twelve months. An eventuality that would open a radically new phase for the country and for the whole of Europe.

Rigas Raftopoulos