Greek Election
Elections are supposed to determine the will of the people, to set a
nation on a new course with a government that enjoys the mandate of the
majority. In splintered Greece, the vote on Sunday is shaping up as a
challenge to this time-honoured rule of democracy.
ATHENS, Greece — The Associated Press
Published
Last updated
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Last updated
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Greeks are in a collective state of depression, burdened not just by the
shrivelling of their finances, but also political divisions with deep
roots in history and confusion over their identity and the very concept
of statehood. And yet an anxious world is looking to this tiny actor on
the international stage for clues to whether the global economy will
cling to a path of gradual recovery, or veer toward another destructive
scenario like the one that followed the 2008 collapse of the Lehman
Brothers investment bank in the United States.
A street
scene in Athens on Saturday symbolized the sense of despair, tinged with
defiance, which pervades a country battered by five years of recession
after years of easy credit and consumption. A homeless man slept in a
doorway, a cardboard box beside him, a slit cut in its top in hopes that
passers-by would drop in a few coins. “We don’t need the euro,” read a
slogan on the campaign posters of a small far-left party, plastered on
an adjacent wall. Polls indicate that most Greeks want to stay in
Europe’s monetary union, but years of austerity with few signs of
improvement have deepened their sense of isolation.
“People are in
agony about their savings; their jobs, their safety, their future (and
their children’s future),” Stathis Psillos, a philosophy professor at
the University of Athens, wrote in an e-mail.
Sunday’s election is
seen as pivotal in determining whether Greece pitches deeper into
economic chaos, and is forced to return to its old currency, the drachma
– an eventuality that amounts to, at least in the short term, a journey
into an economic and social void – and whether Europe fragments or
eventually becomes more unified. The frontrunners are a traditional
party, New Democracy, that wants to modify an international bailout plan
that has kept Greek finances afloat, and a left-wing party, Syriza,
that surged in popularity because it opposes the old political order and
wants to tear up the bailout deal in protest over the cutbacks it
requires.
Abroad, there is concern that a victory for Syriza could
trigger market panic and drag down other economically vulnerable
countries such as Spain and Italy, and then ripple across other
continents. The Greek outcome will be watched closely by leaders of the
world’s 20 most important economies, who are meeting this weekend in
Mexico. However, neither Syriza nor New Democracy are projected to win
enough votes to form a government alone, meaning Greece will have to
form a coalition if it wants to avoid another election.
Elena
Athanassopoulou, a political science professor at the American College
of Greece, predicted “painful negotiations” among parties that would
lead to a government after the vote, and said political stability was
vital to prevent Greece going “any further down the slope.”
An
earlier round of elections in May failed to deliver a clear winner, and
coalition talks collapsed. Even if New Democracy, led by Antonis
Samaras, emerges on top, there is no guarantee that Greece’s creditors,
including other European countries and the International Monetary Fund,
will accede to his desire to dilute the multi-billion dollar bailout
terms, or that Greece can stick to austerity measures imposed by
creditors. Also, the strong showing in the last elections of a far-right
party, Golden Dawn, and accusations that its supporters have attacked
immigrants encapsulate the wider mood of alienation and uncertainty.
“Right
now in Greece, everybody gets to say everything, you get to listen to
many opinions,” said Paris Mexis, a designer for Beetroot, an
award-winning firm based in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-biggest city.
“We have a community that doesn’t work as a community. We have renegade
units, we have random units, we have people who produce and the
production doesn’t go anywhere. Everybody is alone. We need to go back
to philosophy.”
He said Greeks need to recover the basic
principles that hold a society together and help it flourish, including
organization, creativity and communication. Right now, the reality
defies such ideals. Unemployment is about 22 per cent, crime is up and
public services are failing. Greece is not in full-blown disintegration –
that assessment might apply to the civil war between its Western-backed
government and communists in the 1940s – but even the idea of a state,
in which a social contract exists between a government and its
citizenry, is under strain today.
Widespread tax evasion, for
example, was one of the failings that got Greece into its current
financial mess. The government has sought to tighten up on the crime,
but many Greeks, once accustomed to generous state handouts and public
sector salaries, bridle at the idea because their daily circumstances
are deteriorating.
“People are losing faith in the institutions,”
said Reto Foellmi, professor of international economics?at the
University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He said Greeks need to see a
link between revenue collection and spending, and suggested that the
decentralization of control over finances, whereby local authorities
have more say in how funds are raised and spent in their districts,
could benefit the country in the long term.
Mr. Psillos, the
philosophy professor, said European leaders fail to see that Greece’s
“real problem” is that the traditional parties, dominant for
generations, are no longer capable of creating consensus. He noted that
Syriza, while untainted by association with austerity measures and past
policy failures, offers a somewhat contradictory narrative that seeks
balance “between an old left tradition and a need to accommodate within
it tens of thousands of new voters who pin their hopes on it.”
Many
of Syriza’s new supporters are civil servants who lost benefits under
the former socialist government, that struggled to impose wage cuts and
structural reforms and suffered as a result at the May polls. At
present, many Greeks, disillusioned with politics, think their society
has reached a dead end, but feel they don’t have the tools to overhaul
it, or recover what they once had. Mr. Psillos, who believes Syriza
offers hope but needs time to hone its platform, summarized this ominous
state of limbo by citing Alexander Herzen, a 19th century Russian
intellectual.
“The death of the contemporary forms of social order
ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” Mr. Herzen wrote after
the failure of European revolutionary movements in 1848. “Yet what is
frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not an heir,
but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the
other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation
will pass.”
