Unprincipled Greek Electioneering

AIM Athens, February 27, 2000

"I cannot see how I can return to New Democracy (ND), which is a party that does not have even one position that can appeal to me" had been saying over and over again, through Tuesday night 23 February, Stefanos Manos, president of the small party of "The Liberals," founded a year ago. Stefanos Manos was previously probably the most prominent modernist and reformist member of ND, until he was expelled from it, along with other like-minded people, some two years ago. On 24 February, it was announced that Stefanos Manos will be a candidate for ND in Athens-City, while another member of his party will be on the 'safe' sixth position on the state list, thus securing at least one parliamentary seat to "The Liberals" after the 9 April election.

At the other end of the political spectrum, things were no better. One of the most respectable leaders of the unreformed Communist Party of Greece (KKE), and Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, Dimitris Kostopoulos, was making public, on 22 February, the reasons he would not seek reelection. He was implicitly disagreeing with his party's choice to include in its lists, as it did for the Euroelections of 1999 but this time in likely electable positions, journalist Liana Kanelli and self-styled "Mentor of the Nation" Kostas Zouraris. Two persons known, in Kostopoulos' -and so many others'- words, for their "poisonous nationalism, chauvinism, foolish irredentism, belief in stupid theories of 'chosen' people, abandonment of the fundamental values of humanism and who call all those things 'Greek civilization' and 'Greek culture.'"

Two reasons explain this search for odd bedfellows on the eve of each election. The first is the electoral system. Although it is formally a variant of proportional representation, in practice it works almost like the majority systems in favor of the first party: even a tiny plurality of a few thousand votes leads to a majority with more than 50% of the seats in parliament for the winner. At the same time, minor parties need to secure 3% so as to be present in parliament. As opinion polls indicate that there is a tight race for first place and that minor parties may not all get past the "survival threshold," anything goes. The second reason is the absence of civil society from Greece's underdeveloped political culture. If you are not in parliament, hardly anyone pays attention to you. If you are in, your voice and lobbying power is of disproportionately high value to the media and even to the government. Whether you want to promote noble causes, extremist ideas, or just corporatist interests, a seat in parliament makes such aims very much easier to realize.

Some columnists have in recent days raised the question of other strange bedfellow practices. How is it possible to have in the same party, say ND, Manos -or even another liberal outsider and former ND minister now reportedly courted by the party, Andreas Andrianopoulos- who either favored NATO intervention in Yugoslavia or at least were extremely critical of Slobodan Milosevic; along with Alexandros Lykourezos, who is proud to be (or have been) the lawyer and "supporter of the internationally wanted slayers" (Yannis Tzannetakos in "Avghi" 27/2) like Milosevic, and Arkan?

Or, does the governing socialist party PASOK and "Mr. Simitis aim at leaving the European Union and NATO to coalesce with Belgrade, Belarus and Moscow and thus, understandably, courted for the party's state list the person who advocated all that last year, composer Mikis Theodorakis?" asked Richardos Someritis in "To Vima" (20/2). He added, understandably, "as if, with such practices, they are all applying themselves to discredit the only tolerable regime there exists, that of parliamentary democracy."

In a way, though, this unprincipled search for election partnerships is only reflecting an already well-established practice of coexistence of equally odd bedfellows in almost all political parties, including in their parliamentary groups. In both major political parties, ND and PASOK, there are deputies who could find a place only in extreme right parties in the other EU countries. Deputies (and some former ministers) who have in the 1990s voiced anti-minority, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, ultra-nationalistic if not irredentist views, while hardly anyone complained.

On the other hand, the KKE is not alone in this "red-brown" convergence. The other left party, the Progressive Left Coalition (Synaspismos), is also torn between a very modernist and democratic faction and a "Left Current." Many leading members of the latter hold views much closer to those of intolerant nationalists like Kanelli and Zouraris than to those of their comrades in the same party. Indeed a tough act to balance by the party's leader, Nikos Constantopoulos. He was the first Western party leader to shake hands with Milosevic during last year's bombings; but also the only party leader consistently and publicly committed to the recognition by Greece of Roma as a cultural minority with full respect of their culture and language. The last party with a chance to be again in the next parliament, socialist splinter DIKKI, is apparently taking a clearer line, enlisting anti-modernist and nationalist PASOK renegades.

This state of affairs does not seem to bother but a rare handful of crtics. On the contrary, almost all mainstream media have a cohort of intolerant, nationalist, anti-modernist journalists and columnists; some may also have a token number of tolerant and modernists as well. While they publish op-eds by, or invite in their talk shows, intellectuals and politicians from the former group ten times more often than from the latter. University lists in the Internet consider it "exemplary democratic behavior" to allow racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, if not outright trash postings. While mainstream local newspapers unabashedly reprint filthy Roma-bashing articles first published in a neo-nazi newspaper, undisturbed by the rare related criticism.

This apparently unprincipled electioneering is thus only symptomatic of the prevailing trait of Greek society, that of "tolerance of intolerance." This can explain why many Greek media and intellectuals, including editorials in newspapers that would like to be considered tolerant, strongly opposed EU's reaction to the formation of the new Austrian government that included the far right Freedom Party. They invoked the right to non-interference in the internal affairs of a country by the international community. They had done so during the Kosovo crisis; they had repeated it during the Chechnya crisis. But they have all been arguing otherwise, when referring to the Kurdish problem in Turkey (but not in Iraq) or to the Cyprus quagmire. Because "tolerance of intolerance" goes hand in hand with unprincipled inconsistency: political expediency is the only "value" that matters when one seeks partners for elections or in foreign policy.

Panayote Elias Dimitras