Pro-bailout party New Democracy may have come first in Sunday’s Greek election but the radical left anti-austerity SYRIZA bloc was celebrating as if it was the real winner. The election exposed a struggling nation deeply divided over whether to implement a harsh austerity package, the price for receiving a total of €240bn in bailout money from the European Union and IMF to save its near-bankrupt economy.
“My biggest fear is of a social explosion,” a senior adviser to the country’s likely next prime minister, New Democracy leader, Antonis Samaras, told Reuters. “If there is no change in the policy mix, we’re going to have a social explosion even if you bring Jesus Christ to govern this country.”
According to official figures, with 99.9 per cent of the votes counted, Samaras’s conservative New Democracy party won just 29.7 per cent of the vote, only 2.7 percentage points more than SYRIZA, which almost doubled its support from the previous election held on 6 May.
When the votes for Greece’s other anti-bailout parties, ranging from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to the Marxist-Leninist KKE, are added to SYRIZA’s tally, up to 52 per cent of Greeks cast ballots against the terms of the international deal.
New Democracy supporters had initially despaired at the party’s headquarters as exit polls showed less than half a percentage point separating them from SYRIZA, only to cheer up as official results showing a better performance trickled in. Even then, celebrations were muted. “What is there for us to celebrate?” a member of Samaras’s inner circle said. “Our country is in such a deep crisis.”
The streets of central Athens are scarred with repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are running short of vital medicines, thousands of businesses have closed, beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying and suicides are rising, observed Reuters’ Michael Stott.
New Democracy’s Samaras now faces the awkward task of convincing the centre-left PASOK movement to join a coalition charged with implementing highly unpopular spending cuts and privatisations, while the economy nosedives.
Under the terms of the international bailout, the new government must fire up to 150,000 civil servants, slash spending by €11bn this month, sell off a swathe of state-owned companies, improve tax collection and open closed professions to competition.
Once Greece’s ruling party, PASOK’s support collapsed to just 12.3 per cent, giving the two probailout parties just 40 per cent of the popular vote; not a strong mandate for austerity.
A PASOK-New Democracy coalition is guaranteed a parliamentary majority thanks to a quirk of Greek electoral law which gives the winning party a bonus of 50 extra seats. But that will not win it the argument on Greece’s streets.
The Greek economy is expected to shrink by 5 per cent this year after contracting 7 per cent last year and unemployment is running at almost 23 per cent. Many economists believe that the harsh austerity measures will only make matters worse in the short term.
Ominously, PASOK’s first reaction to the results was to say it would support a new Samaras administration but not formally join it, hardly a recipe for stable government in a country which has had two elections in less than two months, wrote Stott. PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos has previously said he would only formally join a coalition if SYRIZA did so as well, something which is politically impossible, given the radical left bloc’s unstinting opposition to the austerity measures.
Greek analysts noted that SYRIZA’s charismatic 37-year-old leader, former student communist Alexis Tsipras, conceded defeat quickly in a phone call to Samaras, apparently relieved he was free of the pressure to form a government and make compromises.
“From Monday we will continue the fight,” Tsipras told cheering supporters in an open-air square outside Athens university. He added: “The next government after this one will be a left government.” From loudspeakers, Second World War Greek Communist resistance songs played at the gathering attended by a youthful, cheering crowd.
Filippos Nikolopoulos, a sociology professor at Crete University and SYRIZA supporter, said that Tsipras’s fans were jubilant because they had won new force and authority by increasing their share of the vote so much. “We want Europe, we want to cooperate,” he said. “But we do not want to be subjugated by [German Chancellor] Mrs Merkel.”
Stathis Stavropoulos, a newspaper cartoonist famous for his drawings depicting German officials preaching austerity at Greece as Nazi taskmasters, said the new conservative government would have the people of Greece against it from the outset. “Our dream of European union was very different,” he told Reuters. “It was a union of countries and peoples, not a union to serve banks and not a fourth German Reich.”
Using the term for a Nazi regional leader under Hitler’s Reich, Stavropoulos added: “Our country is under occupation. How would you feel if they sent a Gauleiter to run your country and tell you what to do?”
The cartoonist said he had nothing against the German people or other European nations. Indeed, he had never visited Berlin, Paris or London — but was familiar with Moscow, Beijing and Nicaragua from his Communist activities. “The Soviet Union may have ended but not the dream of democratic communism,” he said.
Will Peakin
Beginning as a reporter on weekly newspapers in the North-East of England, Will moved to Glasgow and worked as a freelance for a number of UK national newspapers. In 1990 he was appointed News Editor of Scotland on Sunday and in 1995, Scotland Editor of The Sunday Times. In 1999, he and his family moved to the south-west of France where he wrote for The Sunday Times Magazine. Returning to Scotland in 2002, he was Assistant Editor (Features) and Deputy Editor at The Scotsman before joining Holyrood Magazine in 2004. He writes for the magazine's business pages and edits its series of...