The second round provided New Democracy with an even stronger mandate to take Greece in a conservative direction. In the end, the betrayals of the Left came to overshadow the scandals of the Right.
The results of the second round of the Greek national elections of June 2023 were not surprising. New Democracy’s (ND) victory was undoubted, making Syriza’s percentage as the official opposition and the performance of smaller parties the only contested issues. This certainty was cemented already after the first round of elections in May, when despite falling short of a majority, ND increased its voting share after 4 years in government, while Syriza saw a drop of more than 10 points.
If the June elections were predictable, however, the May results appeared to take everyone by surprise. To start with, the context within which ND not only did not lose but in fact gained points was remarkable. Similarly, Syriza’s drop was even more astonishing. Lastly, the ascent of far-right parties and the failure of Varoufakis’ Mera25, for many represented a slap in the face.
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As far as ND was concerned there was good reason to expect them to suffer losses. Ruling during the Covid pandemic, ND presided over a 9 per cent GDP drop in 2020, an authoritarian police-enforced imposition of contradictory countermeasures and higher than EU average excess deaths. And while the EU responded via massive public debt purchases (including Greece for the first time since 2010) and Next Generation EU grants, ND’s government appeared more eager to settle its IMF debts in advance of agreed repayment dates and to purchase new police vehicles, than to fund a healthcare system already decimated by austerity.
If the devastating wildfires of 2021 saw the evaporation of more than 125.000 hectares of forest and arable land, the revelation in 2022 of an extensive system of surveillance of investigative journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens by the Greek secret service at least appeared to add further dints to the ruling party. That the secret service had recently been brought under the direct control of the PM himself was perceived as potentially even more damaging, while the eventual admission of the surveillance on grounds of ”national security” did little to appease a feeling of creeping authoritarianism.
As any other country, Greece was also affected by an inflationary wave driven, as the IMF itself recently admitted, by companies taking advantage of Covid-related supply chain blockages and energy price hikes to mark up their prices – and profits. Even within this context, however, Greece remained an outlier, recording the highest energy price increases in Europe. The reason? An austerity-led aggressive liberalisation of the energy market alongside the ”omission” of creating a forwards’ market framework that would allow long-term contracts at fixed prices.
The tragic train collision in February 2023 that led to the death of more than 50 young students shook confidence. Last month’s publication of an official technical report about the causes of the accident only added insult to injury: according to the experts, the collision took place because of chronic and criminal governmental indifference towards maintaining or even installing standard safety procedures and technology.
ND’s victory, however, appears to indicate that none of the above affected the majority of voters. For some commentators, good economic performance weighed more heavily. But was this really the case? A closer look reveals that the Greek ”success story” is highly exaggerated, uncritically reproduced by a cohort of mainstream media – whose high degree of concentration in the hands of a few businessmen with government ties is a key reason behind Greece’s media freedom position drop to position 107 of the global scale and the lowest within the EU.
Detailed macroeconomic analysis shows, in fact, that despite nominal GDP growth, job creation, real wage growth and inequality measurements show a consistent downward trend. If there are economic gains, in other words, they are increasingly unequally distributed.
Another way of explaining the electoral success of ND would be to look at the opposition. Here, another crucial piece of the puzzle can be found. While most remember Syriza from its spectacular rise to power in 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket, few seem to have paid attention to its – less spectacular – endorsement of fiscal consolidation.
Reconceptualizing itself as a realistic, center-left government, Syriza’s 2015–2019 rule was an unsuccessful attempt at balancing incompatible words with actions. Criticizing austerity while implementing it, promoting vaccination while allowing prominent members to spread denialism, vocally defending migrants while running horrifying refugee camps and signing the disastrous EU-Turkey deal – Syriza’s contradictions were not as inconsequential as its leadership wished. Its profoundly weak stint as official opposition since 2019 did little to reverse that outlook.
After the second round of elections and the further loss of votes, Syriza’s leader Alexis Tsipras was essentially forced to step down. And while this has party members hoping for a renewal that will upend its downward path, many others tend to liken Syriza’s trajectory with that of a shooting star rather than an established opposition suffering a temporary setback.
The inclusion of three far-right parties in the new parliament clearly indicates that Greece is following wider trends of political polarization, visible at a global scale. But the ominous reality of the normalization of far-right discourse and policy is further enhanced by the attitude of ND itself: prominent ministers of the new government, whose own past testifies to a long history inside fascist/far-right parties, are leading the unhinged chorus. With a publicly expressed aim of ending ”the post-dictatorship consensus” – a euphemism for dismantling the remnants of the welfare state and accelerating privatizations in, among others, education and health care – ND’s strong majority is more than alarming.
Ex-Minister of the Interior and current Minister of State Makis Voridis had, after all, no hesitation to publicly proclaim that the aim is the complete defeat of the Left.
