Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Some further remarks on the Greek election

I already discussed, very broadly, the electoral results HERE but today A. Cuesta has a nice review at Gara[es], some of whose observations I think are worth repeating here.

First of all, abstention has been massive: 34.9%, more than one of each three Greeks did no go to vote in spite of the severity of the situation. Some may be anarchists (a major force in real Greek politics even if out of parliament) who hope to make a revolution in part by denying the bourgeois representative system its legitimacy but many others are surely just fed up and do not see in the political options available any hope of real change. 

Of those (65.1%) who voted, 2.4% did so as null or blank (protest vote), but almost one in five (19%) voted for lists that did not make it to parliament, a much larger figure than in any previous election, a clear sign of electoral experimentation and discontent.

Never before the winning list had collected so little support, not even by far: the New Democracy (conservative party) "winners" mustered 18.9% of votes, what is a quite pitiful figure but, once we consider abstention, they are revealed as representing only 12.0% of the Greek citizenry. In other words only 3 of each 25 Greek citizens support the winning party ND, which anyhow managed to collect more than 1/3 of Parliament thanks to an electoral law that is now revealed as clearly flawed. 

In this regard, the leader of the second most voted option, the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, A. Tsipras criticized the absurd gift of 50 seats to the most voted option as undemocratic and as something that now has become an obstacle in the search of majorities. Guess that he has in mind that the overall sociological Left, including the more than dubious PASOK, have a clear majority of votes and would have one of seats would not be for that shocking bonus of 1/6 of Parliament to the first force. 

However appealing now to the unity of the Left seems as utopic of more as the impossible task for the conservative technical winners, who can't rally the forces of the right, the center or anything around them and their IMF-prescribed collective suicide. The KKE has rejected even a meeting, while the rightist breakaway force DIMAR demands SYRIZA to clarify their position on the euro, what is a bit sarcastic coming from a list that collapsed, after rising many hopes, when they accepted with formal reluctance the Troika-imposed pacts of the PASOK-ND coalition.

Meanwhile Germany dares to "demand", after being the cause number one of this political implosion, the formation of a "reasonable government" that keeps paying the tithes to Berlin and Paris, no matter how many Greek untermenschen have to die for it. 

The German authorities, who already succeeded in the recent past to thwart the proposed referendum on the Troika impositions fear that the dissident forces will be reinforced if new elections take place, so they seem to hope that an ND-PASOK-DIMAR coalition (or something of the like) is formed. This will not happen most likely and, if it happens, it will be extremely unstable and can only delay new elections for a few months and erode even more the legitimacy of the lackey parties.

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