Mazower warns Greece is underestimating threat of Golden Dawn

By Harry van Versendaal

Greeks must not underestimate the threat of Golden Dawn if they accept it as a legitimate, mainstream political movement British historian Mark Mazower said Tuesday.

Speaking during a lecture on Greece’s political extremes at Deree – The American College of Greece, Mazower did not hesitate to draw parallels between the Greek far right party and the nationalist socialist (Nazi) party of the 1930s.

“There is commonality of approach,” he said of the two parties stressing their emphasis on biological racism and violent street tactics that sets them apart from other European nationalist movements like Le Pen’s National Front party.

Golden Dawn officials vehemently deny any Nazi affiliation saying they are Greek nationalists and that they have nothing to do with Hitler or Mussolini.

“Any right-wing party worth its salt is keen to stress its nationalist credentials,” said 55-year-old Mazower, an expert on Greece and the Balkans who teaches history at Columbia University.

Greece’s brutal financial crisis has catapulted Golden Dawn, for years at the fringes of domestic politics, into the spotlight. A recent opinion poll put the party’s support at 11.5 percent, compared to the 7 percent that it garnered in June’s election. This puts the party, which currently holds 18 seats in the 300-member House, in third place behind conservative coalition leader New Democracy and leftist opposition SYRIZA.

Reports of deadly attacks against immigrants by alleged supporters of Golden Dawn and its open endorsement of the country’s 1967-1974 military dictatorship have not dented its appeal among voters in a country where national self-understanding has to a significant degree been shaped by the fight against the Nazis and opposition to the junta.

Mazower, who has written a number of books on 20th century Greek and European history, said Greece’s political class has failed to assume culpability or accept even a symbolic share of the burden that the population has had to shoulder as a result of the painful bailout agreements. Nevertheless, he said, Greeks must not turn their back on the democratic legacy of the post-1974 era.

“People need to defend the achievement of the metapolitefsi,” he said of what is widely regarded as the longest period of democratic stability in the country’s modern history.

However, he said, they should try to remedy the system’s failings starting with “the credibility of the political class.”

Mazower was critical of the Greek left “that never made a mental break from the image of revolution.” But in a nod to the ongoing debate among pundits and historians in Greece concerning public toleration of leftist radicalism, the London-born academic drew the line at of equating far right and far left violence.

“Some say all forms of lawlessness are equally dangerous. I disagree,” said Mazower adding that left-wing protests and law-breaking behavior have not put Greek democracy in jeopardy.

He said historical attempts to underline the “fundamental kinship” between fascism and communism – bringing them both under the label of “totalitatarianism” – are flawed.

“The totalitarianism thesis has been abandoned for very good reason,” he said criticizing recent attempts by conservative politicians in Greece to revive the debate in a bid to score political points against SYRIZA.

Instead of going after anarchist-run squats in Athens which are of little political importance, New Democracy should rather direct its energy and attention at the bigger threat that is Golden Dawn, Mazower said referring to recent police raids on several abandoned buildings in Athens.

“Unfortunately the Greek state does not seem to realize the urgency of the situation,” he said.

The genealogy of violence

By Harry van Versendaal

When Dimitris Stratoulis, a leftist lawmaker, was assaulted by alleged far-right extremists at a soccer stadium last month, many in Greece found it hard to disguise feeling some degree of Schadenfreude.

It appeared that the tables had finally turned on Greece’s main SYRIZA opposition party, which has in the past failed to provide a convincing condemnation – some would say it in fact silently condoned – similar attacks on its political opponents.

Greeks have traditionally been more accustomed to social unrest and political disobedience than their European Union peers, but the meteoric rise of Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi party that was comfortably voted into Parliament for the first time last year, has spawned a local Historikerstreit, a contested debate among politicians and pundits about the causes and the nature of violence.

Ideological hegemony

Interestingly, some critics have gone as far as to blame Golden Dawn’s shocking surge on the country’s left, which, despite losing the civil war, went on to win the ideological hegemony. Public tolerance of left-wing radicalism in the years following the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 – what is commonly referred to in Greece as “metapolitefsi” – allegedly laid the ground for Golden Dawn’s violent extremism in providing some sort of social legitimacy.

“Only blindness or bias would prevent someone from noticing the connection between public attitudes regarding the violence of the extreme left and the rise of the violent extreme right in Greece,” said Stathis Kalyvas, a political science professor and an expert on the subject of political violence at the University of Yale.

“If public attitudes vis-a-vis leftist violence had been different, the extreme right would have been much more constrained in its use of violence today,” he said, stressing however that there is no casual relationship between the violence of the two political extremes.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds and more than a few support SYRIZA’s promise to repeal the law if it forms a government.

Beyond the universities, left-wing unionists – like the Communist Party (KKE)’s militant PAME group – traditionally organize street blockades and sit-ins at public buildings as a form of protest. Mass rallies, interpreted by many as a sign of a vibrant democracy, regularly turn violent and destructive. Groups of hooded youths carrying stones and petrol bombs ritually clash with riot police, who respond with tear gas and stun grenades. Public property is damaged, banks are set on fire and cars are smashed, but arrests and convictions are surprisingly rare.

Serious injuries and fatalities were also rare, until May 2010, when three people were killed as hooded protesters set fire to a branch of Marfin Bank in central Athens during a general strike over planned austerity measures. Demonstrators marching past the burning bank shouted slogans against the workers trapped inside the building. No arrests have been made in connection with the murders, which many leftists have blamed – like other similar incidents – on agents provocateurs.

A few months later, Costis Hatzidakis, a conservative heavyweight who is now development minister, was beaten up by unidentified protesters before being led away bleeding on the sidelines of a demonstration against the then Socialist government’s cost-cutting policies.

The reaction of SYRIZA, a collection of leftist, even militant groupings, to such incidents has been rather ambiguous as the party – which denies links to violent groupings – has repeatedly fallen short of providing a clear-cut condemnation of violence.

“We condemn violence but we understand the frustration of those who react violently to the violence of the memorandum,” SYRIZA chief Alexis Tsipras said of the painful bailout agreement signed with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Critics responded by accusing the left of giving in to ethical relativism, by seeking to differentiate between “good” and “bad” violence as it sees fit.

A few months ago, SYRIZA refused to vote for a motion by the Parliament’s ethics committee that condemned violence, arguing that the text should refer to “racist violence” and not just “violence.” Party officials appeared concerned that the motion could be used to sabotage acts of popular struggle versus the injustices of the state. KKE, as is its wont, chose to abstain from the vote.

When the residents of Keratea, a small town 40 kilometers southeast of Athens, fought, often violently, with police forces for three months over the planned construction of a huge landfill in the area, Tsipras hailed the “town that has become a symbol for the whole of Greece.”

But nowhere has social tolerance of violence been more evident than in the case of domestic terrorism. November 17, a self-styled Marxist urban guerrilla group, assassinated 25 people in 103 attacks from 1975 until it was disbanded in 2002. One of the reasons the terrorists managed to remain elusive for so long, many analysts believe, was that its actions, mostly targeting American officials and members of Greece’s wealthy “big bourgeois class,” did not enrage the mainstream public, fed on years of anti-American rhetoric from long-serving socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou.

“Public opinion, as recorded in several surveys, viewed terrorists either with sympathy or indifference. There was hardly any mass mobilization against this group,” Kalyvas said.

In an opinion poll conducted a few months before the dismantling of November 17, 23.7 percent of respondents – nearly one in four – said they accepted the organization’s political and ideological views, although most said they disagreed with its practices. Only 31.3 percent said they wanted the guerrillas to put their guns down and turn themselves in to the authorities. Later, many on the left slammed the government’s anti-terror law as an attempt to crack down on civil liberties.

For Kalyvas, in a public arena saturated with rhetorical violence – for example the increasingly frequent calls for hanging or executing traitors, especially during the Indignant protest gatherings in central Syntagma Square in the summer of 2011 – it was perhaps predictable that the violence of the extreme right may strike a large number of people as a quasi-legitimate political weapon.

“How surprising can it be to see the public responding in this way, after four decades of being consistently told that political violence can be justified?” he asked.

The rise of populism

Vassiliki Georgiadou, a political scientist at Panteion University in Athens, agrees that the tolerance of violence may have played a role in the rise of Golden Dawn. But there was nothing particularly left-wing about the displays of lawlessness, she points out.

“Sure, the law was often not enforced, there was an anything-goes mentality, a sense that people stand above the institutions,” Georgiadou said.

“But this was not an exclusively leftist outlook. It was more the outgrowth of a populist outburst that swept across the left-right spectrum. And it was a PASOK creation. PASOK was the creator of populism in the post-dictatorship era,” she said.

But it was not just the populism. Like other analysts, Georgiadou attributes Golden Dawn’s soaring influence to popular disillusionment with the country’s crumbling institutions.

“It was the discrediting of political institutions, of the political class, and of the operation of democracy that allowed anti-systemic, far-right extremism to flourish,” she said.

When Golden Dawn spokesman and MP Ilias Kasidiaris repeatedly slapped Liana Kanelli, a long-serving Communist deputy, in the face on live television last summer in a fit of frenzy, many, instead of being shocked, saw the move as an attack on the country’s bankrupt status quo, despite the Communist Party not having ever risen to power in any election. In contrast to most analysts’ expectations, Golden Dawn’s ratings rose following the incident.

The trend did not occur overnight. For more than a decade, public surveys have found Greeks to have among the lowest rates of trust in political institutions when ranked with their European counterparts. Only 11 percent of Greeks are satisfied with the way democracy operates in the country, a December Eurobarometer survey found, against 89 percent who said the opposite. A scant 5 percent said they have trust in political parties, while a slightly higher number, at 7 percent, said they have trust in the Greek Parliament.

Journalist Xenia Kounalaki readily points a finger at the obvious culprits: the nation’s mainstream political parties, PASOK and New Democracy, who have between them ruled Greece since 1974.

The daughter of a veteran Socialist politician, Kounalaki speaks of “the corruption, the entanglement between media owners and state contractors, and the sense of impunity,” which, she says, pitted a better-connected, privileged chunk of society against the disenfranchised lot that were left out of “the system.”

If the Greek left has something to regret in the surge of the far right, Kounalaki says, it’s that it chose to hold the moral high ground on the issue of immigration instead of articulating a more pragmatic alternative.

“Its stubborn anti-racist rhetoric was hardly convincing among the lower-income groups living in depressed urban centers, lending it a gauche caviar profile,” she said of the nation’s left-wing intelligentsia who preached multiculturalism from the safety of their suburban armchairs.

Greece’s porous borders, combined with the rather unworkable Dublin II convention, which rules that asylum applications must be heard in the first country of entry, made sure that the country became a magnet for hordes of unregistered migrants who eventually get stuck here in a semi-legal limbo.

Family resemblances

Like many others, Kounalaki may be willing to discuss any wrongs by the left in the rise of Golden Dawn, but she rules out any attempts to equate the radicalism on the two sides. Not only are such efforts unwarranted, she says, they are also dangerous.

“Equating the locking up of university professors with Greek neo-Nazi pogroms against migrants leads to relativism and, effectively, legitimizes Golden Dawn violence,” she wrote in a recent publication on violence.

The Hamburg-born journalist, who became the target of anonymous threats on the Golden Dawn website after she wrote an article critical of the party, thinks that equating the two types of violence amounts to a relativism that effectively legitimates far-right violence.

Others are not so sure. When a protest supported by members of Golden Dawn against the staging of Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi” led to the cancellation of the “gay Jesus” play’s premiere at the capital’s Hytirio Theater in October, several critics were quick to point to a similar incident in late 2009, when self-styled anarchists burst into a theater and damaged the stage at the premier of Michel Fais’s “Kitrino Skyli” (Yellow Dog), a play inspired by the hideous acid attack on Bulgarian labor union activist Konstantina Kouneva. The anarchists said they were against the theater cashing in on the woman’s ill fortune.

The fact is that left-wing activists have in the past prevented the screening of movies and forcibly interrupted speeches and book presentations.

“Golden Dawn’s hit squads are no different from the groups of left-wing activists that like to blockade streets, assault lawmakers or interfere with academic proceedings,” Palaskas said, adding that violence lies at the heart of both ideological doctrines, which, under certain conditions, treat force as a necessary means to a superior end.

“Attacking a student who collects rubbish around his university dorm, or a professor because he holds different views than you do is no different, from a humanitarian perspective, to attacking a migrant trying to make a living in this country,” he said, referring to a recent feud between students at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University and leftists supporting striking municipal cleaners when the former tried to clean up growing heaps of rubbish on the campus.

But it is hard to see how such acts, illegal as they may be, can be compared to organized attacks against fellow humans.

“The violence of Golden Dawn carries a very specific ideological weight: discrimination on the basis of skin color or sexual orientation,” Georgiadou said.

“It’s a violence which is directed against individuals. It seeks to deny their universal rights in the most extreme manner and, on top of that, it involves an extreme form of physical abuse,” she said.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other groups recorded 87 racist attacks between January and September last year in Athens, Piraeus and Patra. In 50 of those incidents, the victims suffered serious bodily harm. In 15 of them, victims accused police officers of using violence against them. Many immigrants are reluctant to report such abuses because they don’t have documents or mistrust the police.

Those who put the two types of violence in the same bag seem to suggest that scrapping leftist violence of its social legitimacy would make it easier to combat far-right violence. However, says Giorgos Antoniou, a historian at International Hellenic University, it’s hard to see why one thing would lead to the other.

“Despite the political and social consensus to deal with far-right extremism, this has not been enough to curb [the phenomenon], a fact which underscores the complexity of the situation,” he said.

Part of the system

Perhaps it would be more interesting to examine why Greek society is not willing to condemn violence in general. Part of the explanation can be found in its modern history. During the Second World War, the country suffered massacres and famine in its fight against the Nazis. The specter of the 1967-74 dictatorship also hangs heavy over the country’s modern politics. Far-right violence has bad historical connotations for it is associated with memories of the so-called right-wing “parastate,” the junta and torture.

“Although leftist violence has its origins in equally anti-systemic reasons, motives and objectives, it would be hypocritical not to acknowledge that, for better or worse, it benefits from having been absorbed into the country’s political culture,” Antoniou said.

“The purportedly anti-systemic violence of the far left is in a way at the same time also systemic because a big chunk of the political system and society has accepted it as an integral part of Greek political culture,” he said.

Each time activists used Facebook and other social media to organize peaceful demos against violence in the recent years, these only drew very sparse crowds.

As part of the national narrative, Antoniou says, this type of violence is seen as less of a threat to the nation, thus “undermining democracy in the long run.”

However, should attacks by ultranationalist thugs spread and diversify, people like Stratoulis may eventually come to develop a more inclusive understanding of violence, condemning it in every form: whether racial, sexual or political.

The man who wasn’t there

By Harry van Versendaal

It was a delicious irony. The two parties that have vowed to negotiate a better deal with the country’s foreign lenders failed to negotiate the simple matter of setting up a television debate.

True to form, New Democracy and SYRIZA exchanged accusations over who was to blame for the impasse. ND claimed it had agreed with SYRIZA on almost all the details for a Samaras vs Tsipras debate but that the leftists scuppered the deal by issuing two statements outlining their conditions for the discussions. SYRIZA, which appeared to want two separate debates, alleged that ND was simply looking for excuses to avoid a televised duel. However, it seems that, as with PASOK boss Evangelos Venizelos before the May 6 elections, Samaras once again got cold feet.

It may prove to be a wise strategy. The conservative leader’s spin doctors know that a debate between the 60-year-old Antonis Samaras and 37-year-old Alexis Tsipras has the makings of a disaster. Given the strict format of a discussion that leaves no room for substantive arguments that could expose sexy Alexi’s fuzzy utopia, the conservative leader’s schoolmarmish moaning and finger-wagging is bound to be outshone by Tsipras’s youthful conviction and upbeat assuredness.

Inferior style and a dismal message are not the only things Samaras — who has systematically shied away from the international media — has against him. The fact is that he has consistently failed to deliver as the leader of one of Greece’s dominant parties. Samaras took over after ND’s thrashing at the hand of the voters in 2009 and managed to drive the conservative party even lower in the May 6 snap polls that he called for. His awkward combination of stubborn posturing and endless flip-flopping has left the party directionless and politically damaged. Despite his opposition to the nation’s first bailout agreement with the EU and the IMF, and despite the fact that history has largely vindicated his gloomy economic forecasts about the growth-killing capacity of austerity, ND has come to be identified with the memorandum as much as the PASOK socialists who initiated the deal.

Many analysts believe that ND would be better off with a new leader — and would score a comfortable victory in this crucial election with someone more adept at its helm. But, like they say, you don’t change horses in midstream, especially when you have no horse to replace it with.

Samaras: too small for his boots?

By Harry van Versendaal

“A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds,” R.W. Emerson said, but — as Antonis Samaras has found out — too much inconsistency can be politically damaging.

In 2009, the 61-year-old conservative politician took over a broken New Democracy party promising to rebuild it around the idea of “social liberalism.” It was an exclusive concept that moved the party further to the right on Greece’s political spectrum by embracing such values as national pride, Orthodoxy and skepticism of the markets. Awkwardly echoing Bismarck, the Greek politician claimed he could hear the distant hoofbeats of history.

A few months later, ND came out against the bailout deal that George Papandreou’s Socialist government signed with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Samaras went on to oust Dora Bakoyannis, the centrist former foreign minister who had earlier challenged him in the party leadership race, for backing the aid package in Parliament. Bakoyannis, in turn, formed her own pro-bailout splinter party, taking some of her ND colleagues with her. Strangely, Samaras had done the same in the early 1990s, as he left ND to form his own party, Political Spring, bringing down the government of Constantine Mitsotakis, Bakoyannis’s father, in the process.

As a result of his tactics, Samaras drove away the party’s middle-ground supporters who had been key in handing his predecessor, Costas Karamanlis, victory in two parliamentary elections.

His opposition to the memorandum was short-lived. Faced with bankruptcy, Greece earlier this year had to sign a second bailout deal worth 130 billion euros to keep the country afloat until 2014. In his most controversial U-turn, Samaras asked his MPs to support the aid package. The decision prompted a great deal of controversy in the right-wing anti-bailout camp inside and outside the party as epithets ranged from “flip-flopper” to “traitor.” Some 20 deputies refused to back the deal in the House and were as a result expelled from the party. One of the rebels, Panos Kammenos, went on to form the populist anti-bailout party Independent Greeks, sucking a great deal of support from ND on the right. After turning his back on the political center, Samaras had now disaffected a large portion of the right.

ND’s role in the power-sharing government that followed Papandreou’s clumsy exit from the driver’s seat only gave voice to Samaras’s critics. Although pledging to support the implementation of the bailout deal, he undermined it at every step of the way while constantly bleating for a snap election.

On May 6, Samaras finally got what he wished for. But, in yet another instance of political miscalculation, the outcome of the ballot was a far cry from what he had hoped for. His party came first in the vote, but the result was a Pyrrhic victory as Samaras had spent a good part of the campaign calling for a clear conservative majority. The numbers were painful. Samaras had inherited the worst support in the history of ND — Karamanlis’s 33.5 percent in 2009 — and managed to drive it even lower, scoring an embarrassing 18.8 percent. The party lost more than a million voters in less than three years, during which it was not even in government.

Like a pupil resitting exams again and again, the poor marks have prompted Samaras to rebrand his politics. Now he wants to build a “grand center-right front.” The results of his overture have been mixed. Most of the smaller liberal parties, including the pro-reform Drasi, turned down the offer. Ironically, it was his bitter political rival Bakoyannis that was this week duly welcomed back into the fold as the two announced they were joining forces in a “patriotic, pro-European front.” And as his acceptance of defectors from the disintegrating nationalist LAOS party into ND demonstrate, there is hardly any ideological or quality filter to Samaras’s attempts to broaden his party’s appeal.

As conservative ideologues would be the first to admit, the political horse-trading of the past few days smacks of unscrupulous opportunism. As it happens, cliches have their place. A true leader must be proactive, he must shape events and not just be blown about in different directions by them. But if the ability to inspire a unifying national vision is a safe measure of a politician’s greatness, then Samaras has proved to be a political pygmy.

ND may well recover by June 17. But Samaras will only have SYRIZA to thank as the leftist party’s fuzzy economics and pie-in-the-sky rhetoric is making many people afraid that Alexis Tsipras’s vision of a bailout-free utopia will lead the country out of the eurozone.

Unlike his new archrival, however, the ND boss lacks an ideal — and that may prove to be his undoing. Samaras may have changed his political tune one too many times for Greek voters to give him the mandate he so desires.

Tweeting to the converted

By Harry van Versendaal

Next time you want to get an idea of who is going to win the elections, make sure you log out of your Twitter account first.

“I was led to believe that Drasi would easily gather more than 4 percent,” says journalist Dimitris Rigopoulos, who followed Greece’s recent election campaign through social media.

He was not alone. Stories and discussions trending on social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook ahead of the May 6 polls convinced many that the pro-reform, free-market party led by former minister Stefanos Manos would put on more than a decent showing.

In the end, Drasi collected a scant 1.8 percent of the vote, a result that killed its ambition of making it into Parliament. In fact, none of its political kin — Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece) and Democratic Alliance — cleared the 3 percent threshold which would grant them seats in the House. Opinion polls, a more traditional tool for measuring voters’ intentions, had safely predicted the failure.

Are people reading too much into social media? Yes, some experts suggest, arguing that the political content of social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is by no means representative of the general population.

“I do think Greece’s liberals are over-represented in the social media, particularly on Twitter,” says Manolis Andriotakis, a journalist, author and social media expert.

Drasi currently has more than 4,800 followers on Twitter (about 4.2 followers per 100 Drasi voters), which is more than half of the 8,140 (about 0.7 followers per 100 ND voters) following New Democracy, the party which came first in the polls.

“Liberals have hijacked Twitter, so to speak, because they realized from early on that social media are basically a platform for debate — and debating is something they like,” says Andriotakis.

Studies suggest the phenomenon is not exclusive to Greece. Scientists at the Pew Research Center in Washington recently found that Internet users who identify themselves as moderate or liberal are more likely than conservatives to be involved in social networking sites.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, has pretty much remained property of leftists given their soft spot for long-winded theories and analyses, says Andriotakis, who is the author of “Blog: News From Your Own Room.” But sites like Facebook and especially Twitter — the revolutionary microblogging tool that limits content to 140 characters — are encouraging bloggers to leave some of their habits behind.

“Social media have pushed these people to become more concise,” Andriotakis says.

The last elections saw Greek parties and candidates embrace social media like never before. Prompted by a lack of cash that took a toll on costly communication campaign tactics such as television ads and leaflets, Greek parties went online to share their message ahead of the vote. Driven by a dedicated crowd of mostly young, tech-savvy staff and supporters, smaller parties in many ways outdid their bigger but slower-moving rivals.

However, some analysts say, if Greek liberal parties enjoyed a strong presence in the social media, it was not because of the ideas they stand for, but because they were alone in openly discussing issues seen as crucial by the local intellectual elite, such as the need for immediate and far-reaching reforms.

“Liberal ideas as such have little influence in Greek society,” journalist and blogger Thodoris Georgakopoulos observes.

Limited influence

Pro-liberal or not, the overall influence of social media in Greece should not be overestimated. Quite the opposite in fact, as figures show that the penetration of the Internet in Greek homes is surprisingly low. Around 40 percent of people here use the Internet compared with 80 percent in the UK. Less than 2 percent are on Twitter. Using these sites as maps for political behavior is, well, wrong.

“Social media are like a distorting mirror. Those who are most active are part of a self-loving intellectual elite,” Georgakopoulos says. Perhaps you could draw some conclusions from the more mainstream networking sites like Facebook or even from user comments on YouTube, he says, referring to the popular video-sharing site — but again, “they would hardly be representative of society at large.”

Part of the problem is that even those users who do surf the Internet don’t grasp its potential. “A lot of people still browse the Internet in a linear fashion, just like they do with television or a newspaper,” Andriotakis says, meaning that people tend to navigate the Internet in a linear pattern — on click at a time, like it’s a TV or radio broadcast. Users are not the only ones sticking to old habits. While the country’s traditional media have increasingly occupied space on the World Wide Web, they have clumsily used it as a noninteractive, Web-based mirror of their existing content. That said, one should one underestimate the influence of traditional broadcasters on social media. Figures provided by the Harvantics social media metrics website show parties and candidates trending on Twitter and Facebook after appearing on TV.

But while techno-optimists praise social media for providing us with more diverse sources of information — take, for example, the indirect exposure from retweeted messages — skeptics insist that the Internet can, in fact, narrow our horizons.

Businesses try to sway us by tailoring their services to our personal preferences; Twitter tells us who we should follow based on our existing contacts; Amazon recommends books based on our buying history; iTunes suggests songs we might like based on our music library. We, in other words, run the risk of getting trapped in a “filter bubble,” missing out on information and stimulants that could challenge and expand our worldview. Similarly, our Twitter feed can feel more like an echo chamber of like-minded friends.

“You pick your own sources so you are selectively exposed to information. You only see a part of reality. You create your own microcosm. And this is something you need to always keep in mind,” says Katerina Petraki, a public sector food inspector who casually uses Twitter to access views and information that are filtered out of mainstream media outlets.

Not all is bad, of course. It may be that the idea Facebook or Twitter can change your mind-set is an illusion, Rigopoulos admits. “But thanks to the social media, I discovered there are a lot more people out there who actually see things the way I do,” he says.

“It’s not that this community of like-minded people is expanding. It’s just that we get to know each other.”

Moderate, pragmatic and unloved: Greece’s liberal parties

By Harry van Versendaal

“In Greece, a liberal is called a ‘neoliberal’ and is perceived as a ‘neoconservative’,” says Constantinos Alexacos, an architect who ran as a candidate with the Drasi party in the May 6 elections.

Big shocks change perceptions but the spectacular meltdown of Greece’s two-party system, dominant since the end of the military dictatorship in 1974, has failed to shake off at least one: mainstream distrust in liberalism.

Socialist PASOK and the New Democracy conservatives suffered a drubbing on Sunday, seeing their combined share of the vote sink to an all-time low of 32 percent. Nevertheless, none of the country’s liberal parties — Democratic Alliance, Drasi (which merged with Liberal Alliance ahead of the vote), or Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece) — won enough votes to make it into Parliament. The three garnered a combined 6.5 percent, or 411,536 votes, as a huge chunk of support went to the anti-bailout parties away from the center of the political spectrum.

The poor showing has prompted a fair deal of frustration and soul-searching among self-described liberals in this debt-wracked nation. If there is one thing they all agree on it’s that their doctrine is a perennial victim of bad publicity. For a wide range of reasons, liberalism is still a dirty word for many, particularly those on the left.

“Like capitalism, liberal ideologies in Greece have been defined by their opponents, not their supporters. We’ve allowed others to tell the Greek population what we are, what we believe, who we are aligned with,” says Emmanuel Schizas, editor of the LOL Greece blog.

“Essentially, if you call yourself a liberal, the reasoning goes, you are pro-war, pro-monopolies, a corporatist, unfeeling and uncaring, and have a casual tolerance for corruption, inequality and the suppression of political rights,” adds Schizas.

It’s quite an exasperating situation for people who have traditionally espoused such values as individual freedom, rule of law, active but accountable government, free but responsible markets, and mutual toleration.

Most liberals have called for a smaller government, fewer civil servants, privatizations and further deregulation of closed professions. But the fact that liberal parties chose to back the deeply unpopular austerity policies attached to the EU-IMF bailout deal didn’t do much to promote their ideas. Worse, some liberal commentators say, the parties paid the price of endorsing ideas that were not, in fact, related to their political religion.

“Most liberals around the world have strongly opposed policies like those included in the memorandum,” says Tilemachos Chormovitis, a contributor for the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog. “You can’t solve a debt crisis by accepting more loans. Instead of putting forward their own program against the tax-heavy policies of the memorandum and the stubborn statism of the left, liberals tagged along with the worn-out parties that backed the program,” he says.

To be sure, allergy to liberal ideas goes further back and has systematically been fed by the system of nepotism, clientelism and corruption that took hold of Greek society after populist PASOK rose to power in 1981. Any attempts to contain the country’s gigantic and profligate state ran against the interests of the ruling parties and their voters. Over time, liberal reforms were seen as coming together with a self-destruct button.

“There comes a point on the road to serfdom where so much of a country is dependent on government subsidies, government-sanctioned rents and government-upheld false economies, that liberalizing it will simply kill it,” says Schizas with a mention of F.A. Hayek’s 1944 classic.

Implementing liberal economic reforms, he says, was bound to take a hefty toll on the well-being of hundreds of thousands of people — at least in the medium term. “In an aged and inflexible society such as ours, people don’t bounce back from such setbacks; they stay down,” he says.

It’s hard to miss the uncomfortable truth at the core of the liberal creed: “The liberal parties are in the business of pointing out trade-offs; telling people they can’t have everything. That’s been a widely unpopular way of thinking in Greece since the ‘change’ of 1981,” says Schizas, referring to the late Andreas Papandreou’s famous campaign slogan which heralded the massive, but often misguided, program of wealth redistribution which was to follow.

The trade-off idea is a far cry from the populist, pie-in-the-sky idealism that has animated Greek parties seeking to appease an audience that had grown increasingly spoiled during the past 30 years. Furthermore, this cold, instrumental approach to politics, observers say, is out of synch with the all-too-human qualities of politicking. “Politics is not engineering. It’s chaotic, it does not follow a straight line. Just like life,” Kathimerini commentator Nikos Xydakis says, acknowledging SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’s deft timing and political opportunism. “Politics requires Machiavellian ‘virtue,’ the ability to adapt to any given situation by doing whatever is necessary,” he says.

Wrong leaders, wrong audience

Analysts also voice reservations over whether Drasi leader, veteran politician and ex-minister Stefanos Manos and former New Democracy heavyweight Dora Bakoyannis, who now heads Democratic Alliance, are the right people for the job.

The biggest handicap, journalist and urban activist Dimitris Rigopoulos suggests, is that the vast majority of voters see them as part of the problem, not the solution. “Manos and Bakoyannis are both associated in the collective consciousness with Greece’s discredited political establishment,” he says.

Parallel to this, experts say, there’s an issue with the audiences that these parties have chosen for themselves. Drasi, which likes to see itself as the ‘orthodox’ libertarian party, tanked outside the main urban centers while drawing a disproportionate share of the vote from the alumni of elite schools. One of the most common criticisms against liberals is that they are haughty and elitist.

“You get the impression that many of these people feel unfortunate to have been born in Greece and often treat their compatriots with disdain. Naturally, they have failed to identify with the masses and the biggest chunk of support comes from posh districts like Filothei or Kolonaki,” Chormovitis says.

Meanwhile, most of the support for Democratic Alliance appears to come from the reservoir of voters connected to Dora Bakoyannis’s family — which includes her father and ex-Premier Constantine Mitsotakis and her late politician husband Pavlos. “If we’re being charitable, it would be best to say that not all of them care about liberal this and liberal that; they have personal loyalties,” says Schizas.

Still far from tipping point, but…

Some observers are rather reserved about the future of Greece’s liberal movement. “Greeks — at least those who did not vote for the leftovers of the old system and those who didn’t abstain — voted for sterile reaction and conservatism,” says journalist and blogger Thodoris Georgakopoulos.

The ballot, he says, shows that Greece’s creative minority — those who find solutions to the challenges, which others then follow — is still far from reaching what writer Malcolm Gladwell calls “the tipping point” – “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” bringing about disproportionate change in society.

“If Greece’s creative minority had really reached the tipping point, the country wouldn’t have gone bankrupt in the first place,” Georgakopoulos says.

But true to their creed, liberals remain optimistic about the future. For Rigopoulos, a journalist with Kathimerini and founding member of the Atenistas citizens’ group, Greece is for the first time witnessing the conditions for the emergence of a genuinely liberal, reformist movement.

“Until five years ago, the so-called liberal front was reduced to a mostly isolated, demonized faction inside New Democracy plus a few scattered voices inside PASOK — the legacy of Costas Simitis, as it were,” he says in reference to the former modernist-minded premier. As intense polarization fades, new forces are being unleashed — “for better or for worse,” he says.

But unless they decide to join forces, liberals will find it hard to reach the tipping point. Ironically, although they are proud of their pragmatism and consensual habits, Greek liberals were in these elections represented with three distinct groupings. While bigger parties are struggling to form a unity government, liberal party officials have over the past few days been in talks to cooperate ahead of possible new elections. “Working with other people and parties has always been part of the solution as far as Drasi is concerned,” says Alexacos.

Others are less sure about the prospect. Chormovitis, for one, questions whether a liberal coalition would in fact succeed in even amassing the combined 6.5 percent won by the three parties on May 6.

“I am not so sure that Bakoyiannis’s election base in Crete or Evrytania would vote for a liberal coalition party that would not feature herself as leader, or that the fans of Manos and Tzimeros would throw their weight behind one of the most worn-out politicians of the post-1974 period,” says Chormovitis in reference to Thanos Tzimeros, the young advertiser who led Dimiourgia Xana, the surprise package among smaller parties.

Schizas insists parties should call on their supporters to discuss and approve a common platform first. “The liberal parties have never tried to develop a potential common policy platform and are instead focusing on horse-trading among themselves,” he says.

But whether they choose to cooperate or not, Schizas says, Greece’s liberals must above all reach a point where they are defined not by association, but by their actual program. “As long as we are the pro-banker people, the pro-gay people, the pro-bailout people, the pro-privatization people, the anti-minimum-wage people, we are easy prey.”

A dose of the right medicine for New Democracy

By Harry van Versendaal

Some three months since ousting a veteran MP for suggesting that “extremist right-wing droplets” had infiltrated the party, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras last week welcomed two far-right politicians into the fold.

Makis Voridis and Adonis Georgiadis were both expelled from the ultranationalist Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), the junior partner in Greece’s coalition government, for supporting the terms of Greece’s loan deal with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The perennially ambivalent LAOS rejected the deal and withdrew its support from the government. Meanwhile, Samaras, who had vehemently opposed the first loan deal in 2010, ousted 22 deputies for turning down the second aid package.

Analysts have interpreted the recruitment of the two politicians as an attempt to offset the damage of losing the 22 MPs and, on a more strategic level, as a bid to rally a party base disaffected by ND’s involvement in the coalition government.

“Damaged from his involvement in the coalition, Samaras wants to siphon votes from crumbling LAOS,” historian and political blogger Vasilis Liritsis told Kathimerini English Edition.

Going mainstream came with a hefty price for the party of Giorgos Karatzaferis, who saw its popularity tumble to 5 percent, from 8 percent during its heyday in 2010. Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party has surged to 3 percent, hitting the threshold for entering Parliament.

“For ND, having the two far-right politicians on board is part of a bigger strategy to eat into rightist territory,” Liritsis said.

However, some observers point out, this is not an indiscriminate overture to the far right. The conservatives are only trying to woo politicians who backed the bailout deal.

“ND needs to show its electorate that the memorandum was not only supported by PASOK and other reformists but also by a section of the nationalist far right,” said Vassiliki Georgiadou, a political science professor at Panteion University in Athens.

“This is what brought Voridis and Georgiadis to ND,” she said.

Gray zone

Voridis and Georgiadis, who were both given portfolios in the coalition government led by former central banker Lucas Papademos, have repeatedly drifted into democracy’s gray zone by expressing nationalist and anti-immigration views.

Georgiadis, who resigned as deputy minister for development, competitiveness and merchant marine, has made a name for himself as a flamboyant telemarketer and publisher of pseudo-scientific patriotic literature. He has in the past called for the en-masse deportation of Albanian immigrants and, as a lawyer, he has defended historian and Holocaust denier Costas Plevris in court.

Voridis, who has kept his position as minister for infrastructure, transport and networks, was leader of the EPEN (National Political Union) youth group founded in the early 1980s by Greece’s jailed dictator Georgios Papadopoulos. A few years later, he was banned from the student union at the Athens Law School for engaging in extremist acts. A picture of Voridis taken around that time shows him walking down a central Athens street with a homemade ax. In the mid-1990s, he founded the nationalist Hellenic Front (Elliniko Metopo), modeled after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France. Hellenic Front was absorbed by LAOS in 2005.

“Can you imagine any of them in charge of a ministry dealing with immigrants?” Liritsis said. “These are dangerous people.”

Voridis has gradually gone mainstream, adopting a crafted, airbrushed image. His public language habitually taps into popular concerns about crime, illegal immigration and law-breaking acts of leftist activists. His tough positions tread the limits of political correctness but usually not enough to alienate a mainstream audience.

“I was a political activist of the right,” said Voridis last week while labeling the conservatives as a “big patriotic liberal party.”

“ND’s ideology is tied to two central concepts that belong to the value system of the right: the nation and freedom,” he said.

Endgames

ND has historically had an ambivalent relationship with the far right. Faced with the prospect of election defeat in 1981, the party absorbed the royalist National Alignment (Ethniki Parataxi), although that was not enough to stop Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK from sweeping to power. In 2000, conservative leader Costas Karamanlis ejected Karatzaferis, who went on to form his splinter LAOS party. He still scored a comfortable victory four years later.

“When things are going well for ND, it likes to keep a distance from the far right. However, when they’re not and the party needs to galvanize support, it tries to embody the far right into its core,” said Georgiadou.

This is certainly one of those times. The tectonic plates of Greek politics are shifting as failure to grapple with the deepening financial crisis has sparked an unprecedented rejection of the two-party system that dominated Greece’s post-dictatorship politics, commonly referred to here as the “metapolitefsi.”

Brutal belt-tightening measures, soaring unemployment and a pervasive sense of precariousness and lost bearings are making Greeks responsive to bunker-ish rhetoric from the edges of the political spectrum.

Despite PASOK’s abysmal ratings in recent polls, ND is struggling to keep its head above 30 percent — not enough to form a government on its own. Meanwhile, combined support for the three leftist parties is at 42.5 percent, according to the most recent poll by Public Issue.

Centrifugal politics

Can people like Voridis and Georgiadis boost ND’s unconvincing ratings? Analysts are not so sure. Georgiadou says the strategy would work if it helped convince voters that ND was not drawn by PASOK or European leaders into backing the memorandum but rather did so out of conviction that doing so was in the national interest.

“But if the recruitment of Voridis and Georgiadis was to mobilize the anti-right reflexes of centrist and center-right voters, then any gains on the right could be offset by defecting centrist voters,” Georgiadou added.

That said, most of the damage to the center has already been inflicted by the very presence of Samaras at the helm of the party.

“Look at ND. It’s not just Voridis or Georgiadis,” Liritsis said, pointing at close Samaras associates such as Failos Kranidiotis and Chrysanthos Lazaridis — both members of the nationalist Diktyo 21 think thank. Kranidiotis, a ND hardliner, this week said that with Samaras in charge of ND, LAOS no longer served any political purpose.

“ND has completely lost the middle ground. It is gradually verging into far-right territory, turning more and more into a party reminiscent of the 1950s populist right,” Liritsis said.

The transformation certainly marks a big change from yesteryear, when Greece’s big parties battled for control of the center. PASOK climbed to power in the mid-1990s after Costas Simitis swayed the center, riding the hype of Third Way politics engineered by fellow social democrats like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder. Again, hijacking the middle ground was key to conservative Costas Karamanlis’s success eight years later.

“The voices of people like Kyriakos Mitsotakis or Costis Hatzidakis are no longer heard,” said Liritsis in referrence to ND’s so-called liberal faction while lamenting the country’s drifting from consensual centrism.

“The sad truth is there’s no party left to express the middle ground anymore.”

Coalition deal exposes ideological rift in ND

By Harry van Versendaal

A decision earlier this month by conservative leader Antonis Samaras to back a power-sharing deal with PASOK and the small far-right party LAOS has painfully exposed long-simmering ideological differences inside his New Democracy party.

ND’s agreement to back a provisional government under unelected technocrat Lucas Papademos who has the task of negotiating further loans for Greece has piqued party hardliners who have long opposed the debt-wracked country’s bailout deal with the EU and the IMF – also known as the memorandum – and ruled out any chance of forming a coalition with PASOK.

The move, which has pitted members of ND’s so-called liberal section against its “popular right” wing, came as Samaras appeared to be pulling his party to the right of the political spectrum – a realignment that has been criticized on both ideological and tactical levels.

Failos Kranidiotis, a member of the nationalist Diktyo 21 think tank and close associate of Samaras, last week suggested that liberals were a largely marginal force inside the party.

“These types of MPs are the remnants of a past era for New Democracy,” he said in reference to Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Sotiris Hatzigakis.

The latter, a veteran conservative deputy, was ousted from the party early last week for suggesting that “far right elements” were influencing ND’s decision-making. Kranidiotis, a lawyer who in the past defended Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, was thought to be among the cadres targeted by Hatzigakis.

Mitsotakis hit back, accusing Kranidiotis of being a populist and an opportunist. He was backed by Mitliadis Varvitsiotis, also a member of ND’s moderate wing, who pointed to the party’s liberal and pro-European credentials.

Interestingly, Samaras decided to tolerate outspoken MP Panos Kammenos after he broke with party ranks to vote down the interim administration which he described as a “junta.”

On Monday Samaras said any further in-fighting would not be tolerated.

New religion, fewer followers?

Propelled by a mix of conviction and opportunism, Samaras has since his election as ND chairman two years ago ditched the middle ground stratagem of his predecessor Costas Karamanlis. This fuzzy, albeit more consensual, creed was credited with swaying a critical mass of centrist voters away from PASOK, earning Karamanlis two successive election victories.

Samaras — also wary of LAOS’s growing influence on the right — has not been shy about polarizing his party. Instead, he has proudly advertized ND’s new political religion that is dominated by love for the nation, traditional middle-class values, and an allergy to unfettered free market forces.

Analysts are divided over whether ND’s existential squabble will eat into the party’s support.

“The existence of conflicting tendencies within the party will, of course, not help boost New Democracy’s political and electoral power,” said Takis Pappas, a political scientist at the University of Macedonia, who claims that the party is not so much threatened by an ideological chasm but rather an “absolute ideological void.”

ND’s numbers are so far anything but impressive. According to an opinion poll held earlier this month, if snap polls were to be held now neither of the two main parties would emerge with enough of the popular vote to form a majority government.

The survey found that 28.5 percent would vote for ND, 19.5 percent for PASOK.

But other analysts insist that regardless of where Samaras choses to take the party, most protest voters, angered by the socialist government’s failures and belt-tightening measures, will go to ND.

“In fact, if the shift came under a nationalist mantle — always popular among voters across Greece’s political spectrum — then ND could well emerge largely unscathed from [the process],” said Dimitri Sotiropoulos, a political scientist at the University of Athens.

Samaras has recently dug in his heels over an EU demand to sign a written pledge to back austerity measures needed to unlock some 8 billion euros of aid that Greece needs next month to avoid defaulting on its debts.

Observers are divided on whether the Europeans are trying to humiliate Samaras following his previous reluctance to support the memorandum signed by the George Papandreou administration. But the pressure has allowed Samaras to play the patriotic card.

New parties, new habits

The recent brawls within ND have fueled speculation that liberal cadres will abandon the party. Some of them might be tempted to join forces with former ND politician Dora Bakoyannis who went on to establish her own centrist, yet so far underperforming, party after losing the 2009 race to Samaras.

For Sotiropoulos the short time until the next general election, tentatively scheduled for February 2012, should keep such defectionist tendencies at bay.

“For all mainstream parties, the impending rise to power provides that strong glue that keeps the party together,” he said.

But not everybody agrees.

Given ND’s ideological differences and the flux political landscape, “it’s natural to expect defections from ND,” said Pappas, adding that he would not be surprised to see a similar urge inside the socialist camp.

The instinct for survival will kick in, Pappas suggests. “Politicians from the two biggest parties will most likely form new parties or political groupings in a bid to save their political skin,” he said.

Since the fall of a military dictatorship in 1974, Greece has mostly been ruled by PASOK and ND governments – a twisted political diarchy that is commonly held responsible for Greece’s nepotist, corrupt and wasteful system of administration.

Political commentator Stavros Lygeros does not rule out a schism inside ND. Interestingly, however, he claims that losing some of his officials will not necessarily do Samaras any harm.

“In fact, they would do Samaras a big favor if they left [the party]. Although I am not sure Samaras sees it this way,” he added, suggesting that many key figures of the old order will no longer be relevant in the nascent political landscape.

We are about to see the end to Greece’s once-unshakeable two-party system, Lygeros suggests. But that does not mean everyone here is prepared for this.

“Many people still think in the old terms. But the fact is both mainstream parties have been discredited. If ND wins [the next election], that will only be because people want to see PASOK go.”

Economic, political crisis catapults far right LAOS into the mainstream

By Harry van Versendaal

Embarrassing foot-dragging by the mainstream parties and growing political turmoil, even for Greece’s anarchic standards, has enabled a small far-right party to claw its way up the greasy pole of domestic politics by successfully asserting itself as champion of a crisis coalition government and accelerator of political developments.

In a bid to ease a crisis that brought Greece closer to a default and a eurozone exit, leaders of the PASOK socialists, New Democracy conservatives, and ultranationalist LAOS party last week agreed on an interim administration under technocrat economist Lucas Papademos. Since its establishment in 2000, LAOS has campaigned on an anti-immigrant, nationalist platform.

“A leadership vacuum presented an opportunity for LAOS, which used it to its own advantage by seeking, and imposing, its own participation in the government,” Vassiliki Georgiadou, a political science professor at Panteion University in Athens, told Kathimerini English Edition.

Greece’s debt crisis proved too big for PASOK to tame, causing the dramatic fall of its leader George Papandreou from the country’s top seat. The endgame came after Papandreou’s explosive decision to put a 130-million-euro rescue package agreed with euro area leaders in October to a referendum. The announcement rattled financial markets and sent shock waves through Greece’s European peers. It also proved a catalyst for political developments at home, as Papandreou eventually agreed to step down and make way for a cross-party government.

The power-sharing deal was struck after 10 days of Byzantine negotiations and cringe-worthy political theater. After a boycott from Greece’s left wing parties who rejected the talks as “anti-constitutional,” the provisional government brought together deputies from PASOK, New Democracy and LAOS. (LAOS, which means “the people” in Greek, is short for Popular Orthodox Rally).

“With the two biggest parties unable to govern, and the rest unwilling to govern, LAOS appeared to be the only party that wanted to accelerate developments,” Georgiadou said.

LAOS chief Giorgos Karatzaferis repeatedly called on Papandreou and conservative leader Antonis Samaras to join hands for “the good of the country.” A previous bid between the two politicians to strike a unity government in June fell through.

Greece’s communists, better known after their acronym KKE, have branded the transitional government the “black alliance,” attacking LAOS officials as the “ideological heirs of dictator [Ioannis] Metaxas” — a reference to the country’s leader between 1936 and 1941. SYRIZA, or the Coalition of the Radical Left, has levelled similar accusations.

But a lot of the vitriol, critics agree, is hypocritical. By choosing to stay in the political safe zone, parties on the left effectively gave LAOS more space for maneuver in the bargaining, and more influence in the new government.

“Those who see threats in LAOS’s participation in the government should not overreact now. Not because their fears are unfounded, but because they did nothing to prevent this from happening in the first place,” Georgiadou said.

Cynical conservatives

LAOS, which garnered less than 6 percent of the vote in the 2009 general elections, is over-represented in the 48-member Cabinet with one minister, one alternate and two deputy ministers.

The reason for this interestingly lies with New Democracy — which itself is underrepresented in the new Cabinet. Samaras — who has given critics many reasons to question his commitment to the interim administration — is said to have wanted a heavy LAOS participation in the transition government in order to prevent the party from trawling for New Democracy supporters while in opposition.

Reservations about LAOS’s role have also been voiced inside PASOK, while a Muslim PASOK deputy this week voted down the new government in a vote of confidence.

Critics outside Greece were not too impressed either. France’s Socialist Party expressed “shock” at the news while the Central Committee of German Jews was also adamant, saying that “a professed anti-Semite [such as Karatzaferis] cannot serve in a government with which the German government will need to negotiate billions in aid.”

Greece depends on loans from a 110-billion-euro rescue package agreed in 2010, when mammoth borrowing costs blocked Greece from international markets. That bailout later proved inadequate, forcing the a new loan agreement in late October that will also see a writedown on Greece’s privately held debt by 50 percent.

Past imperfect

To be sure, misgivings about LAOS are justified. Its officials have often made extremist and intolerant comments in the past.

“We are the only real Greeks. We are not from these Jews, homosexuals or communists,” Karatzaferis said in 2000. Two years later in a debate with Israel’s ambassador to Greece, he seemed to dismiss the Holocaust as a myth. “Let’s talk about all these tales of Auschwitz and Dachau,” he had said.

The past of LAOS’s Makis Voridis, the new minister for infrastructure, transport and networks, is also a political minefield. In the early 1980s he led the EPEN (National Political Union) youth group that was founded by ex-dictator Georgios Papadopoulos from inside Korydallos Prison. Five years later, Voridis was kicked out of the law school student union for engaging in extremist acts. In an infamous picture taken at the time, he is seen wielding a hand-made ax (he later said it was for self-defense).

In the mid-1990s, Voridis established the Hellenic Front (Elliniko Metopo), a nationalist party with close ties to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France. In 2005, Hellenic Front merged with LAOS and Voridis was elected to Parliament two years later.

Voridis, who showed up at the swearing-in ceremony carrying his child in his arms, has toned down his language over the years. Seeking to resonate with a largely middle-class electorate worried about rising crime and economic insecurity, he has sought to wed his trademark law-and-order rhetoric with talk about public sector reform.

His party leader, the media-savvy Karatzaferis, has done his fair share of airbrushing himself. In an interview with Reuters this week he denied he was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, describing him as the “greatest criminal” of the 20th century. He also said he regretted previous remarks that Jews were warned to leave the World Trade Center before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

And then there is Adonis Georgiadis. A sort of televangelist who is mocked for hawking his wares (nationalist history books in pseudoscientific disguise), the new development deputy minister began his tenure with changing office signs for ones using the accent system dropped in the early 1980s. But despite his colorful antics, his career has very often verged deep into bigoted territory, such as defending Holocaust denier Costas Plevris in court.

Political filter

The rise of the right is not exclusive to Greece, of course. A mix of xenophobia, Europskepticism and unemployment has sent far-right politicians making it into parliament in many European countries including Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Some analysts argue that letting populist parties join a government — provided they have enough votes — is the best way to moderate their message and influence.

“If a party is regarded as populist, it’s also safer to have them inside the government sharing responsibility for the difficult decisions rather than having them outside stirring up reactions on the street,” Kevin Featherstone, head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, told Kathimerini English Edition.

Georgiadou is not so sure.

“Extreme parties that take over government posts are obliged to adopt less extreme positions, to abandon the politics of protest and to become more institutional and systemic actors,” she said.

“But that does not mean that their voters will be willing to follow,” she added, explaining that voters who disagree with how their party evolves will turn to new groups and organizations to vent their extremist sentiment.

One does not need to look too far. When LAOS decided to back Nikitas Kaklamanis, the New Democracy candidate, in the race for Athens mayor a year ago, the neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi group succeeded in swaying far-right voters to elect its own representative in City Hall.

Although LAOS’s participation in the provisional government does not necessarily mean it will inflict permanent damage to the political system, Georgiadou argues that its participation in the government nevertheless sets “a bad precedent.”

Others remain more sanguine.

“Given the depth of the crisis, a wider political base for the government is essential,” Featherstone said, adding that this needs to be as broadly based as possible to be effective.

“Including LAOS achieves this aim, but the exclusion of Dora Bakoyannis, a centrist, was a missed opportunity,” Featherstone said of the Democratic Alliance party that claimed to have been left out after a Samaras veto.

By any measure, the cross-party government marks the end of politics as it was known in this corner of Europe. Like every government, this one too will be judged by its results. But the LAOS contingent — whose part in the coalition risks alienating the core of their grassroots supporters — would seem to have more reasons to make this work than their coalition partners.

Wanted: The bold and the beautiful

By Harry Van Versendaal

It was a splendid ride in cynical, and often surreal, territory. Speaking to ruling PASOK’s parliamentary group on Thursday, an embattled Prime Minister George Papandreou proudly said that no other government ever brought so much money to the country, ridiculously glossing over the fact that the cash in question is in fact foreign loans at mammoth interest rates.

Truth, Nietzsche quipped, is a mobile army of metaphors –- a statement that’s perfectly suited to Greek politicians. Animated by slogans, dazzled by fantasies, our politicians keep stumbling through the shambles, oblivious to facts. Painfully exposing his divorce from reality, Papandreou later went on to suggest that he was willing to step aside and allow an emergency government to be formed, provided that his socialist deputies publicly show their support for him first in a vote of confidence. Prove that you trust me, and then you are free to get on without me.

It was yet another absurdity in a loaded day that started with Papandreou backpedalling from his earlier explosive plan to put a European rescue deal to a popular vote. He first contradicted himself by saying that the government never intended to hold a referendum on euro membership; then he said a plebiscite was no longer needed anyway after it had forced New Democracy to come off the fence on the debt deal.

This unprecedented mix of arrogance and incompetence that undid the nation, pushing it to the brink of disorderly default and eurozone exit, has most probably rendered PASOK unelectable for the next decade. More important, it has left the entire political system seriously damaged.

In what was perhaps the most telling development of the day, conservative opposition leader Antonis Samaras called for an interim government made up of non-political figures –- an unintended admission that Greece’s politicians are part of the problem, and not the solution.

He is not alone in that. A plethora of commentators have over the past few days called for an interim administration of high-profile technocrats who will take responsibility of the debt-choked country’s fiscal and national security issues. It’s a reasonable demand, and every sober-minded person would naturally want such a task force to succeed. But what would success mean for Greece’s political system?

Speaking to a dumbfounded Jon Snow on Britain’s Channel 4 earlier the other night, a delirious Communist Party MP Liana Kanelli pledged a good fight against the brutal austerity measures imposed on the Greek people, saying “we are bold and beautiful” — a cheesy reference to the 1990s international and domestic soap opera hit.

The fact is that, much like the American sitcoms of the time, a great deal is happening but nothing has really happened. Regardless of what happens on Friday, it seems fair to say that unlike the tormented souls in ”The Bold and the Beautiful,” our political stars have proved themselves to be neither one nor the other.