The split personality of the Greek voter

by Mark Dragoumis

e-rooster.gr
November 12, 2010

Professor Kazakos attempts to explain in his latest of many books on the relationship between Greece and Europe how it is that Greeks wish their country to become more European while at the same time obstructing any real effort to make this happen. Premier Simitis (of PASOK) got elected promising “modernisation” in all fields and under “popular pressure” expressed in strikes and violent street demonstrations failed to implement his programme especially concerning the necessary changes in the country’s crumbling social security system. Costas Karamanlis (New Democracy) promised the “re-founding of the state” and left the state on the verge of bankruptcy as huge, clientelistic and corrupt as ever. To his credit, George Papandreou (PASOK) who won the elections on 30 October 2009 did not make any grandiloquent promises. He simply said that “the money was there” for the suffering classes to be assisted, when it was not and he knew it was not.

To avoid impending bankruptcy George Papandreou agreed to be saved by a hefty loan from Brussels and the IMF with a number of strings attached. Under close supervision from the European Commission, the European Bank and the IMF Greece is indeed changing in more ways than one. Reforms that proved impossible in the past are slowly taking shape under the strict guidance of Greece’s foreign supervisors colloquially known in Athens as “troika”. With teams of foreign experts looking after the governance of the country, the split personality of the Greek voter seems to have been put under some kind of control, at least for the time being. Even those Greeks who were keen to be ruled by a Government biased in favour of special groups have, for now, had to bow to the inevitable.

What does emerge from Kazakos’ systematic study is that up till now when Greek voters saw themselves as citizens they were all for honesty, meritocracy and modernisation. However, once a government was elected they tended to revert immediately to their personal, familial and unionist priorities seeking favours, fighting for special treatment and even using corrupt practices. Truth is that this “return to basics” (really to personalised power instead of the rule of law as was the custom under the lawless Ottoman regime) had already become increasingly difficult even before the recent crisis with Greece being in the eurozone and exposed to the global economy. Kazakos points out a duality in the country’s institutions. On the one hand Greece has an independent central bank and guarantees the entrepreneurial freedom both for its own citizens and for the foreign would-be investors, while on the other hand it is “saddled with informal institutions and practices (illegal financial backing of political parties, give and take between MPs and their voters etc) something that leads eventually to ‘institutional disorder’… A political system that has relied for decades on clientelistic values and extra-institutional arrangements rejects basically any strict rules of the game and all innovative institutions”.

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