May 7, 2012
Europe's union may be struggling. But from sun-baked Greece to unseasonably chilly Northern Europe, voters Sunday did deliver a common message: We're angry.
In Greece, voters delivered a sharp rebuke to both main parties, the Socialist party, known as Pasok, and the conservative New Democracy party, with a majority of austerity-fatigued voters backing smaller alternatives on the left and right.
The fractures were visible in Athens's main Syntagma Square, where Dimitra Pataki, a 72-year-old retiree, said he would vote for the anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, poised to enter Parliament for the first time. The government "took away my supplemental pension and I am down to €320 ($419) a month," he said. "It's barely enough for food. Now they are asking to vote for them again."
Nikos Papadopoulos, a 35-year-old salesman laid off from his import-export company two years ago, said he, too, was voting for a newcomer: the Democratic Left party of independent lawmaker Fotis Kouvelis. His main goal, he said: protesting all of Greece's establishment parties.
"I'm not either for or against the austerity measures per se," he said. "What I'm against is the existing political system as it stands now."
In Petroupoli, a traditional Pasok stronghold in western Athens, 39-year-old English teacher Katerina Trikardou said she had voted for the leftist Syriza party, as a protest vote against Pasok.
"My parents voted Pasok, I voted Pasok, my husband voted Pasok," she said. "This time I voted for Syriza. Pasok is dead to me. They put us in this mess."
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