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Velas Tours
an incoming tour operator based in Greece with 34 years experience in both, tours and holidays
velastours.com
an incoming tour operator based in Greece with 34 years experience in both, tours and holidays
velastours.com
Death of a GovernmentDeath of a Government Robert Zaller There comes a time in the life of every government when its occupancy lease expires. The Chinese had a phrase for it in the days of the dynasties; they called it losing the Mandate of Heaven. When it happened, the writ of the emperor no longer struck terror and awe in his subjects. Strange sects emerged, banditry flourished, and rebel armies slowly converged on the capital. We live less grandly, and the daily grind of democracy generally produces not a yawn in heaven, much less the electorate. Still, the sense that an era was ending was palpable in Greece during the run-up to the elections just concluded. There were no armies in the suburbs, but plenty of strikers in the streets. The platform of the long-reigning Panhellenic Socialist Party was retooled, the cabinet reshuffled, and a new day proclaimed. That day, however, now belongs to the New Democratic Party of Kostas Karamanlis. Greek political parties have been, until recently, the creatures of charismatic political leaders. PASOK is no exception. Born in resistance to the military dictatorship, it was stamped by the vision and personality of a single individual, Andreas Papandreou, who both in life and death has dominated the past quarter century of Greek public life. It is now possible to look back on this era, and weigh its significance. PASOK presented itself as the party of the future. In reality, its historic function has been to accommodate the past. When Papandreou was elected to a first term in office in 1981, it marked the first time a self-described party of the Left had peacefully taken office in southern Europe since the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in the 1930s. By this time, however, the term socialist flaunted by PASOK had turned as soft as a Dali watch. All parties in non-Communist Europe (as in North America and East Asia) had become functionaries of Cold War capitalism. What PASOK offered was an anodyne populism that distributed a few crumbs of favor to organized labor and peasant smallholders, and brought some civil legislation up to date. What it represented was closure for the civil war period, for more than three decades the corpse in the garden of Greek politics. Liberal polities, at least in Europe, had historically required a nominal party of the Left, and in filling this role PASOK put paid at last to the specter of the postwar Communist insurrection. The corpse was buried, though with scant ceremony, and Greek democracy settled into the comfortable harness of the two-party system. From this perspective, the strident anti-Americanism of Papandreous first years made a certain amount of sense. Greek democracy had been “guided” by the American presence since the late 1940s, and when Papandreou presented himself prematurely in the mid-60s, the result had been a preemptive military coup. His election fifteen years later signified not the triumph of radical politics but its domestication, and with that the era of American tutelage was at an end. Obligingly, the Americans overstayed their welcome, giving Papandreou a rhetorical whipping-boy that concealed the essentially conservative and accommodationist character of his regime. Bled of a political object when the United States finally ended its occupation, Papandreous flamboyance found more traditional outlets in his May-December romance with an airline stewardess, and in his final term he made capital (as a certain European figure is doing now) out of his own death watch. To the end, his political party was an extension of himself; at the same time, however, his success in remodeling Greek politics as a two-party system enabled it to survive him. The seamless transition to a successor whose governing style was the virtual antithesis of his own, the colorless technocrat Kostas Simitis, made it clear that Age of Charisma was over. Papandreou shrewdly guided Greece into the European Union, seeing in it not only a counterweight to American influence but a stable replacement for the American subsidies that, with the end of the Cold War, were in any case bound to diminish. This enabled him to continue cultivating his political base. Without genuinely modernizing, Greece has become in the past two decades a consumer society. The gap between its tastes and its income has begun to catch up with it, and that was part of the dilemma the Simitis government faced. The inflationary transition to the euro has complicated the problem, while the strain of preparation for the 2004 Olympics has exposed both the inadequate infrastructure of the country and the incompetence of those who would deal with it. It will be a near thing for Greece to avoid international embarrassment, and perhaps only outside assistance will enable it to do so. Fearing defeat in the coming elections, Simitis proposed a revision of the electoral law last summer that would enhance his prospects of retaining a parliamentary majority. He went on a well-publicized retreat, emerging with a new reform package and a change of the palace guard. Nothing seemed to help, though. It was not merely that PASOK had lost the confidence of the country, but that no one could say what if anything it stood for. After Papandreou, Simitis very drabness seemed an asset, an earnest of quiet competence and political maturity in a party that, to survive, needed to distance itself from its founder. After seven years, this was no longer enough. Papandreou, no matter how closely he hewed to the center, was always able to rally the cadres of the Left that were the base of his support. Simitis, a centrist by instinct, permitted that base to atrophy, but failed to replace it with another. A leader without personality, he faced the task of reinventing a party that was no longer a movement. The harder he tried, the less convincing he appeared. Acknowledging the hopelessness of Simitis candidacy, PASOK prevailed on him to step down in favor of his predecessors son, George Papandreou. A competent enough foreign minister, he had none of his fathers charismatic appeal, and no opportunity to fashion a record of his own. Finally, he had nothing to run on but his name. The old political system reflected the individuals who dominated it. The new system comes down to personality too, but only because party differences are so marginal, and the countrys room for maneuver in a global economy is so limited. The new prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, also bears a famous name, though he too is a pale imitation of the man who restored Greek democracy after the collapse of the Junta. Legacy politics is the product of a system bankrupt of choice. No doubt the identity of the next Greek leader mattered to the professional politicians whose fortunes rode on which of the competing dynastic brand names proved more popular at the polls. It will likely be of less consequence to the voters themselves. Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University.
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