No going back

I’ve spent the last 12-13 years completely torn about where I think the country is headed. There have been days where I woke up feeling that Greece was literally headed to hell and then gone to bed believing that I had overreacted, and things would be OK. My friends and acquaintances became accustomed to these shifts and stopped paying attention after a while.

Greece and Greeks have indisputably been tested by successive crises over the course of these years. It’s a wonder how we’ve managed, having been constantly in the “red” or on the brink of one disaster or another. We’ve been through bankruptcy, political chaos, a massive social crisis, hope of recovery, the opportunistic but very educational adventures of 2015, devastating fires and other effects of climate change. We’ve come to the brink of war with Turkey and returned to an era of recovery, only to be slammed by the pandemic and now more political uncertainty and the frightening prospect of being left without a government as a result of the new electoral system.

One of the more alarming scenarios we’re looking at now is an extended pre-election period defined by a Balkan style of political confrontation, with the parties vying to win favor with promises of handouts as society bends under the pressure of rising living costs. Then there’s Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is constantly flirting with the prospect of an “accident” with Greece as he battles for his political – and physical – survival. The combination of these two factors may bring some nasty surprises in the runup to elections. The solution cannot and should not lie in the formation of some artificial, non-political government. Citizens must weigh the facts and consider the risks before making their decision and determining our future.

So, we’re back to seesawing between pessimism and optimism. 

The good thing is that when a country has already been through so much, when it has already stared into the abyss, it tends to look to the future with an almost metaphysical sense of optimism. I often feel the innate magnetic force that would have us become like the Balkans or even the Middle East, but I am confident that we will resist, as we have done so far. And there’s always the mini-movie I play in my head when I feel down: I imagine myself flying from the old airport at Elliniko in the 1980s from a country that looked like a struggling nation in the Middle East and then returning to a new, European Greece at the new Athens International Airport.

We may get knocked about some more but we will not go back to those days.