Rematches and ghosts
Greece is not in a state of civil war, it is not a country under occupation, it is not at war. Anyone who talks and acts as if any of the above is true is obviously stuck in the past and wants some kind of “rematch” for events that happened many decades ago: one for the December events of 1944, another because the period after the restoration of democracy in 1974 was not the “true” restoration of democracy.
Haunted by the anxiety of a historical “rematch,” they step into roles, comparing themselves to mythical protagonists. Most importantly, they believe that there is no limit to the means they can use to achieve their goal, from the clear targeting of people to physical violence. A very thin line separates a few of them from those who believed for a long time that an “armed movement” was the answer to Greece’s problems. The rhetoric and the arguments are the same.
SYRIZA, the main opposition party, was born out of anger. The anger of the citizens who lost their trust in the two major parties that ruled for years. On the way to power, the most disparate elements gathered in the party’s fast-moving caravan. It didn’t really matter because it was a protest movement, without limits in how it expressed itself, without the need to submit to any realism. After all, it was the time of a great social crisis but also of the flourishing of social media. Let us not forget that the violent winds of the extreme anti-bailout populism of those times did not only affect the Left. The country had gone through phases of very extreme populism before but in that period we reached a new low. Clear targeting, bullying, and the use of ahistorical terms became our routine.
Taking power and the expensive – very expensive – lesson learned by the SYRIZA-led administration led many of the hardcore proponents of the anti-bailout caravan to despair and later to their exit. Some of them stayed, either because party leader Alexis Tsipras is always slow to sever his Gordian ties or because they helped the party win anti-systemic votes. This is a permanent excuse, the argument that “but if they leave we will lose all the anti-systemic votes.” They don’t understand how this traps them in political impasses that will later come back to haunt them when they have to govern. They also don’t see that they inflame and feed the inexorable beast of populism that knows no bounds and bites with particular ease the hand that fed it.
We are in 2023. Greece is moving forward. The world is moving on. Historical rematches do not concern the people who want to survive and find a better future for their children. The country needs a good opposition as much as a good government, which will relentlessly criticize and scrutinize the government, offer solutions to the big unsolved problems and have a team that can govern without experimentations and political acrobatics. The only rematch we need to win, is against the problems that haunt us as a country, not against the ghosts of the past.
