Where the heck is ‘Vrisvani’?

As MPs in Parliament overwhelmingly ratified a new law giving Greeks abroad the right to vote in national elections here back in December 2019, no one had imagined that the uptake would be as disheartening as it is today. The number of applications that have been approved have come to just 22,816 and it is not at all certain that they will all turn up at the end of the day, mainly because of the way that 99 polling stations have been set up in 35 countries.

The most disappointing example is Albania. The once vibrant Greek-speaking minority does not live there anymore. Its members live in Greece or wherever else they were driven by necessity or by disappointment in this country. The lackluster uptake for the vote in the Greek elections seen in Albania means that a polling station will not be set up there, so Greeks living in Gjirokaster, for example, will need to travel to Sofia to cast their ballot. Sure, it may not be a huge distance in this day and age, but 700 kilometers is still 700 kilometers. The distance between Gjirokaster and Ioannina is much smaller at 90 kilometers, of course, and even between Tirana and Florina (230 km). Couldn’t a polling station have been set up there instead, for the Greeks in those Albanian cities?

The question sounds rhetorical in the age of the digital revolution – especially given how prominently Greece’s progress on this front features in so many pre-election videos. Such horn-tooting may have been partly justified, however, if steps had been taken to make sure that a Greek living in Beijing doesn’t have to travel 950 kilometers to Seoul to vote. Or, to bring it even closer to home, if seasonal domestic migrants could vote in the place where they work rather than having to travel back to where they’re registered. Every year, thousands of young men and women heave a sigh of disappointment as they put their degrees back in the drawer and head off to the islands to work in the tourism machine. And we all know the conditions under which they work.

Any suggestion that the government may be afraid of all these young men and women whose professional prospects are so poor and of how they will vote so it avoided making the process easier for them – as it ought to have done – will be dismissed as baseless grumbling. The government is so intolerant of criticism that it would label as toxic even the observation that the official ministry map of polling stations could have referred to Brisbane as Brisbane, rather than “Vrisvani.”