Our essential obligation

Barring any big surprises, Sunday’s election race will be a personal triumph for Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Come Monday morning, Greece will be in the unprecedented position of having a new government and no real opposition. SYRIZA is looking at a long period of introspection, with the prospect of dropping back down to the 3% threshold looming large. Regardless of whether party leader Alexis Tsipras stays or goes, no one will really listen to what he or his party has to say. And PASOK, meanwhile, is in no position yet to act like a strong opposition with the prospect of rising to power. 

This is not good – not for Mitsotakis and not for the country.

So, who will exercise opposition, in the sense of keeping the government in check? That role will likely fall on the shoulders of the media and civil society. And if these quarters also fail to exercise control and criticism, that role will inevitably be assumed by the usual rabble-rousers – and we know the catastrophic effects of that all too well. Our role will be tough but necessary. We have seen how some issues, like the destruction of the environment or the failings of the justice system, become part of the agenda, compelling the government to act, when the media is doing its job. But it is essential that everyone understands this. Our politicians, from the top to the fringes, need to become more tolerant of criticism. Suspicion and dismissiveness are lethal. When the oxygen of criticism is sucked out of the room of democracy, lunacy takes over. With the fear of a SYRIZA comeback growing more distant and the country looking at four years of political stability, there are no excuses, no alibis. The expectations of what Mitsotakis will achieve in his second term are, and should be, very high. They are in line with the potential he has shown and with the country’s aspirations. 

There are those who will accuse us of complaining, of never being satisfied. Kostas Leontaridis, a trusted colleague and the newspaper’s institutional memory, recently gave me a copy of Kathimerini’s May 6, 1980 edition so I could read the editorial written after the election of Konstantine Karamanlis as president of Greece by a newspaper that was clearly in his corner:

“Mr Karamanlis is surrounded by consensus in the highest office of the land. But it would be mistake, for him or others, to interpret this as agreement with and approval of everything his governments did during their six years in power, across the board. Besides all the great and major achievements, there were also many great failures, mistakes, oversights, slips, violations and misinterpretations of the essential content and meaning of the people’s choice and mandate… And mistakes still exist. The need for change is evident… Real change, and not just in faces.”

It’s been 43 years since that op-ed was written and much has changed since then – but not our essential obligation.