The far-right blur

We already knew that Greeks have a high opinion of themselves from a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2015-2017 and published in 2018 which showed that 89% of us stated that “our culture is superior to that in the rest of Europe.” At the same time, 66% of Greeks declared that they “believe in the evil eye” – a European record.

Another survey, conducted by Greek research institute Eteron and published in October 2023, confirms the above finding. A total of 62.5% believe that “the Greeks are an important people who stand out for their intelligence and culture.”

So far so good. If you don’t praise your own people, they will slap you or worse. But there is another response in the same research that should concern us. A total of 55.3% of Greeks do not trust their fellow citizens and the question is how can you not trust the members of an “important people who stand out for their intelligence and culture”? Why are they afraid of their fellow citizens? Do they think they will give them the evil eye?

Confusion is a characteristic of societies in transition, such as Western ones. People adopt the new before completely rejecting the old

Things get even murkier if we look at the breakdown by political party. The more some believe in the superiority of Greeks, the less they trust them: 86.4% of those who voted for the far-right Spartans and 85.7% of those who voted for nationalist Greek Solution believe that “the Greeks are an important people” but, at the same time, only 23.4% of the Spartans’ voters and 29.8% of Greek Solution’s trust their fellow Greeks. One wonders how the telemarketing channels that the leader of Greek Solution has set up on across the country survive.

On the other hand, 65.9% of those who voted for the Spartans believe “that in some cases, a dictatorship is preferable to democracy.” But since only 23.4% trust the Greeks, how can they trust a Greek dictator? What on earth does that mean? Would they import a fuhrer?

Confusion is a characteristic of societies in transition, such as Western ones. People adopt the new before completely rejecting the old. For example, in the same survey, 50.1% are in favor of the free market, against 35.6% who believe in central planning, and at the same time 55.9% believe that “the state does not intervene enough and allows the private sector to run rampant,” while only 28.9% say that “the state intervenes too much.”

This confusion is greatest in that part of the population which has the most antiquated notions, which, precisely because they are the oldest, are also the most powerful. This might explain the Greek far-right blur.