The crisis in our political system
Our political leaders are obliged to realize that a lack of trust in political parties – now felt by 72 percent of Greek people, according to a recent opinion poll – is clear evidence of a major crisis in our political system. And, naturally, the collective and exclusive blame for this situation rests with our political leaders and the way in which they have organized and managed the operation of their own parties (which have long since stopped producing concrete policies and have merely become mechanisms for pursuing power). Further, the responsibility of our political leaders for the public’s waning trust in them is not abstract or theoretical; it has been enshrined in our constitution which, in 1986, first recognized political parties as primary factors in the operation of the democratic state. And Article 29 in particular gives lawmakers the right to enact legislative provisions aimed at ensuring the democratic operation of our political parties. There have long been calls for our political parties to be upgraded, but scant progress has been made toward this end. Parties have finally started receiving at least some funding from the state budget – and this year the amount was hardly negligible, some 52.13 million euros. But there has been no overhaul of the parties’ internal structures, nor provisions made to ensure that they operate democratically. As a result, our political parties remain dominated by their leaderships, which retain exclusive responsibility for drafting and exercising policy and for choosing parliamentary candidates from whom the Greek people are expected to entrust the exercise of power.
