Machinations
The victory of the conservatives in the Portuguese elections was one more indication that the European left has entered the twilight zone. This fact, of course, intensifies Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis’s nervousness and that of his reformist-minded aides who have resorted to old-style socialist discourse and have put together patchwork solutions in an attempt to solve the economy’s outstanding problems and thereby restore contact with Greece’s increasingly estranged society. The goal of Simitis and PASOK’s spin doctors is clear. Gradually adopting a populist policy – and, above all, populist rhetoric – they are trying to push the conservative party to adopt extreme neoliberal positions and thereby alienate it from the social classes that have suffered over the previous years under the government’s flawed economic policies, which have essentially redistributed the country’s wealth to the advantage of a small group. However, prudent citizens of this country are less concerned with the victor of the coming elections and more with the fact that, two years ahead of the expiration of his public mandate, Simitis is showing strong signs of political inertia, fatigue, and a clear inability, or rather unwillingness, to tackle the issues of corruption and vested interests. Simitis’s appearance in Parliament last Tuesday, at the debate on the ratification of the December 2000 Nice Treaty, was pathetic, as was his attempt to appear to be one of the molders of joint European policy, a policy which is plagued by many serious problems. One only has to note that, in view of the French presidential elections and the German parliamentary elections, the European Council in Barcelona sought to promote – and this was not coincidence – the social face of the European Union, while the goals announced in Lisbon for an increase in productivity have been largely sidelined. But Simitis’s problem is not connected to developments in the European Union as, even at the current unfavorable conjuncture and with the possibility of an economic war with the USA, they are not expected to have immediate repercussions on Greece, which stands to receive an influx of Third Community Support Framework funds. The problem facing Greece is that, as Simitis and PASOK enter pre-election orbit, there is a growing danger that the last community support funds to be channeled to our country will be used to serve the needs of the economic group which helped Simitis maintain power in the previous elections, and for taming those social classes which will be called upon to pay the price of the government’s arbitrary political decisions. When Simitis came to power in 1996, he fostered the illusion that the country’s political life was entering a new phase where political passions and narrow partisan objectives would give way to a managerial style of governance that might seem dull but would be more pragmatic and would help get rid of the current unhealthy mood. Instead, the government and Simitis have tended to oscillate between a state of political inertia and a crude cynicism the like of which Greece has rarely seen in its political history.
