One year on, just keeping afloat
Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called early elections a year ago, citing the need for a renewed mandate to tackle the great challenges facing the economy. He could not have guessed just how great those challenges would become. With 152 seats in the 300-member Parliament, Karamanlis has had to balance the urgent need for substantial reforms with the risk of losing his majority. He has had to cope with shrill and relentless opposition from left and right of his party, but he has also had his hands full coping with rebels and miscreants in New Democracy itself. With a two-seat majority, the government is like a wounded animal: It can still keep moving but it’s only a matter of time before it is brought down. Polls show New Democracy dropping while PASOK, the party that ran Greece for most of the time between 1981 and 2004, has failed to capitalize convincingly on this – despite some recent polls putting it slightly ahead. Smaller parties – the Coalition of the Radical Left, the Communists and the right-wing populist LAOS – have gained. It appears that if elections were held now no party would win an outright majority in Parliament. This would lead to the formation of a coalition government. Given past experience and the shameless grandstanding of all our parties, we can safely predict that coalitions will neither govern nor survive for very long. So Karamanlis’s struggle to flog some life into New Democracy is perhaps the best we can expect from our politicians at this time. The challenges that Greece faces, though, have been here a lot longer than this government – and will certainly be here after it has gone. Productivity is low – not because of a lack of effort on the part of the average Greek but because an incompetent bureaucracy, inadequate infrastructure, spineless politicians and a wasteful state obstruct real growth rather than encourage it. This situation is tied closely to corruption – the confusion allows people to demand bribes and it obliges those who need something to pay for it. These problems are now compounded by the meltdown in the global financial market, the rise in oil and food prices and the glut of new houses in Greece. Deficits are widening and the public sector borrowing requirement is estimated at 42 billion euros this year – so far. This forced the government to take unpopular tax measures recently – measures that were so badly planned that Economy Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis keeps revising them. The world is even more volatile than it was a year ago. The issue of a final name for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is a thorn that keeps digging deeper into Greece’s side. Athens also faces a dilemma with regard to relations with Washington and a newly assertive Moscow: It has angered the United States by vetoing FYROM’s accession to NATO, by not recognizing Kosovo’s independence and by signing strategic pipeline and gas deals with Russia. Moscow, on the other hand, is angered by Athens’s toeing the EU line on condemning the unilateral declaration of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the breakaway Georgian provinces. Talks aimed at reuniting Cyprus are under way, but Turkey remains a most unpredictable neighbor. Greece’s political parties are incapable of instilling the confidence demanded by these difficult times. Nor are politicians or intellectuals managing to inspire anyone with new proposals for a way out of the swamp. Everyone is just trying to keep their heads above the water. That is no way to lead a country into a difficult new century.
