PASOK MPs withholding endorsements

The upcoming October contest for the leadership of the socialist PASOK party has attracted an unusually high number of candidates. Eight have thrown their hat into the ring. The latest was former minister and European commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou, at 65 the oldest candidate, who, while long known as a political heavyweight within the party, has not been active in party politics since 2012.

The election has a particularly interesting angle: will the winner be the one with the largest network of party officials or will it be the one most popular with the supporters and friends who will vote with the payment of a measly 2 euros as the only requirement to be an elector?

It was PASOK that pioneered the mass party leadership vote in 2004, when George Papandreou, already anointed by the party leadership and facing no opponent, gathered over a million votes. Not that this helped much: he lost the subsequent national election to conservative leader Kostas Karamanlis and had to wait until 2009 to become prime minister, only to immediately see the country plunge into its worst-ever financial crisis and watch his popularity go up in smoke.

Conservative New Democracy and left-wing SYRIZA followed the same voting procedure for their own contests. But the method has a serious vulnerability: it allows people hardly committed to the party to show up, vote and influence the result. It may also allow an otherwise obscure candidate to prevail, as was the case last year with SYRIZA and Stefanos Kasselakis. Certainly, that party had just endured an unexpectedly large electoral defeat and voters were demanding change. But there is no way to ensure that the voting was not influenced by non-SYRIZA voters showing up.

PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis, who is one of the eight candidates, and his supporters are said to have considered restricting eligibility in the vote. But they will probably find no satisfactory way to do so. And even if they did, it would take more than just one candidate, who is also the one in control of the party machinery, to agree to that.

What has been striking, so far, is that few of the party’s 32 MPs, apart from the five who are standing as prospective leaders, have endorsed a candidate. An exception is Odysseas Konstantinopoulos, the first MP to have declared that a new leader is needed, who has endorsed Athens Mayor Haris Doukas.