On Sunday, May 6, the people of Greece will be going to the election polls.This year's importance is due to the thorough discrediting of the established party system of the last 40 years: the alternating rule of one nominally right-liberal (New Democracy) and the other nominally social-democrat (PASOK) who have swapped power since the end of the dictatorship in 1974. New Democracy and PASOK leaders have employed a pre-election rhetoric that borders on blackmail, explicitly warning the nation in their latest speeches and articles about the chaos that will surely follow if they do not survive the election. Though "this blackmail worked for the last two years, it wont be of use for much longer," said Zeza Zikou, an economic analyst for the biggest national political newspaper, Kathimerini. Gradually, she said, people will understand that the bailout agreements have condemned ordinary people to work forever to repay a debt that can never be settled.
The collapse of credibility in the entire political system underlies these elections: a bankrupt country, whose population is profoundly disaffected with the political system, a population reluctant to exercise their democratic right to elect officials that are to preside over a nation that has effectively lost its sovereignty. People are witnessing a contradiction between democracy and capitalism. While the nation-state still remains the requisite form of society's self-determination, one of its pillars, namely, the national economy - is now thoroughly dismantled by a globalised economy that could not care less about national boundaries, cultural particularities, social histories, or even less so, about societies themselves as self-recognised collectives of real men and women whose very conditions of life are at stake. Unelected bankers and EU-technocrats effectively run the country, deciding for the generations to come to sell out the country's most vital assets, and to sink the population into unprecedented levels of poverty and misery. The majority of the Greek electorate justifiably perceives the leaders of both so-called leading parties to consist of traitorous thieves who, in dutiful servitude to international robber barons, have sold out the country. The mass demonstrations and protests revealed this sense of disaffection on the general public at the entire ranks of Parliament, regardless of party affiliation or personal record, with chants of "Burn this Brothel of a Parliament" or "Hang The 300" - that is, all three hundred elected members of the Parliament. Voters are seeking solace through political candidates spouting increasingly extremist rhetoric, and raising the prospects of parties on the far Right and Left. The irony is that political extremists have no better plan and stand no better chance of turning things around - even though voters would like to believe they do.
Greeks are literally dying in order to satisfy ruthless profit margins of global capital. Greece has seen the highest rate of year-to-year suicide increase in the EU. Suicide rates have tripled in the last year, in a country that statistically held the lowest suicide rate in the world. Suicides have now become a daily occurrence. Many choose to take their lives so as not to saddle their families with insurmountable debt are living in borderline hunger conditions, a level of poverty not seen since the Second World War and its aftermath. The death note of Dimitris Christoulas, the 77-year old pensioner who publicly committed suicide in Athens' Syntagma square, expressed immense anger: "if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov," wrote Christoulas, "I would be the second after him." Christoulas' suicide widely covered in the media, momentarily breaking through a veil of silence covering the wave of suicides that was to be laid again only days later when Savas Metoikidis, a 45-year old teacher, also ended his life as an act of political protest. Yet what largely went unreported in Christoulas' case was that his suicide note called for an armed uprising, for "young people with no future to...take up arms and hang this country's traitors."
The official unemployment figure has risen to 21.8 per cent.Youth unemployment had for the first time tipped over half of the entire population group (age 15 to 24), at 50.8 per cent, the figure had more than doubled in three years. And these numbers fail to portray a much wider landscape of informal/part-time employment, wild precarity, a rapid decrease in wages and pension payments (the national minimum wage was decreased by approximately 20 per cent alone). This condition is complimented by a spectacular increase in state taxation (numerous new taxes along with sharp increases in existing ones) and a wave of emigration that has so far been largely undocumented in official statistics.
The social effects of these conditions are devastating. It is said that the German government has imposed these austerity programs because it is haunted by its Weimar past: hyperinflation, impoverishment, social capitulation, political malaise, and the rise of Fascism. What may have escaped notice is that those German policies are creating new Weimar Republics elsewhere in Europe. Certain aspects of the Greek situation seem to corroborate this fact. A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday. At Greece's last general election in 2009 Golden Dawn, whose members use the Nazi salute and whose party symbol is an adapted swastika, polled fewer than 20,000 votes nationwide. Faced with the government's failure frequently because it is outwith their control, the Right has re-directed focus on to a perceived "enemy within" instead. There is a language of war on "outsiders", these "outsiders" ranging from foreign centres of power (Germany, the EU) to undocumented migrants. It's in this environment that a fringe group of neo-Nazis that would previously have struggled to attract a hundred supporters to one of its rallies seems set to enter parliament according to polls. Under Greece's convoluted electoral laws that could give them somewhere between eight to 12 or even 15 MPs Together along with two other ultra-nationalist parties, Independent Greeks and LAOS, some surveys indicate that the far right could take as much as one-fifth of the vote on Sunday. A splinter party from New Democracy, Independent Greeks, seems to have gathered enormous momentum. The increasing public presence of Golden Dawn. This neo-Nazi fringe group is exploiting the surge of nationalist sentiment that has emerged as a kind of defensive knee-jerk reaction of a people who suddenly have to endure not only conditions of flash impoverishment but also an onslaught Greek character and its history. This is a typical situation, hardly particular to Greeks. Coupled with the collapse of credibility in the entire political system, a resurgent defensive nationalism does render society vulnerable to fascist practices. Barely surprisingly, then, the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn has found itself being shifted from the social and political margins to the space in the centre of public attention, by having a bigger chance of entering the next parliament
"We're not afraid to be called Nazis or fascists – the whole political system is against us" said Elias Panayiotaros, a Golden Dawn candidate for central Athens. Asked about the party leader Nikos Michaloliakos' links to the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967-1974, he said that people were calling for the return of George Papadopoulos, the leader of the Colonel's regime. "The name of Papadopoulos is being heard everywhere," he said.
In the central Athens neighbourhood of Ayios Panteleimonas,which has the highest concentration of immigrants in Athens, prices here have dropped to as little as one quarter of what they were five years ago. The Greeks who could afford to have left. For rent signs are plastered over almost every one of the area's shabby five-storey apartment blocks. On the side streets among the North African-run mini markets and Nigerian internet cafes, newcomers from West Africa push shopping trolleys full of scrap metal stripped from deserted buildings. Large-scale drug dealing has overtaken an entire street in the neighbourhood. Violent crime has rocketed. "People here have been forgotten by the government. People here have been forgotten by the government," complains resident Mr Roumeliotis. "They have done nothing about immigration." The walls in front of the local church are daubed in anti-immigrant slogans such as "foreigners don't fit in our square". Members of Golden Dawn were voted on to its local council. Skinheads are talked of as "good boys" who are looking out for their community. "They were calling themselves the residents association but they were just fasistakia [little fascists]" explained Roumeliotis.
Nick Malkoutzis, a journalist and political analyst points out "It is evident that people are looking for something different. Plenty of them think that a vote for the neo-Nazis is a way to punish traditional politicians" However, they end up punishing themselves in the process.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain frequently irritate the Left by our refusal to consider despair and desperation, destitition and deprivation as fertile ground for the success of socialism. We have recognised that the working class may well not seek solutions to their economic woes through a shift towards socialism but could well switch to the Right. We have always insisted that class consiousness, while being subject to historical and material conditions, also requires knowledge and understanding - the motorpower of ideas. It does not automatically arise. Workers circumstances and their daily struggles could well make workers susceptible to the reformist yet radical soundbite of fascism (or state-capitalism) and easily turn away from the socialist case. Political and economic crises ushers forth new discontent, and new slogans, which generally bring about new political groupings and new figure-heads. When the population are driven by intolerable conditions into organising for common action the ruling class sooner or later will either placate the movement (and often harness it) or they find a means of dividing it, by finding scapegoats to blame. SOYMB previously referred to the possibility of a fascist back-lash in Portugal. We also witnessed the recent strong vote for the National Front in the French elections. Socialist consciousness emerges through discussion, debate and analysis. It is about people interacting directly or indirectly with others, exchanging ideas with one another. It is people's experiences of capitalism coupled with being acquainted with socialism and its feasibility that will bring about real revolutionary change.
Sources:
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5
The collapse of credibility in the entire political system underlies these elections: a bankrupt country, whose population is profoundly disaffected with the political system, a population reluctant to exercise their democratic right to elect officials that are to preside over a nation that has effectively lost its sovereignty. People are witnessing a contradiction between democracy and capitalism. While the nation-state still remains the requisite form of society's self-determination, one of its pillars, namely, the national economy - is now thoroughly dismantled by a globalised economy that could not care less about national boundaries, cultural particularities, social histories, or even less so, about societies themselves as self-recognised collectives of real men and women whose very conditions of life are at stake. Unelected bankers and EU-technocrats effectively run the country, deciding for the generations to come to sell out the country's most vital assets, and to sink the population into unprecedented levels of poverty and misery. The majority of the Greek electorate justifiably perceives the leaders of both so-called leading parties to consist of traitorous thieves who, in dutiful servitude to international robber barons, have sold out the country. The mass demonstrations and protests revealed this sense of disaffection on the general public at the entire ranks of Parliament, regardless of party affiliation or personal record, with chants of "Burn this Brothel of a Parliament" or "Hang The 300" - that is, all three hundred elected members of the Parliament. Voters are seeking solace through political candidates spouting increasingly extremist rhetoric, and raising the prospects of parties on the far Right and Left. The irony is that political extremists have no better plan and stand no better chance of turning things around - even though voters would like to believe they do.
Greeks are literally dying in order to satisfy ruthless profit margins of global capital. Greece has seen the highest rate of year-to-year suicide increase in the EU. Suicide rates have tripled in the last year, in a country that statistically held the lowest suicide rate in the world. Suicides have now become a daily occurrence. Many choose to take their lives so as not to saddle their families with insurmountable debt are living in borderline hunger conditions, a level of poverty not seen since the Second World War and its aftermath. The death note of Dimitris Christoulas, the 77-year old pensioner who publicly committed suicide in Athens' Syntagma square, expressed immense anger: "if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov," wrote Christoulas, "I would be the second after him." Christoulas' suicide widely covered in the media, momentarily breaking through a veil of silence covering the wave of suicides that was to be laid again only days later when Savas Metoikidis, a 45-year old teacher, also ended his life as an act of political protest. Yet what largely went unreported in Christoulas' case was that his suicide note called for an armed uprising, for "young people with no future to...take up arms and hang this country's traitors."
The official unemployment figure has risen to 21.8 per cent.Youth unemployment had for the first time tipped over half of the entire population group (age 15 to 24), at 50.8 per cent, the figure had more than doubled in three years. And these numbers fail to portray a much wider landscape of informal/part-time employment, wild precarity, a rapid decrease in wages and pension payments (the national minimum wage was decreased by approximately 20 per cent alone). This condition is complimented by a spectacular increase in state taxation (numerous new taxes along with sharp increases in existing ones) and a wave of emigration that has so far been largely undocumented in official statistics.
The social effects of these conditions are devastating. It is said that the German government has imposed these austerity programs because it is haunted by its Weimar past: hyperinflation, impoverishment, social capitulation, political malaise, and the rise of Fascism. What may have escaped notice is that those German policies are creating new Weimar Republics elsewhere in Europe. Certain aspects of the Greek situation seem to corroborate this fact. A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday. At Greece's last general election in 2009 Golden Dawn, whose members use the Nazi salute and whose party symbol is an adapted swastika, polled fewer than 20,000 votes nationwide. Faced with the government's failure frequently because it is outwith their control, the Right has re-directed focus on to a perceived "enemy within" instead. There is a language of war on "outsiders", these "outsiders" ranging from foreign centres of power (Germany, the EU) to undocumented migrants. It's in this environment that a fringe group of neo-Nazis that would previously have struggled to attract a hundred supporters to one of its rallies seems set to enter parliament according to polls. Under Greece's convoluted electoral laws that could give them somewhere between eight to 12 or even 15 MPs Together along with two other ultra-nationalist parties, Independent Greeks and LAOS, some surveys indicate that the far right could take as much as one-fifth of the vote on Sunday. A splinter party from New Democracy, Independent Greeks, seems to have gathered enormous momentum. The increasing public presence of Golden Dawn. This neo-Nazi fringe group is exploiting the surge of nationalist sentiment that has emerged as a kind of defensive knee-jerk reaction of a people who suddenly have to endure not only conditions of flash impoverishment but also an onslaught Greek character and its history. This is a typical situation, hardly particular to Greeks. Coupled with the collapse of credibility in the entire political system, a resurgent defensive nationalism does render society vulnerable to fascist practices. Barely surprisingly, then, the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn has found itself being shifted from the social and political margins to the space in the centre of public attention, by having a bigger chance of entering the next parliament
"We're not afraid to be called Nazis or fascists – the whole political system is against us" said Elias Panayiotaros, a Golden Dawn candidate for central Athens. Asked about the party leader Nikos Michaloliakos' links to the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967-1974, he said that people were calling for the return of George Papadopoulos, the leader of the Colonel's regime. "The name of Papadopoulos is being heard everywhere," he said.
In the central Athens neighbourhood of Ayios Panteleimonas,which has the highest concentration of immigrants in Athens, prices here have dropped to as little as one quarter of what they were five years ago. The Greeks who could afford to have left. For rent signs are plastered over almost every one of the area's shabby five-storey apartment blocks. On the side streets among the North African-run mini markets and Nigerian internet cafes, newcomers from West Africa push shopping trolleys full of scrap metal stripped from deserted buildings. Large-scale drug dealing has overtaken an entire street in the neighbourhood. Violent crime has rocketed. "People here have been forgotten by the government. People here have been forgotten by the government," complains resident Mr Roumeliotis. "They have done nothing about immigration." The walls in front of the local church are daubed in anti-immigrant slogans such as "foreigners don't fit in our square". Members of Golden Dawn were voted on to its local council. Skinheads are talked of as "good boys" who are looking out for their community. "They were calling themselves the residents association but they were just fasistakia [little fascists]" explained Roumeliotis.
Nick Malkoutzis, a journalist and political analyst points out "It is evident that people are looking for something different. Plenty of them think that a vote for the neo-Nazis is a way to punish traditional politicians" However, they end up punishing themselves in the process.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain frequently irritate the Left by our refusal to consider despair and desperation, destitition and deprivation as fertile ground for the success of socialism. We have recognised that the working class may well not seek solutions to their economic woes through a shift towards socialism but could well switch to the Right. We have always insisted that class consiousness, while being subject to historical and material conditions, also requires knowledge and understanding - the motorpower of ideas. It does not automatically arise. Workers circumstances and their daily struggles could well make workers susceptible to the reformist yet radical soundbite of fascism (or state-capitalism) and easily turn away from the socialist case. Political and economic crises ushers forth new discontent, and new slogans, which generally bring about new political groupings and new figure-heads. When the population are driven by intolerable conditions into organising for common action the ruling class sooner or later will either placate the movement (and often harness it) or they find a means of dividing it, by finding scapegoats to blame. SOYMB previously referred to the possibility of a fascist back-lash in Portugal. We also witnessed the recent strong vote for the National Front in the French elections. Socialist consciousness emerges through discussion, debate and analysis. It is about people interacting directly or indirectly with others, exchanging ideas with one another. It is people's experiences of capitalism coupled with being acquainted with socialism and its feasibility that will bring about real revolutionary change.
Sources:
1
2
3
4
5
1 comment:
Post-poll projecions estimate Golden Dawn got 7% of the vote, enough for perhaps 19 MPs.
Its leader has lashed out at those he described as "traitors" responsible for the country's financial crisis and said his party was ushering in a "revolution".
"The day of national revolution by the Greeks has begun against those who are selling us out and looting the sweat of the Greek people."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/golden-dawn-far-right-greece
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