The polls
tell one part of the story. The Pasok party, which tried and failed
to implement the first austerity bill until replaced by a technocratic
coalition in October, is now down to 11%. (Epikaria poll, 16 February
2012)
New Democracy,
the centre-right party that expected to form the government –
it has been a two- horse race since the restoration of democracy
in the 1980s – is also in trouble. Its own vote – 27.5% – is not
enough to form a government. And 20 MPs just got expelled for
opposing the bailout.
The Christian
Orthodox hard-right party, LAOS, has also split, after leaving
the coalition government during the austerity vote last Sunday.
I heard two perfectly ordinary guys, sitting next to me in a cafe,
comment: "I don't care if the splitters from LAOS were once
fascists. They are right."
The far
left is now polling a combined 43.5%. The extreme-right party
Golden Dawn is on 2.5%. And there's an air of mania....
The left,
for its part, remains riven by splits. When the security squad
of the communist trade union PAME clashed with anarchists on a
demo last summer, the communists pinned the blame on the other
big left party, Syriza.
Outflanking
both of them, a tiny former "eurocommunist" party called
the Democratic Left has gone from near zero to 16% in the polls.
Yiannis
Bournous, the international spokesman for Syriza, believes that
despite this, it may be possible for the left to attempt to form
a government. "And run a state that's part of Nato?"
I ask. He makes clear that any left government would do the basic
things – certainly not leave Nato.
Syriza and
the DemLeft do not even want to leave the euro: Syriza's proposal
is for Greece to declare a selective moratorium on debt repayments
and use the euro bailout money for a programme of social reform.
In the meantime,
their growing popularity is not just down to the militant atmosphere
on demonstrations: "We've built a solid record in local administrations,"
claims Mr Bournous "and all over the country groups of our
supporters are organising things: food provision, bartering clubs,
self-help groups. That's how we've built ourselves.
"We
are talking about a new bloc of forces that have their internal
differences but which agree on the rejection of the new memorandum
and this suffocating policy of super-austerity."
Does he
seriously think they can form a government?
"This
is our proposal. They must put aside their partial differences
and after the election, yes, form a new bloc of power."
This week
the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, voiced fears others
have only spoken about in private: that given the low showing
of the "mainstream parties", there should be a truly
technocratic government, with no career politicians involved.
Others, such
as the appointed Pasok MP Elena Panaritis – an economist
who advises the party leadership – say the elections should
be postponed:
"If
there's an election so soon, then there'll be elections again
in two months, and an election the next months, and then we can
kiss the country goodbye, and possibly the euro goodbye. If we're
not seriously looking at the repercussions we're looking possibly
at a situation like Russia in the early 1990s; then Russia had
a poverty rate higher than under communism. And it had crooks
running the country."
I have been
reporting the Greek crisis now for two years, intermittently on
the ground, and it looks like something changed, tangibly, in
the past 10 days.
The established
parties lost belief in what the EU is forcing them to do; parts
of the EU lost belief in it too; and the people – quite wide layers
of society – lost belief in the political class.
