Somewhere out there, and according to our post-junta political typology, there are a “world of the political camp” and a “progressive world.” Neither can any longer be understood as a mass of loyal voters. They are rather ideological communities that were once expressed in polarized terms, one in favor of New Democracy and the other in favor of PASOK, but have been eroded since the economic crisis. The worlds became mixed.
Alexis Tsipras and his minority Left needed the votes of a certain PASOK and the seats of a madcap Right to govern. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, without the blue that had by then been painted dark blue in far-right parties, drew votes and officials from modernizing PASOK to consolidate his dominance. The Tsipras anti-establishment system, crude and too closely identified with the circumstances of its time, disintegrated. That certain PASOK scattered to the four corners of the political horizon, Kammenos went home, and the Left split into more minority formations.
The succession was a much more structured Mitsotakis system. But seven years later, while his own modernizing PASOK remains solid and united around him, the “political camp” is being shaken by an ideological split. It is “losing its soul,” as the old ideological combatants put it. Which means that the Mitsotakis problem is not to be found in the expansion of his system but at its core.
The problem lies within New Democracy itself. That is where the contraction is taking place. As Alexis Tsipras attempts to reconstruct the other pole with a “progressive world” that no longer exists as a solid mass, and PASOK has never recovered from the brain drain to the left and right, New Democracy remains the largest party. Only it has ceased to be a large party.
Why? Because the “world of the political camp” has split into three. One part remains there, together with PASOK’s modernizers and the people who moved over from LAOS. A second migrated, with all its baggage, to the dark blue. And the third sat uneasily, awkwardly or disappointedly on the couch.
An old but active ideological combatant of the political camp sums up these tectonic changes in the two worlds as follows: “Today,” he says, “anyone can vote for anything.” Worse still, social classes that once moved marginally between the two worlds and consistently rejected the extremes are now flirting with the idea of casting a protest vote for formations outside the democratic spectrum.
“You can’t imagine what you can hear from people you would never expect it from,” a friend told me, without even needing to read between the lines to understand. “The ball has been lost.”
Where might it be? The Metron Analysis poll presented by To Vima probably offers an answer. According to the survey, leaders’ ability to take care of our wallets ranks only fourth among the qualities citizens seek. Seventy-eight percent of respondents consider honesty to be the most important qualification for a leader. Another is the ability to understand the pulse of the social majority.
In other words, the survey captures moral and ideological priorities. “It is not (only) the economy,” Ioannis Balampanidis and Penny Apostolopoulou explain in their analysis. Citizens are asking for something else beyond what is being offered to them in the packaging of “TIF packages” and other Thessaloniki programs.
From this perspective, the pre-election period is just as critical as the post-election landscape. Before the curtain rises on the ballot box, and not only after it falls.
The signs of social instability are here, and no social instability can be metabolized into political stability. No political system can manage a result that resembles an incoherent scream.
