Μake us preferred on Google The date of elections is written in stone in very few democracies. In ours, on the other hand, it is not written even on cardboard. It is theorized as a “constitutional prerogative” of the prime minister, leaked as an intention to spring an electoral surprise, and, with the manufactured prestige of “reliable information,” it can end up printed on the front page of a newspaper as a six-column headline.
At least, that is what happened last June, when two dates were briefly announced, one in September and one in October. The prime minister himself made sure to reinforce the scenario with a burst of activity resembling that of an election campaign. Although he declared himself institutionally committed to the electoral cycle, he was rushing around to make everyone else rush around. Certainly his own people, some of whom were “recommending” early elections in the fall out of fear of a terrible winter that would wreak havoc on New Democracy in the spring. Above all, however, he was making Alexis Tsipras, Antonis Samaras and Maria Karystianou run.
Better, the thinking went, for them to introduce themselves and actually be measured in opinion polls as political entities rather than hypothetically as saviors-in-waiting.
At least two-thirds of the trick worked. Tsipras and Karystianou rushed to announce their parties, unlike Samaras, who preferred to wait and simply go viral with a carefully disheveled video.
A month and a half later, the haste is already costing Karystianou dearly; “Hope” appears to be the first to die. Now Tsipras’ ELAS is being chosen as a convenient opponent, along with the ghost of his past. And when that ghost does not awaken on its own because of the failures of his rebranding, they make sure to shine as much light on it as the spotlights of the Maximos Mansion can provide.
It is a strategy that overlaps with Tsipras’ own. On the one hand, because the ghost can be presented in the packaging of innocent immaturity or solitary struggle during the “difficult years of the memorandums.” On the other, because the new Tsipras, the one of flesh and blood, is cultivating a profile of moderate realism—in other words, of governability that poses no threat.
In other words, the past and the present are addressing different audiences. One, let us say, the more left-wing soul. The other, the more centrist mindset.
Would this not be the “other pole” of the political system? The one who, as he himself has said, may lose the first election but nothing rules out his winning the second.
If anything made the scenario of early elections weak, despite the “reliable information,” it was precisely this: an electoral process in two rounds in which all the players would emerge losers from the first.
First and foremost, Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the “constitutional prerogative,” who would sacrifice a crucial six months of autonomy at the Maximos Mansion.
Who, with so many potential successors, opponents and outstanding issues surrounding him, would leave his position of power earlier in order to negotiate what comes next?
Then there is PASOK under Nikos Androulakis, which, from the position of the official opposition, failed to turn pressure into stature.
And finally Tsipras, for whom it is true that he needs far more time to reassure the electorate than he needed back then to enchant it and then frighten it.
Thus, and not because it is August 15, the lines have gone silent on early elections.
Simply, it does not pay.
It “does not pay” for a country in which every front is open—from the economy and its high prices and migration, with its Uganda, to defense, with its frigates, and diplomacy, with its “Islamic NATO.”
Elections are not a trick pulled by some clever guy, and the pre-election period is something other than its electoral tactics.
Now more than ever.
