With elections barely
two weeks away and every poll against him, Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras
began to sing from a different hymn sheet this weekend, focusing on his
government’s handling of the economy in a desperate bid to win round voters.
“The strategy of fear
that the conservatives have campaigned on clearly hasn’t worked,” said Paschos
Mandravelis, a prominent political commentator. “Greeks are not buying the
theory that the opposition poses a danger, so now Samaras is altering course.”
The change of tactics
for the snap elections forced on the government by parliament’s failure to
elect a president, comes at a critical juncture. In every opinion survey,
Syriza is in the lead. Last week, for the first time, pollsters began to speak
of the impossibility of the lead being overturned. Less than three years after
he took office at the helm of a coalition and at the height of Greece’s
economic crisis, it was going to take a miracle for Samaras, 63, to keep power.
“The difference is
between a rough three and four percentage points and I don’t see it closing,”
said professor Dimitris Keridis, who teaches political science at Athens’s
Panteion University. “Samaras is facing the inevitability of defeat,” he told
the Observer.
A Metron Analysis poll
released late on Friday showed Syriza leading, with 27.1% against 23.8% for
Samaras’s New Democracy. Between 9 and 16% of voters are undecided.
But even if the
conservatives drum up support among the undecided, few believe the radical
leftists - once on the fringe of Greek political life but now centre stage and
determined to change economic debate in Europe - will not emerge on top on 25
January. On the back of pledges to repudiate the onerous conditions of the EU-
and IMF-sponsored bailout accords that have shored up the debt-stricken Greek
economy but have brought ordinary Greeks to their knees, Syriza has seen its
popularity soar. Its belief that Athens’s unsustainable debt load should also be
written off has won applause from other hard-left groups in Europe.
In stark contrast to
Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras, who at 40 is the country’s youngest political leader
and has waged a relaxed campaign, Samaras has frantically crisscrossed Greece,
often visiting several cities on a single day. Until now, his rhetoric has been
based solely on sounding the alarm. If Greeks vote for Tsipras and his “drachma
lobby” party, Athens will face the danger of almost certain ejection from the
eurozone - and by extension the EU. “It will mean the loss of all the
sacrifices Greeks have made since the crisis began and be a catastrophe for the
economy,” Samaras has maintained.
Senior figures in the
EU have backed up that view, saying in no uncertain terms that a vote for
Tsipras is a vote for danger, replete with uncertainty and risk.
But with more than 25%
of Greeks out of work and close to three million facing poverty, the EU
interventions have led increasingly to accusations of interference. Five years
into their worst crisis in living memory, the vast majority no longer care
about creditors’ demands but rather their ability to survive.
“I am seriously
thinking of voting for Syriza because I am sick of all the scaremongering from
people who brought us to this place,” said Elena Christodoulaki, a hairdresser
in Athens, adding that at 64 she had never supported the alliance of Marxists,
Maoists, Trotskyists and Greens. “It’s not just that I want to see a change.
With all this talk of leaving the euro it has been very difficult for them [the
radical leftists] to have a say or [expound on their beliefs] which makes me
mad.”
On Friday, parties
unveiled their campaign lists, with the conservatives announcing that a former talk
show host, a model and an actor would be running as candidates. Syriza’s ticket
includes academics based abroad including Costas Lapavitsas, an economics
professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who has
become a prominent advocate of resolving Greece’s woes within the eurozone.
“Europe has failed to
have a constant voice in its approach to Syriza,” said Keridis. “There have
been a lot of contradictory statements regarding the threat the leftists
represent for the eurozone,” he added. “That has helped Tsipras dilute any fear
that he is anti-European and allowed him to win support.”
(Πηγή: theguardian.com)
