June 28, 2011
"Kleftes"
New York Times article by Joanna Kakissis on the shifting fortunes of Greece's old-lion political families. Could the current financial crisis be the beginning of a new era in Athenian politics without a Papandreou or Karamanlis at the helm?
"Dora Bakoyannis knew that voting for the Socialist government’s austerity measures last month meant that she would get kicked out of the conservative party that her father, a former prime minister, helped shape.
Mrs. Bakoyannis, a towering, charismatic former foreign minister and former Athens mayor, is now considering forming a new party. But she acknowledges that her lineage, as well as her years of political exposure, may hurt her at a time when Greeks have lost trust in their political institutions.
“Believe me, there is no DNA which can save any politician, especially now,” Mrs. Bakoyannis, 56, said during a recent interview in her sunny office near the Acropolis. “At the end of the day, you are going to be judged alone.”
Many Greeks, worried about their country’s future, remain cautiously behind the reform efforts of Prime Minister George Papandreou, the scion of Greece’s most influential political family. But recent polls show that Greeks also believe corruption fostered by their politicians has led the country to economic ruin.
As a result, they are questioning their most familiar political brands, said Kostas Ifantis, a political science professor at the University of Athens. “The country’s political families are easy targets,” he said. “They represent the state, which has been so dominant in Greece for so long, and which Greeks have grown used to being responsible for everything.”
In the last half-century, three main families have dominated Greek politics.
The center-left Papandreous have produced three prime ministers: George; his powerful father, Andreas, who founded Pasok, the governing Socialist party; and Andreas’s centrist father, also named George.
The previous prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, is the nephew of Konstantinos Karamanlis, a four-time prime minister who founded the New Democracy Party and led Greece in 1974 after the fall of the seven-year military dictatorship.
Mrs. Bakoyannis and Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a member of Parliament with New Democracy, are the children of former Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis, who led New Democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s and who often sparred with Andreas Papandreou.
...A survey this month by the pollster Public Issue showed that 40 percent believed that neither Mr. Papandreou nor the New Democracy leader, Antonis Samaras, was up to the job of dealing with Greece’s problems. Other surveys show that most Greeks do not trust the country’s two main political parties. At dozens of protests outside Parliament, thousands of angry Greeks gather to chant “kleftes,” or “thieves.”
A theme running throughout this quasi-biographical article is that the trust level from the Greeks toward their leadership is at a dangerously low level. The summer season right now is just a run up to the pressure of the austerity measures that will come to the fore this fall, and if the present government has by then fallen into another scandal it could bring about revolutionary changes through the polls.
Greece's Golden Visa program
