Mirage

Nothing was decided by the elections. In fact the ominous trends prevailing before were reasserted, even if slightly decelerated. If the "radical" left had come first, then Greece would be exiting the Eurozone at this very moment. As it is the inevitable will occur probably around the end of the year.

The supposedly "European" parties that won and formed the tripartite government ran a decisively non-European, if not outright anti-European, campaign. They peddled the barefaced lie that the agreements with the EU concerning deficit reduction and structural reforms were somehow non-operative and subject to complete renegotiation. The Hollande victory in France was the chief circumstance cited in support of this analysis, despite the fact that Hollande himself and everyone else in Europe, whether follower or opponent of the Merkel line, repeatedly declared in crystal clear terms that Greece was under obligation to honor those agreements.

So the position of the collective victors was actually tantamount to that of the "radical" left, minus the shrill tone of voice. After the election they drew up a common programmatic statement that flies in the face of all the commitments undertaken to secure the second bail-out and debt forgiveness of October last. The disgust of European officials was quite plain, but our politicians were busy doing the only thing they are expert at, namely jostling for posts in the new government.

When the governement was actually formed it was composed largely of old-line politicos who had excelled in the crony politics that ruined the country. There was a mix-up with the crucial post of finance minister. The person who was finally selected is indeed a competent and reform-minded individual, a member of the team that guided Greece into the Euro a decade ago. But he is just a lone individual whose presence at this point seems a mere sop to Europe. Given the delusional mood prevalent in the three ruling parties, namely that with Merkel's alleged "defeat" in the latest Brussels summit it is now opportune to renege on Greece's legal commitments with a view to going back to the old regime of kleptocratic corruption paid for out of the pockets of European taxpayers, it is doubtful how much the new minister can accomplish.

So with their lying electoral campaign and government manifesto the current rulers have painted themselves into a corner. They have promised the people to keep the country in the Eurozone without in fact sumbitting to the discipline of sound and honest public finance which has been demonized as a diabolical German invention. They will of course soon run up against the hard facts and be obliged to eat their silly words. If, then, they decide to go for real reform (privatizations, reduction of the bureaucracy and encouragement of private investment), they will lose the support of a public they themselves have educated to consider these things as fiendish "neo-liberal" impositions from abroad. They will also face the crippling sabotage of the entire civil service whose rapacious unions have been a chief cause of the Greek state's ruin. If, alternatively, they decide on confrontation with Europe in order to maintain their internal position, the country will go instantly bankrupt and they themselves will be engulfed by the public rage that this folly will engender.

In either case the beneficiary will be the "radical" left, accusing them as lackeys of the imperialists in the first case or as ineffective leaders of the "fighting nation" in the second. Why do I keep putting radical in inverted commas when I refer to the leftist opposition? Because that party in fact fulfills the very definition of a reactionary political force. Their "ideal" is a nebulous anarcho-soviet utopia, the rags and rubbish of twentieth century history woven together into a comic nullity, while in practical terms they advocate the return to the filthy regime of debauchery by the party elites, the regime that died in 2010.

Still, they can rest assured that he people currently in charge are working for them. They did not win on June 17, but they will certainly win big next time around -unless something cataclysmically good happens. Their triumph will of course be short lived, for they will be managing smoking ruins. They themselves will go under in no time and then their natural and inevitable successors will be the neo-nazis, with whom they share anyway sizable chunks of their totalitarian, anti-European, conspiracy-theory laden ideology.

One final thought: personalities count. For all the European facade put up by the current ruling team (which has not even started ruling yet, due to various medical accidents!), the leaders of the tripartite bloc have been instrumental in whipping up the anti-European, populist and nationalist frenzy that has vitiated public life here for the past generation. The new prime minister has distinguished himself as a leader of the nationalist primitivism, especially in respect of Macedonia, that errupted after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Also from 2009 to 2011 he was a rabid opponent of the first bailout pact with Europe, thus empowering the fascist-nationalist wing of his own party and indirectly the neo-nazis. The leader of the rump Pasok party is also a prominent populist, a virtuoso practitioner of crony politics, whose first ingenious act after he became finance minister in June 2011 was to throw out the foreign negotiators demanding what he is also demanding now, namely the annulment of all standing agreements. This led to the near bankruptsy of the country then. As for the third leader, in charge of a "moderate" left party, he is simply a old-style leftist unable to shake off the benighted collectivism of his ilk, except that he expresses all this in a mild manner.

We all hope certainly to be pleasantly surprised, especially by the new finance minister if and when he takes up his office and he begins to put his ideas into effect. But it is a hopelessly tall order.