'Greek Tragedy'

three generations of the Papandreou Family

I remember when I was a child, I could tell when spring was coming by the smell of the nerantzies (bitter orange trees). I didn't know this back then; I only realised it a couple of years ago, I was in Athens in late April or early May. I suddenly understood what it was I missed all those years in London - the passage from winter to spring - that smell of the flowers of nerantzies. And I also understood how I experienced home; that is, Athens. Home for me is past. Athens reads in my personal narrative in the past tense. An idealised, romanticised childhood memory governs my relationship to this rapidly changing city and this rapidly changing country. A place that becomes increasingly unrecognisable the more I understand it.

What my romanticised narrative of Athenian streets abundant with nostalgic smells, failed to acknowledge was the strange function of politics in this country, always rooted on the past. My own thinking about it has been in past terms. My absolute and absolutely affective response to the place that hosted the first part of my life, in its childish naivety, does not see the complexity of the weird late 1980s - the national victory of 1987 in the European Championship in basketball seems overwrite the significance of what came after: the instability of 1989. Until Andreas Papandreou (and his 'socialist party')was in power again in 1993. The father of the present (and soon to be former) prime minister, a central figure in the scandals surrounding the general election of 1989, was put on trial and cleared. But in the four years between 1989 and 1993, the ghosts of the past resurfaced - polarisation grew once again out of proportion, populist rhetorics undermined political debate. Democratic politics was reduced to party tactics. Andreas Papandreou's governments in the 1980s had, especially after 1985, taken the path of populism; they had created (or, in fact expanded) a monstrous service state by encouraging the citizens to become clients, consumers of its services rather than sovereign subjects of its power (a fundamental principle of democracy). The Greek clientele fully drawn in this hyper-reality, fell into the abyss of what is known as the 'dirty 1989'. Papandreou threw the country into that crisis and the others navigated through it in what can only be seen one of the most politically unstable periods in the post-1974 era. Until now.

What followed Papandreou's resignation was a couple of coalition governments and then the first neo-liberal incarnation of the conservative party (Konstantinos Mitsotakis' Nea Dimokratia) that formed a government (supported by a narrow majority in the parliament) and instituted the first attempt for a neo-liberal transformation of Greek society. This aggressive attempt caused upheavals, particularly in the youth millieu (the death of a teacher in Patras in 1991 is a clear example of this unrest). Then came the FYROM affair and everything was forgotten. We felt proud as a nation that we could dictate our own terms on this issue, that we could veto any decision on the claims of the neighbouring state to the name of Macedonia and the national imaginings it implied. We were on the side of the powerful. We were part of the EEC soon to become the EU. And the government fell apart into Papandreou's hands.

In the 1993 incarnation of PaSoK, Papandreou is slowly fading away. He is ill and by 1996 he lives in an emergency room. In January 1996 he resigns and the new prime minister is Simitis, a technocrat who continues with the neo-liberal project as part of the EU perspective. Everyone is optimistic. At the end of this, we are promised is the common market, common currency - almost a miracle, a dream come true. They never said anything about common democratic structures or common ways for the peoples of Europe to voice their opinions. The already optimistic atmosphere is enhanced by the other dream come true: Athens will host the Olympics of 2004. The period between 2000 and 2004 seems to be the climax of this megali idea (grand idea). The Euro, the urban transformation of Athens (the new airport, the metro, the new highways, junctions, bridges etc.), and a jolly looking government led by one of the most uncharismatic but seemingly effective and hard-working prime ministers in recent history, makes everything about the past crises and past polarisations redundant. As if they never existed. The future begins here!

Let us now return to the 1989-1993 crisis: after the first general elections in 1989, a coalition government was formed between Mitsotakis' Nea Dimokratia and the united left forces, Synaspismos, which saw the left wing parties in a coalition. This government was short-lived and was followed by another short-lived government, supported by all parties, that would take the country into elections. 1989 for Synaspismos and for the left political forces was something like an original sin. Similar to Brecht's Galileo the coalition governments in 1989 were the choices that once again divided the two main sections of the old communist party as they were formed in the 1960s: the Soviet and the European. After the 1989 political developments in Greece and the parallel collapse of the Soviet block 'orthodox' and 'euro' communists drifted apart and it doesn't seem possible that they can find any way of negotiating in the future.

The political class at the time sensed the ghost of the 1965 apostasia, when a group of MPs from Georgios Papandreou's party Enosi Kentrou (Centre Union) that had the majority in the parliament, supported the illegitimately appointed by king governments led by the opposition. Their way to prevent this from happening again, they formed the second government of 1989, led by economist and banker Xenofon Zolotas, which signalled the way things would unfold. Mitsotakis' government was its logical extension. And, like Blair's New Labour, Simitis 'modernising' and 'modernised' PaSoK was a lighter incarnation of the agressive neo-liberal reforms designed and carried out by Stefanos Manos, Mitsotakis' finance minister.

In 2004, during the electoral campaign that saw Simitis stepping down from the party's leadership and George Papandreou's rise to the throne, Manos joined forces with PaSoK. At the same time, Nea Dimokratia's leader Kostas Karamanlis has brought in his LSE boy Alogoskoufis. He was the architect of the post-Olympics depression - what by now has become the great depression of the Greek state. Its government's neo-liberal aggressive strategies and the politicans' high level of corruption exposed the political system (new scandals springing up on a daily basis, exposing all political parties). The people's reaction was not immediate, but when it came it was angry, violent, menacing. After 2008 and the riots of December, several movements are in the making, waiting for a favourable moment to explode in one mass movement, whose traces can be found in the demonstrations and protests witnessed by the house of parliament; sadly, the parliamentarians fail to notice the turbulence in society. Or they pretend not to see them, under immense pressure by their European counterparts.

Antonis Samaras is now the leader of the opposition. He was in Mitsotakis' cabinet - minister of foreign affairs. He was the one handling the Macedonian affair; he was the one who left the party and created his own and, subsequently, brought the country to elections in 1993. Karamanlis, was the nephew of the old Karamanlis, a central figure in Greek politics in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s. He was the Greek president when Andreas Papandreou came to power in 1981; he was the rival of Georgios Papandreou in 1963. He was the man who 'created' contemporary Greece - his policies of development in the 1950s and his choice for Greece to enter the EEC shaped the country. Mitsotakis, finally, was an apostatis in 1965, one of the MPs that left Enosi Kentrou and the country was led into chaos, out of which grew the colonels dictatorship.

Recent history of Greek politics is a tight knot always tied to people and debates of yesterday. We never seem to be up to date. And we never seem to see what's coming. In the exact same way that Greek politicians failed to see the colonels coming in 1967, they now fail to see the impact of this 'crisis induced restructuring' on democratic politics. Or, perhaps, this is a conscious strategy of the political class in its struggle to (re)establish its domination. And they, the politicians, are simply the local agents of this class, therefore, their class allegiance lies with the European and global economic elites not the people. And we, the citizens of Europe, pretend that this 'Greek tragedy' is a surprise - but deep inside we knew it all along. But always hoped that we were wrong. And we succumbed to the nostalgic smell of bitter orange flowers...