In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Tancredi Falconeri, a descendant of the dying Sicilian aristocracy, asserts that, “for things to remain the same, everything must change.” Not quite so with Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of the youthful left-wing party in crisis-ridden Greece. If there were to be one, his dictum would be exactly the opposite: “If everything is to change, things have to remain the same.” And, ho, in the third electoral contest since the beginning of the year, the winner was the same as in the previous ones: Syriza, the party led by Tsipras. So, what exactly happened in Greece’s last election? Why? And, what is in the store for this country?
Graph.Takis S Pappas.Beginning with the bare facts (shown above), there have been several new developments. First of all, beyond anybody’s (especially the pollsters’) expectations, Syriza won big. This, mind you, happened in the face of a disastrous term in office during which unemployment didn’t decline, the banks closed and capital controls were imposed, Greece’s future in the euro was seriously risked, and Syriza suffered a huge internal party split. And yet, in the course of this most calamitous year for the country, Syriza’s share of the vote only declined from 36.3 percent in January to 35.5 percent in September.
Secondly, while the Communist Party on the extreme left and the neo-Nazis on the extreme right retained (and, in the case of Golden Dawn, even increased) their electoral strength, the more liberal parties at the middle of the political and ideological spectrum, that is center-of-right New Democracy, centrist Potami and left-of center PASOK, did not display electoral oomph. Put together, they received exactly the same percentage of votes they had won in January 2015 (38.5 percent in both elections), which remarkably also corresponds with the “yes” vote in the July 2015 referendum (38.7 percent).
