All change in Greece: the beginning of the end for populism?
How reassuring to see Greece become a normal country again, said Le Monde (Paris). Since its government debt crisis exploded in 2009, we’ve been used to it “teetering over the abyss”. But harsh austerity measures – ruthlessly enforced by the same populist left-wingers who’d originally sworn to oppose them – brought it back from the brink; a third and final EU- and IMF-driven bailout programme ended last year. Now the Greeks have voted emphatically for the centre-right New Democracy party, handing a decent majority (40%) to its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis after a strikingly “moderate” campaign. The defeat of Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party after four years in power was no surprise, but its respectable showing (31%) means it will form a strong opposition. Another plus was that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn – the third-largest party at the country’s 2015 general election – failed to win a single seat. Greece’s economic turnaround has nurtured a “welcome political maturity”.
Mitsotakis must now show that New Democracy has changed its ways, said Nikos Konstandaras in Kathimerini (Athens). In the past, the party has been profligate – spending heavily to attract votes and helping to wreck the country’s finances. This time, he’s sending the right signals, moving the party HQ to a cheaper building and recruiting staff on merit. And though he comes from a powerful family – his father was PM in the 1990s – he is clearly more liberal than his party, with a reformist zeal that belies its conservative tradition. He’ll need to keep “defying expectations” to overcome ongoing problems in Greece’s public administration, politics and economy.
Syriza can claim major achievements, including a drop in unemployment (from 26% to 18%) and expanded access to healthcare, said Yiannis Baboulias in Foreign Policy (Washington). But its popularity declined because influence shifted from the grass roots to Tsipras himself. He ended up making all the decisions, and causing disappointment by trying to be “all things to all people” – a left-wing “champion of the poor” who broke his promises to help them, and a “protector of refugees” who did nothing about the “hell on earth” of the Lesbos refugee camp. With his defeat, populism in Europe may have “passed its zenith”, said Fabian Löhe in Tagesspiegel (Berlin). The cry that the traditional parties destroyed the country is heard less often these days, and fewer people blame Brussels and Berlin for Greece’s woes. Greece has accepted that populist “arrogance” doesn’t work in negotiations with the EU – only compromise does. It would be fitting if the birthplace of Western democracy was now witnessing the start of a new “post-populist era”.