Pivotal events on the campaign trail
ND's recovery from Tempe, gov't of losers, Varoufakis' Dimitra, Greek Solution crisis, Kasidiaris ban
The road to Sunday's national elections has been colored by a series of events, developments and choices, the dynamics of which in terms of shaping the electoral outcome will become clear in the next couple of days.
When on April 22 the elections were set for May 21, Greece was still reeling from the aftershocks of the deadly railway collision at Tempe. The initial feeling was that the tragic incident would exact a heavy political toll on ruling New Democracy. However, this was not to be, due the party's management of the event, the way the opposition sought to reap political gains, but also because of problematic developments that occurred to the right and left of the conservatives. With the formal start of the election period, a major crisis erupted within the nationalist Greek Solution party, which, amid serious accusations of “black money,” culminated in the departure of two former MPs, Antonis Mylonakis and Aikaterini Alexopoulou.
SYRIZA was also impacted by the allegations against its MEP Alexis Georgoulis of rape and causing bodily harm to a female PASOK member. If that wasn't enough, SYRIZA was faced with a new crisis on a purely political level. More specifically, a few days after SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras announced that he was looking forward to a progressive government of cooperation only if SYRIZA emerged first, two leading party officials, Yiannis Dragasakis and Euclid Tsakalotos, begged to differ. Both indicated that even if it came second, SYRIZA could, under certain conditions, explore the possibility of forming a government. The debate continued for some time, over a so-called “tolerance government” or even a “special purpose” one.
All these scenarios were however rejected by their prospective partners – PASOK, KKE and MeRA25. The leader of the latter, Yanis Varoufakis, said that he would rather have his arm cut off. Varoufakis had also in the meantime come up with his Dimitra system of transactions running parallel with the euro, eliciting Tsipras' disdain. The bickering only served to awaken memories of the SYRIZA term in office, which Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis used to further bolster his campaign message: “Will we keep going forward or will we turn back?” The campaign was also preoccupied by the Supreme Court's ban on the participation of the party founded by jailed former Golden Dawn official Ilias Kasidiaris and the ramifications this would have on the extreme right-wing spectrum of the political scene.