Parliamentary Elections in Greece: A turn to the left

The crisis of the entire bourgeois political system, as it was shaped in Greece after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, erupted in the results of the parliamentary elections on September 16: both bourgeois Parties alternating in government the last few decades, the right wing New Democracy and PASOK had lost substantial amount of votes and parliamentary seats. A significant shift of the voters mainly to the parliamentary parties of the Left, KKE (the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece) and SYRIZA (Coalition of radical left - a coalition of former Euro-communists and reformists with some groups of the extra-parliamentary Left, Social Forum supporters, movimentistas etc.) took place. Four other lists of extra-parliamentary left organizations, including MERA (Front of Radical Left, in which participates EEK, the Greek Section of the CRFI) had also slightly increased their vote. The far right LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally) increased its vote (not spectacularly) but succeeded to have a parliamentary representation with well-known figures of Greek fascism.

The right wing government was re-elected but with just a parliamentary majority of one seat above the limit. It was "saved" in its fall by the much more rapidly falling and disintegrating PASOK, which had its worst score in the post 1974 period. Its mutation from a left populist movement into a neo-liberal bourgeois Party made its supporters to desert it either to the left (most of them) or to the right. The social expectations of exploited strata that first were invested to the movement founded by Andreas Papandreou are completely disappointed and PASOK faces its worst and disintegrating crisis from 1989, when a corruption scandal and the collaboration of Stalinists with the Right had toppled it from government.

The "traditional" Left in parliament got its best results from 1974. The Stalinist KKE presented itself as an intransigent opponent of both New Democracy and PASOK while SYRIZA won the majority of the young generation radicalized during the mass youth movement of occupations in the Universities in 2006-2007.

In the far left, apart two Maoist lists that got also more votes than in the past, the main competition was between MERA and a newly formed electoral bloc on its right named ENANTIA ("Against"). The core and driving force of this formation is SEK (Socialist Workers Party, a clone of the British Cliffite SWP) in alliance with OKDE "Spartakos", the Greek Section of the USFI and two Mao-Althusserians groups composed mainly by University students. SEK openly stated that with ENANTIA is made a first step for the formation in Greece of a party like Respect in Britain, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Green Red Alliance in Denmark or the PSOL in Brazil. Naturally they had the full public support of their international sponsors, the British SWP and the French LCR first of all.

The main difference between MERA and ENANTIA was the program itself: MERA campaigned for a program of transitional demands for a socialist way out from the crisis and for workers power while ENANTIA was restricted to an "anti-neoliberal" minimum reformist platform, the lowest common denominator between its constituent parts.

Despite the fact that this bloc pressurized and tried to split MERA, particularly among the youth and the students, despite a very intense and very-very expensive electoral campaign with the support of sections of PASOK trade union bureaucracy and some bourgeois mass media, despite SEK's claims that they will win a parliamentary seat, the results sharply disappointed their wild expectations. ENANTIA failed to get more votes than MERA losing the opportunity to present itself as the "main representative of the United anti-Capitalist Left", the embodiment of the "alternative Left of the social movements". MERA got 11.867 votes (0, 17%) and ENANTIA 10.605 (0, 15%). In the central rally in Athens, the same day in the last week before election day, MERA rallied near 1400 supporters while ENANTIA gathered 300 to just hear messages from Callinicos, leader of the British SWP, from Canavo of the Italian Sinistra Critica and from the LCR and then to have a small demonstration in the streets.

EEK played a leading role on behalf of MERA, during the months before elections, in the ideological battle against this reactionary diversion. During the very short (only two weeks) pre-electoral period we campaigned all over the country, from Thessalonica in the North to Creta in the South, and from all over Western Greece (Ioanina, Patras etc) to Chios and Dodecanese in the East and South East Aegean. We addressed decades of public meetings, we met and made a lot of new comrades and a powerful impulse was given to expand and strengthen an organization of revolutionaries on a national level.

Anyway we are entering a new period where the political regime crisis in Greece coincides with a deep social economic crisis and an international financial maelstrom. Venceremos!

Savas Michael

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