Elections seem to be increasingly putting together strange partners into power. The UK election in 2010 saw the unexpected and highly unusual result of a coalition government between the larger centre-right Conservatives under David Cameron and the smaller left-ish Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg. The result has been a disaster for the minority party who have had to hold their noses continually while voting for policies in government that stink and that they would have been outraged about in opposition. That’s formal democracy for you.
There are dozens of examples across Europe where coalitions come together on an agreement of what the partners can and cannot do in their assigned Ministries and meekly accept the things they don’t like about their partner’s policies.
Last week’s Greek election however has given rise to one of the most extreme coalitions ever witnessed. Even in a system that gives the winning party an extra 50 seats just for coming first it wasn’t enough for Syriza who polled 36.3% of the votes because they ended up with only 149 of the 300 seats in parliament: 2 short of an absolute majority.
(We will not question in this article the value of a democratic process where 36.3% of the votes can result in 49.6% of the seats, mainly because it works to the advantage of a result we’re very interested in today :-). We’ll leave the criticism aside for now. Suffice is to say that this is very far from a system of Real Democracy that Humanists would like to see.)
In Greek politics a majority coalition must be achieved in order for a government to be formed so Syriza had to look to possible partners. With the most obvious partners and neighbours on the traditional political spectrum, the Communists and PASOK, both immediately ruling out any coalition, Syriza had to look further afield.
A deal was quickly struck with “Independent Greeks”: a clearly anti-austerity party but one living on the far right of the spectrum with such tendencies as religious orthodoxy, xenophobia and homophobia.
Social Media, broadcast and print media across the world screamed “hypocrisy!” at the coalition, but the criticism has been brushed aside as the result of the democratic process in Greece and it should be lived with for now.
What did Syriza have to give up though in order to work with these extremists? In the deal, the Ministry of Defence was given to the Independent Greeks with a promise, according to our sources, that the military budget will not be cut and a commitment was also made that the links between church and state will not be disestablished.
What becomes clear in this coalition is that politics no longer works according to the old definitions of left and right. When a party is anti-austerity, and anti-banks and pro-people, through an old way of seeing things you would traditionally assume it’s on the left. Nowadays these policies can live happily with xenophobia and religious intolerance: typical of the right.
How do you categorise such parties? How can parties with such fundamental differences accept to work together?
Well, it is the pragmatic solution to implement a programme of work over a short time frame: the ends justify the means according to the partners.
As much as we might not like it as we look from outside in our utopian towers, in the real world if Syriza couldn’t form this coalition then another election would have been the result and it’s not certain that Syriza would have done any better or got any closer to a majority. If the cost of coalition is the Ministry of Defence and a static budget, then so-be-it.
Hopefully Syriza isn’t too offended by the policies of its partner to stop working together and can at least see through the anti-austerity measures that the country so badly needs. Hopefully the Independent Greeks will not bring the coalition down and force new elections when Syriza starts to roll back all the other nasty effects of five years of troika-enforced austerity. In fact with any luck, once Greece starts to shake off the burdens of austerity maybe the Independent Greeks will see that their xenophobia and the rise of the extreme right was a predictable, even planned (?), consequence of austerity, they will see that immigrants are not the problem, and that religious intolerance is much less interesting than the culture of openness that Greece is famous for as one of the world’s top holiday destinations.
I realise that there’s a lot of conjecture in that last paragraph! Let’s see if any of it stands up and if anyone can come up with a better way to classify parties than “Left” and “Right” which were coined during the French Revolution and are now well and truly overdue a dignified retirement.
