Everyone is looking at the elections in Turkey, but as I already wrote last week: it won’t make a big difference who will win them. In Greece though the center-right ruling party Nea Dimokratía risks not to have enough votes to win. The second party is the extreme-left Syriza and third the socialists of Pasok. The only party that got Greece moving forward again in over 30 years is Nea Dimokratía and if this party must share a government with extreme leftists, that will harm not only Greece but also you as Europeans.
At the moment the polls say the following chances are most likely:
- Nea Dimokratía 31.7%
- Syriza (Communist) 25.6%
- Pasok (Socialist) 8.7%
- KKE (Communist Party) 6.3%
- Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution, right-wing) 3.3%
- MéRA25 (by Yanis Varoufakis, extreme left) 3.5%
- The rest of the decades of parties all together 11%
- People who plan to abstain, don’t know yet or plan to cast a blank vote 13%
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The current government does a miraculous job
Nea Dimokratía is the party with the most realistic solutions for not only the economy but everything. We have already seen in the past four years that these work. Greece was in a constant recession since it entered the EEC in 1989. Asylum seekers were coming in like mushrooms and wouldn’t leave Greece whatever many following governments tried. Now the entrance of asylum seekers decreased with 90%, thanks to the policies of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his government. They built different walls in northern Greece at the Turkish borders and had solid talks with the Turkish government that just sent people over in rubber boats and then lied to the international media that Greeks allegedly sank the boats, killing thousands of innocent people.
The European Union turned against Greece and the Turkish army attacked with war jets and ships. Yet Greece won both the almost-war and the diplomacy. No other government has ever been able to accomplish such enormous tasks. Governments would fall one after the other, you can see it for yourself here.
The problem in Greece is that most people after more than 30 years still don’t understand that the European Union is not such a beneficial factor as they think. They mostly vote by family tradition or because they happen to know some member of the far too extensive Parliament (300 Representatives), who comes from their region. Then they vote for that person no matter what party he or she represents. Politics is a Greek word just like democracy and agora, the place where politics would take place in Ancient Greece, but today’s people are totally unaware of what happens in their country and why.
Greece and the EEC
It is because the country started growing economically just before it joined the EEC. So many people didn’t see that the money that suddenly came in from Brussels and that was a forced loan to develop the country, had to be paid back with interest. Greece wasn’t yet so far that it could repay billions of euros (even if the euro didn’t exist then), but the people saw just one thing after having lived in extreme poverty and misery since the Turkish occupation started in the 14th century. Money for schools! Money for airports! Money for highways! Money for hotels in order to build up a touristic country that most Greeks didn’t even know what it meant. It rained money from Brussels and the Greeks thought it was a miracle.
When the financial crisis started already two years after, in 1991, they felt like: oh yeah that was it, we were poor. We almost forgot. And they didn’t care too much. That only happened a few years later, when Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ father Constantinos (also Mitsotakis) took over the government and squeezed all the money out of the people. They were forced to have a cash desk in all shops, which was too high an expense for many shop owners and which caused loads of shops to close. The measure was meant to force everyone to pay taxes and not to cheat as had been normal until then, but it grandly missed its target. Then the prices rose more than 100% in a year’s time, the salaries were frozen for decades and people started to feel what owing money to Brussels meant: they needed to start thinking the 20th century’s way overnight, or else the country would go bankrupt.
Greece for sale
The government pulled out its hair, not knowing what to do to find money to pay back the billion euro loans and started selling government companies like banks, the telephone company OTE, the railways OSE and they even sold islands. But the German and French buyers were greedy and the sellings didn’t help Greece forward at all. Medical doctors were used to terrorise patients demanding them to come to their office and pay the heck out of their bones, instead of neatly providing the healthcare they paid for. Now they were forced to stop these practices and they were furious. Medical doctors in the United States received tenfold their salary and so they massively left to The Great America and Canada, that brutally profited from the exquisitely well educated but greedy Greek doctors.
And then that horrible tourism! Because of the war in former Yugoslavia the nice and rich German tourists couldn’t come to Halkidikí anymore in northern Greece. They could only get there by plane to Thessaloniki and then by renting a car drive over 100 km to their destination. Greece had no money left to build an airport in Halkidikí and so it also lost the good tourists. It was left with the cheap backpackers, sailers, youngsters that would go on cheap tour and that would only drink 24/7 and other European tourists that polluted the country with their waste and demanded to stay for a whole week all-in for less than €500 including their flight. Greece didn’t only not earn anything anymore from its tourism, but even lost. Something urgently needed to be done, but everything was hard.
They tried to drastically decrease the number of public servants, but those didn’t allow any measure and went on strike after strike. I remember when I was a student that half of the time you couldn’t even do your exams because of the eternal strikes. University was an asylum place where police wasn’t allowed, so both students with doubtful political ideas and professors that wanted a higher payment were occupying the faculties time after time. The government finally succeeded in stopping to provide completely free of charge education, which meant students had to pay for their own books but still no fees. From which incoming money did the government have to pay higher salaries to university staff?
A breakthrough is happening right now
Many of these issues have been solved now during the last four years. What should happen in Greece, is that this government gets the chance to continue its awesome work to rebuild the country. If no party wins enough votes to govern, there will be a run-off a few weeks later, but it is just so important that Nea Dimokratía that really, really did such a huge job, can continue. It’s still too early for the mass of the people in Greece to really understand that their country is rising out of debts and growing its economy, so that they can start trusting the government again. I feel like a lobbyist which I am definitely not! I just hope my fellow Greeks will think logically tomorrow and vote for the right party. You never know with polls. Most of the time they aren’t right.
My beloved, deeply beloved Greece, please do a good job tomorrow, in a few hours, and choose for Nea Dimokratía again. Kyriakos isn’t Constantinos Mitsotakis who stripped the whole country of its possessions and money. Kyriakos Mitsotakis is a very smart and peaceful politician who really cares for his country and who will get Greece out of the rubbles.
