About Political Change in Greece (original) (raw)
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SSRN Electronic Journal
There have been almost 40 years after the restoration of democracy in Greece and a peculiar prosperity, which was consciously cultivated by the leaders of political and economic elites, was promoted before the onset of the financial crisis. However, from the beginning of the financial recession, the temporal illusions have been revealed and the need of a complete transformation of the financial policies has been expressed, while a significant transformation of the entire political culture has started. Parties such as SYRIZA, Independent Greeks(ANEL) and Golden Dawn took advantage of the growing social discontent by propagating themselves as exponents of ordinary people and of their concerns or their fears, as the expression of resistance against an avoidable sellout of public values. However, crisis has exposed a number of successive truths which were elaborately hiding in the underbelly of the detaining political and socioeconomic system. These truths were exteriorized once it became clear that the foundations on which the Greek society was based after the restoration of democracy, were weak and insufficient to lead country towards a modern future.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2017
There have been almost 40 years after the restoration of democracy in Greece and a peculiar prosperity, which was consciously cultivated by the leaders of political and economic elites, was promoted before the onset of the financial crisis. However, from the beginning of the financial recession, the temporal illusions have been revealed and the need of a complete transformation of the financial policies has been expressed, while a significant transformation of the entire political culture has started. Parties such as SYRIZA, Independent Greeks(ANEL) and Golden Dawn took advantage of the growing social discontent by propagating themselves as exponents of ordinary people and of their concerns or their fears, as the expression of resistance against an avoidable sellout of public values. However, crisis has exposed a number of successive truths which were elaborately hiding in the underbelly of the detaining political and socioeconomic system. These truths were exteriorized once it became clear that the foundations on which the Greek society was based after the restoration of democracy, were weak and insufficient to lead country towards a modern future.
Greek political culture has changed beyond recognition since the crisis began
2015
Support for individual political parties has changed substantially since the start of the crisis in Greece, with Syriza emerging as the largest party in the 2015 elections, while other parties, such as Pasok, have lost most of their support. But beyond the electoral success of parties, what effect has the crisis had on wider political culture within Greece? Gerasimos Karoulas writes that the crisis has also had a profound effect on the types of individuals holding political power. Time will tell, however, whether this change in the composition of the parliament and government will also lead to long-term policy changes.
The central point of this presentation is the examination of the particular characteristics of social and political movements that develop in the context of neo-liberalism, and especially their relationship with violence, in a period characterized by the world economic crisis. This crisis is not at all limited to the economic level. We are in reality in a conjuncture of neoliberalism's deep political crisis; economical and social crisis that touches large sections of the population; crisis of political representation, including the crisis of the left; crisis of legitimation of the State and its apparatus, as well as of institutions; crisis of hegemony of neoliberalism. We are focusing in the Greek paradigm, Greece being the first member country of the European Union that this crisis manifests itself in that manner that leads to the economical and political intervention of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank. Thus, we are facing a series of interventions in economic, social and political level that bring out structural changes in the way that the political system is constituted.
Greece: The implosion of the sy
2013
First, because of the new flare-up of riots in Athens in December 2009 caused by the alienated youth of the country marking the first anniversary of the police killing of a 15-year old student a year before ―when an unprecedented social explosion took place, which, as I tried to show a few months ago, [1] had not been seen again since the student uprising in the early seventies that eventually led to the fall of the military junta in 1974. However, this was only a pretext and the new flare-up should be seen, in fact, as part of a process indicating the flimsy foundations on which the post-war social and economic system has been built and, also, as an indication of the fact that the systemic crisis in Greece is continuously deepening. In this context, the recent Greek elections in October, which gave an overwhelming parliamentary majority to PASOK’s social-liberals and was celebrated by the political and economic elites both in Greece and abroad, could be shown to be just a sideshow,...
The Rise of the Golden Dawn in Greece: Austerity and Its Impact on Democracy
Christodoulaki, I. (2020). The Rise of the Golden Dawn in Greece. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (eds J. Stone, R. Dennis, P. Rizova and X. Hou)., 2020
This chapter gives an account of the debate about austerity, the prevalent economic policy implemented in response to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe by the “Troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It presents the positions and underlying theories underpinning aus- terity measures, in both camps for and against austerity, as these have been exemplified both in the fields of scholarly research and policy‐making. Central to the current anal- ysis is the impact of austerity in Greece, and especially the conditions under which the far‐right party of the Golden Dawn emerged and developed. Evidence from the litera- ture suggests that austerity might not have been an effective prescription to alleviate the Greek economic crisis. Instead, the impact of austerity in the form of layoffs, wage cuts, and reductions in benefits and pensions, was conducive to further economic recession, and brought about unprecedented levels of unemployment resulting in increasing poverty and inequality. Although there is no causal relationship between the implemen- tation of austerity measures and the rise of the far‐right in Greece, it can be argued that the economic and social effects of austerity paved the way to the rise of neo‐fascist political groups, as the case of Golden Dawn illustrates. Many studies historically have shown that far‐right political parties tend to exploit such conditions to strengthen their position in national and European parliaments at the cost of contemporary democ- racies. Subsequent developments in Europe further corroborate this hypothesis.