Version imprimableOn the contrary: we can even think that the pitiful spectacle of the one-sided interview of prime minister Samaras by two puppets (in the opinion of the Athens journalists’ union of ESIEA) from his governmental TV channel (created after the dictatorial closing of the public radio and television station ERT) turned against him: whereas we could have could have expected a number of deputies close to 180, the vote on this Monday, December 29 did not even bring him one more vote: 168 the same score as in the second round. This is likely to pose problems for Samaras’ continuing role as leader of the right wing, internal disputes are becoming more and more obvious.
This is excellent news: the institutional block created by the impossibility of electing a president thus leads to the dissolution of the Parliament and parliamentary elections fixed for 25 January 2015. It is unnecessary to insist on the exceptional character of these elections: for 3 weeks the European bourgeoisie has been continually warning against this possibility of elections, which could see the radical reformist party Syriza coming to government, and in particular provoke a wave of mobilizations which should not stop at the Greek borders!
The electoral campaign is already very much on the horizon, it started from the result of the vote this morning: Samaras, in a state of total disarray, once again went into a rant against Syriza, asserting it to be in alliance with the Nazis to push into the abyss a country that he claims to have saved… This will surely be the tone of the campaign, and which implies right now that the radical and revolutionary left continually point out 2 things:
– it can never be said enough, Greece has been controlled for 4 years by politicians of the PASOK or New Democracy who brought the far right into the government (the PASOK with the LAOS group) and while discussing in a friendly (if not more …) way with it (Baltakos, advisor of Samaras, regularly giving voting orders to Kasidiaris, tough guy number 2 of Chryssi Avgi), and the defeat of the “interior troika” will be also a defeat of the far right;
– the abyss, we’ve been in it for 4 years, and currently frozen measures (lower pensions, further attacks on basic rights) are ready in the files of the current government, obviously within the framework of its submission to the orders of the troika and the Merkel and Hollande governments. And those who were thrown into the abyss this weekend, are the trade unionists of the books and paper sector, beaten by the MAT (Greek riot police) when they protested against the imposition of a third successsive Sunday worked in front of a bookstore, Ianos, which wants to offer a cultural facade like the FNAC of the 1970s but brought in the riot police using sexist insults against the workers and violence of all kinds. Or then, the same day in the north of Greece, the MAT again was sent against a demo of more than 500 residents protesting against the authorization given to a large company of goldmines to poison the region of Skouriès. In both cases, police violence engendered casualties. These two examples would be enough to show some of the many challenges of these elections: workers’ rights, defence of an environment shamelessly sold off to all comers recently, cleansing of a police affected the gangrene of the far right… It is the whole destructive logic of capitalism that must be stopped!
What demands to propose in the electoral campaign? What alliances? Both for Syriza (whose leadership is ogling a rightwing group which came out of Syriza and who took part in a previous pro-memorandum government!) and the anticapitalist left ANTARSYA (a section of it wants an alliance with the nationalist and rightwing group of Alavanos, former leader of Synaspismos)? International Viewpoint will continue to report on this situation, which now needs to evolve in the right direction, that of broad popular support in Europe!
Athens, 29 December 2015
