Some conservatives are also mourning
Greece’s main opposition was not the only one that crashed and burned in Sunday’s general election. The intra-party opposition faced by Kyriakos Mitsotakis also collapsed: The faction of former premier Kostas Karamanlis, traditional right-wingers, the extreme-right, obsessive opponents to Mitsotakis – all those within the party apparatus but also out there, in the media microcosm and the toxic microparticles of social media – they are in a state of mourning.
And it is not only SYRIZA that seems to be out of step (stuck in the passive nostalgia of the “revolutionary” 2015, when the party came to power) but also those who oppose Mitsotakis and what he represents for the party.
To be fair, all those on the right who are mourning over Mitsotakis’ triumph are the ones whose opinion the prime minister took very seriously while in opposition.
There is an excuse for Mitsotakis’ seesawing toward the faction of his party that opposes him: He is the leader of a right-wing, conservative party
Often way too seriously. So much so that his choices and positions caused discomfort in the center-right, liberal (and even social democratic) nexus that supported him from the very beginning until his rise to the leadership of New Democracy.
There is an excuse for Mitsotakis’ seesawing toward the faction of his party that opposes him: He is the leader of a right-wing, conservative party whose deepest roots, despite its openings to the center after the restoration of democracy, reach into the “deep” Right of the National Radical Union (ERE) of the period after the Greek Civil War (1946-49). This is the party that Mitsotakis has to manage and it is not easy to make such a heavy ship turn toward the center, as many people who voted for him (and continue to vote for him) had dreamed of.
But after such a triumph – which is credited to him personally, but is also due to SYRIZA’s suicidal inability to become a genuine center-left party, its insistence on an anti-systemic leftism, its attachment to toxicity and the anti-austerity slogans that Alexis Tsipras himself betrayed – Mitsotakis’ responsibilities are gigantic.
Another election is pending, but everything shows that New Democracy will achieve a solid majority in Parliament – for the second time. So Mitsotakis should leave those conservatives to their mourning and do what he has to do. People feel the burden of the crises plaguing the planet and need a stable but visionary national government. Voters looked the other way when it came to the wiretapping scandal, but nobody should get too comfortable. For example, will the government really stand by the victims’ relatives and survivors of the Tempe train disaster, or was the early support they received a PR ploy? The arrogance of power has a deterministic dynamic, and it works like woodworm. Can the new Mitsotakis government remember this simple thing in its new four-year term?
