End of a mentality
Those who watched the prime minister’s televised news conference on Monday night were overtaken by a feeling of sadness and boredom, as Costas Simitis simply confirmed that he has exhausted his political potential and is unable to come up with a new turn of phrase to inspire PASOK’s supporters – even tentatively. Simitis’s television appearance marks the beginning of his political demise, and this fact magnifies the political responsibilities of the opposition, as it now ought to formulate a radical policy in order to tackle the colossal problems bequeathed by the Socialists. The first thing conservative politicians have to realize is that New Democracy’s electoral base is composed of the social and marginalized strata of Greek society, and not of the economic elite which arose from PASOK’s entangled relations with a specific group of business interests. At the ideological level, the basis of the conservative party is made up of individuals who are not xenophobic, as Simitis enthusiasts regard them. They see Greece’s participation in the European Union as an opportunity to preserve and develop the fundamental elements of the Greek identity, not as a pretext for leveling the cultural particularities of Europe’s nation states. The European left, which has stigmatized the European Union in recent years, has managed to turn the economy into a major focus of the European citizen and to lend a metaphysical dimension to technological achievements, displaying an ideological inflexibility reminiscent of the materialist intellectuals of the 19th century or of their sad offspring who were politically undone by the collapse of the communist regimes in Europe. The political comeback of the conservative party should mark the end of these vacuous leftist ideological constructs, so that politics can regain its traditional urban face in a society where the citizen is not only a productive unit but rather a member of a particular community in which his value is not confined to the size of his property. In other words, Simitis’s political demise should also mark the end of an era which was characterized by a sense of inferiority and by an effort to create a reality that perceives European diversity not as a specific historical setting but as an ephemeral multinational consortium.
