The far-right bubble
Three years ago it was the stock market bubble. These days it’s the far-right bubble – a creation of Giorgos Karadzaferis that PASOK rushed to take advantage of like another institutional investor. So have several cunning pro-New Democracy figures who are magnifying the political weight of Karadzaferis’s bubble – for reasons unknown until now. The far-right bubble can obviously yield short-term and provisional gain for PASOK. It can also serve those various figures who aim to undermine the opposition party from within so as to advance their self-serving and dark objectives. But it is equally certain that investing in Karadzaferis’s ultra-rightist project involves genuine and long-term peril. Matters are quite simple. If the far-right threat is indeed real in Greece, who should be first to tackle it? No one else but those who have proclaimed themselves as the guardians and guarantors of our democracy. This is, of course, the so-called democratic left led by PASOK, with its claim to a monopoly on democratic convictions and the exclusive right to recognize the authentic quality and the indisputable title of «democratic.» In other European countries facing the emergence of extreme-rightist movements, it was the democratic left that sounded the alarm and called for cross-party solidarity to curb the phenomenon. This mobilization was not always to its own benefit. Quite the reverse, in fact, as in France’s recent presidential elections, where the leftist electorate voted overwhelmingly for the conservative Jacques Chirac in the runoff in order to block ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Greece, however, the only party to rebuff any association with the far right was ND, which has tried to burst the bubble in a timely and harmless fashion. Meanwhile, PASOK and some self-pronounced guardians of ND’s interests keep inflating the bubble and toying with it.
