Loser wanted
Like student elections where each candidate proclaims himself a winner even if the total adds up to 140 percent, everybody claims to have won the local elections. New Democracy, which won by getting more prefectures than PASOK, even though it lost the Athens-Piraeus «super-prefecture», made a poor impression and forfeited the right to demand early elections. PASOK won because it wasn’t crushed, though its policies were massively rejected. The Communist Party and DIKKI won because they deem the creation of a third pole feasible, even though together they lost municipalities that the KKE had held on its own. The Left Coalition won because it did better than the KKE, though it didn’t win half its friends over to its tactic of collaborating with other forces. LAOS won because it got 14 percent from extreme nationalists, anti-Semites, those who would expel foreigners and protesting ND supporters, though that percentage soon evaporated, despite warlike cries of «On to Aghia Sophia.» The incumbent mayor of Athens, Dimitris Avramopoulos, won, since he realized that «the deciding role was played by the average middle liberal factor,» in other words, himself, though he couldn’t aptly regulate the affairs of his own dissolved party. And the Mitsotakis family won since, as its founder declared, his daughter Dora Bakoyianni’s win was «a personal victory.» Those who cast blank and invalid votes and politically motivated abstentions also won, but happy party cadres don’t mind, though some of them deem it unpatriotic that many people decided not to submit to the forced dilemmas of the second round of voting. And local government won. But since both PM Costas Simitis and ND leader Costas Karamanlis said so, we don’t know exactly which party’s «non-party» local government won.
