🇬🇷 Greek politics and elections

[Vosem]

Yeah, retroactively throwing out people's votes would set an extremely ominous precedent and might be, like, the most meaningful democratic rollback that has occurred within the European Union. One can complain about how Orbán runs elections, with the media participation rules and qualification rules, but Orbán does not change election results retroactively and Europe permitting any country to do this would be an awful sign.

A shame, because in many ways I really do like the Mitsotakis government and it's extremely non-obvious to me that any of its opponents would be any better in power. Oh well.

[Vosem]

Sometimes politics is about supply rather than demand -- ND has been weak on its right flank rather than its left so far, but it seems like if Mitsotakis were to become unpopular then many of the people who have been its base voters in the past two elections, who might never have considered Tsipras and might be leery at PASOK, might be persuadable by Kasselakis. Even if the harder left splits off, I have to imagine that in a situation where both men are short of a majority and trying to form government they'd be likelier to ally with Kasselakis than Mitsotakis.

(Yes, I am aware that in June 1989 ND and Synaspismos formed a coalition government, but that lasted only several months and Wikipedia seems to portray it as having only ever been meant to last several months and accomplish a few very specific tasks on which the right and the far-left agreed. There has never been a government lasting a four-year term -- or even a two-year half-term -- which was a right/far-left coalition.)

[Vosem]

Looks like a close match between Paok F.C. and Aris F.C. for control of the Thessalokini Mayorship.

(Just like in Piraeus and some other Mayorships, it's strongly controlled by Soccer Clubs)

Say more about political parties in certain cities being controlled by soccer clubs? Is Greece still vulnerable to something like the Nika riots?

[Vosem]

So, I knew that Kyriakos Mitsoakis is related to the PM with the same surname (his dad Konstantinos Mitsoakis, PM 1990-1993), but I found out he's also the brother of Dora Bakoyannis (former Mayor of Athens and Foreign Minister) and the uncle of Kostas Bakoyannis (the current Mayor of Athens). Which is weird, but then Greek politics is infamous for being very Happy Families. And then... that his great-grand-uncle was Eleftherios Venizelos, arguably the founder of modern Greece and certainly the founder of the Venizelist tradition today represented by Pasok and Syriza. Like, this is Romanov levels of inbreeding. Imagine if Rishi Sunak's sister was, I don't know, Theresa May, his nephew was Sadiq Khan, his father was John Major and his distant uncle was David Lloyd George.

It actually goes way beyond that. Since the restoration of democracy in 1974, throwing out temporary placeholders, there have been 9 Greek Prime Ministers who have won at least one election. These include a Papandreou father-and-son duo (Andreas in the 1980s and 1990s and Georgios in the 2010s; note that Andreas's father Georgios was also PM in the 1960s), a Mitsotakis father-and-son duo (Konstantinos in the 1990s and Kyriakos in the 2010s; they are descended from the earlier Venizelos dynasty which also produced multiple PMs), and a Karamanlis uncle-and-nephew duo (with the same name, Konstantinos). Only three out of nine post-1974 Greek Prime Ministers -- Simitis, Samaras, and Tsipras -- were not from prime ministerial dynasties.