🇬🇷 Greek politics and elections

[Estrella]

Average of polls: (compared with the 2019 election)
12% PASOK (+4)

Pasok cannot be pasokified!

The funny thing is that the sort of Western European social democratic parties with long history, trade union ties and stable support base whose decline is described as Pasokification have pretty much nothing in common PASOK: a one-man show founded in the 1970s that barely scraped third place in its first election, became a dominant party kinda out of nowhere and only lasted as long as it did because it turned itself into a hilariously shameless mafia clan patronage organization and/or a cheap knockoff of Peronists.

[Estrella]

There has been a serious electoral development, the main center-left party SYRIZA is in internal crisis after the purge of it's most popular and vocal MP over his allegations that the greek judiciary is corrupt.

An own goal by Tsipras really, corruption in the greek judiciary is so widely perceived that has even been used internationally to refuse legal extraditions to Greece in some occasions.

By purging the MP who made those allegations he invites critisism that he himself is corrupt, just before an election.

However there is also the perception that he had no choice, after the government passed an amendment to the electoral law allowing it to ban political parties, opposition parties are now on their toes not to give a pretext to be banned.

That seems uh. A bit concerning. Is Mitsotakis trying to go full Orban?

Of course not. ND is a mainstream centre-right party, and Mitsoakis is on its liberal wing to boot: he supports EU membership for Macedonia and Albania, sent arms to Ukraine, passed a conversion therapy ban and so on. That's not to say Mitsoakis hasn't done some dodgy stuff on things like migration, but I think our Greek friend is getting a bit ahead of himself.

The actual law is this: Greece bans parties with convicted leaders from running in elections

Under the amendment, parties cannot run in elections if their "real leaders", not only their official representatives, have been convicted at any instance for crimes that carry a sentence of up to life imprisonment, ranging from treason or spying to participating in a criminal organisation.

Golden Dawn was notorious for being a literal criminal organization: their leader and 6 MPs are currently in prison for murder. I presume the same is true of their now banned splinter and it's cases like this the law was tailored to.

[Estrella]

No one is pointing that out, but the Greek Ecologists had a massive surge of 100% in this election. From 0 votes in 2019 to... 1 vote last Sunday. Tremendous.

Is that the one ran by the crazy guy who thinks he's Dionysius and constantly has nude women advertise for him?

Yes.

[Estrella]

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.