Which Are The Effects Of Political Marketing In The Parliamentary Elections Of 2004 In Greece - Essay Example

Which are the effects of political marketing in the parliamentary elections of 2004 in Greece In the Greece parliamentary elections of 2004 the effects of political marketing gave a new culture to the politics of the country. Greece's socialist PASOK party, in power for all but three of the past twenty-one years, was braced for disaster at the October local government elections. Opinion polls for the last year have given the right-of-center opposition New Democracy party (ND) a commanding lead, while Costas Simitis, the reformist prime minister and PASOK leader who steered Greece into the euro zone, has lost ground to Costas Karamanlis, his younger conservative rival. True, the ND party came out ahead of PASOK, winning mayoral races in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece's two biggest cities. Furthermore, the conservatives exploited farmers' dissatisfaction with declining European Union subsidies to win thirty out of fifty-two provincial governor's posts. But PASOK held on to the high-profile post of Attica governor--won comfortably by Fofi Gennimata, a rising star and one of only a handful of women in the party's upper echelons. Overall, barely two percentage points separated the two big parties. While ND is still the favorite to win the next general election--not due until spring 2004 but likely to be held earlier--PASOK has shown remarkable powers of resilience. A feel-good factor is certainly at work, with Greece's economy projected to expand this year by 3.8 percent, more than twice the EU average, and by 4.1 percent in 2003. Growth is being driven by high levels of public and private investment, backed by a five-year, $24.6-billion package of EU structural aid. A massive program of infrastructure improvements is aimed at giving the Greek capital world-class sports facilities and a modern transportation system in time for the 2004 Olympic Games. While unemployment is the second highest in the euro zone, this year it has declined to single digits (just less than 10 percent) for the first time since the mid-1990s. PASOK has expanded job creation programs targeting women and young people and has launched tax cuts for lower income workers. But they face criticism for postponing urgently needed pension system reforms and for failing to cut corporation taxes--among the highest in the euro zone at 35 percent--to boost inward investment. Foreign direct investment, averaging only around $1 billion yearly, is much lower than in the Central European countries that will join the EU in 2004. "When the EU funds start to decline after 2006, Greece will need a sharp increase in foreign investment to maintain reasonable rates of growth," says George Alogoskoufis, ND's spokesman on the economy. The Simitis government has earned praise from the US for arresting eighteen alleged members of the November 17 (N17) terrorist organization over the summer. Since its emergence in 1975, the left-wing group had claimed responsibility for more than twenty assassinations, including US diplomats and servicemen and, most recently, Stephen Saunders the UK defense attach in Athens, as well as dozens of bomb and rocket attacks. The arrests came after two years of close cooperation between Greek police and Scotland Yard over the Saunders killing. Trials are due to start early next year and are likely to last for months. The apparent dismantling of N17, together with plans to work closely with the US on security for the Athens Olympics, has brought a significant improvement in relations with Washington. In response to concerns that other members of the group were still at large, Simitis said: "We will deal thoroughly with the terrorism problem. There may be some pieces of N17 left, but we intend to expose them." This month EU leaders are due to approve the accession of Cyprus--even if it is still divided into separate Greek and Turkish Cypriot sectors--at their Copenhagen summit along with another nine enlargement candidates. Accession for the island will mark a milestone in Greek foreign policy and will also have an impact on Greece's warming relations with Turkey. George Papandreou, the US-born, American and European-educated foreign minister, has called for Brussels to set a date for Turkey's accession negotiations to start. Regardless of which party is in power in Turkey, he says Greece remains committed to building close relations and solving the disputes over sovereignty that brought the two NATO allies to the brink of war as recently as 1996. Papandreou took over as foreign minister in 1999 at a difficult moment--Greece had attracted international censure for harboring Abdullah Ocalan, the rebel Kurdish leader at its embassy in Kenya. But he has succeeded in boosting both his own international stature and Greece's credibility with its EU partners. Increasingly, the foreign minister, the son of PASOK's populist founder, the late Andreas Papandreou, is seen as the natural successor to Simitis as party leader. As a member of a leading political dynasty, Papandreou is tipped to follow both his father and grandfather and become Greece's prime minister. In July 1974 the military government of Greece collapsed and democracy returned. Even though ancient Greece is the birthplace of democracy, the history of modern Greece, beginning in 1821 with the onset of the Greek war for independence against the Ottomans, has been characterized by instability. "This instability has taken Greece through various forms of dictatorship and democracy." (Lancaster 264) It has also caused many divisions and many deaths, especially during the Ethnikos Dikhasmos or National Schism during World War I, the National Catastrophe of 1922, and the Civil War of 1946-1949. Despite past experiences and many obstacles, Greek democracy has survived since the fall of the junta in 1974. The lack of legitimacy of the dictatorship, as well as changes in the domestic and the international environments, made the transition toward and the consolidation of democracy possible in Greece. To better understand the reasons for the transformation in Greece one must begin with the end of World War II. For decades after 1945 the politics of Greece "were largely outer-directed: external factors played a major role in affecting her security and stability." (Brown 12) Greece found itself dependent upon the United States for financial and military support and the United States became extensively involved in the affairs of Greece in order to promote its strategic interests in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. The end of World War II coincided with the beginning of the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the protagonists of which were the pro-Western government in Athens and the communists. The war of independence in the early nineteenth century and the National Schism during World War I caused important cleavages in Greek society. These divisions could not, however, compare with the savagery of the Civil War which prolonged the agonies of the World War II occupation. The old conflict had been between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, generally speaking between republicans and monarchists. But now this conflict was enhanced by an even more important division, that between communists and anticommunists. (Clogg 145) The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan significantly helped the government to defeat the communists whose supporters, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, eventually discontinued their assistance. The Civil War was costly not only in terms of people and money but also because it delayed reconstruction after the end of World War II. The outcome of the war involving Greeks against Greeks was high inflation, serious economic depression, and a cost of living that was so high that 1.5 million people were near starvation. At the end of the Civil War, the Greek government was directly assisting about 34 percent of the population through the military, government employment, pensions, and refugee relief. (Legg 45) "Perhaps more important in the long term, the military as an institution acquired the position of national savior and remained a major drain on the national budget (with military and security personnel numbering nearly 250,000) as well as a significant political player. Even more important, the defeat of the communists also meant that the moderate left lost its opportunity to be a legitimate participant in parliamentary politics. The possibility of forming a political party with a mass base and a modern ag enda was delayed for a generation." With peace re-established, the people of Greece and the ruling class wished for tranquillity and political stability. New elections were called for April 1950, but what followed was not political stability but a nightmare due to the number of governments formed in the next two years. 1952 marked the beginning of a new era in Greek politics characterized by a stability unparalleled since the beginning of the Modern Greek State. Between 1952 and 1963, Greece had only two Prime Ministers (Field Marshal Papagos and Constantine Karamanlis), in contrast to the pre-1952 period when half a dozen governments a year was not unusual. The government was in the hands of the Conservative Party. In addition, when the conservative government fell in 1963, it was replaced in power after a constitutionally conducted election by another party--a rare occurrence in Europe, outside of Great Britain, since 1945. Even though the traditional political parties of Greece emerged intact from the Civil War, it was the Right which was the beneficiary of the defeat of the Left because of the "outlawing of the Communist party of Greece, the polarization of the electorate and, above all, the emergency legislation which lay the foundations for the paraconstitution and the institutionalization of the anti-Communist state in Greece...." Anticommunism became the ideology of powerful ruling groups, and arrangements were made to neutralize the Left and to ensure the political dominance of the Right. During these years of stability Greece became a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and eventually (by a treaty of association) the European Economic Community. The relative tranquillity of Greek political life was shaken by uneven economic development, the renewal of violence in Cyprus (especially in 1964), and the crisis in defense policy which caused the collapse of the government and shook the monarchy in 1965. In the 1950s Greece chose the path of full integration into the international economic community and subsequent rapid growth. Despite impressive economic development (the average rate of growth was about 6 percent), there were serious structural problems. The social dislocation caused by rapid growth exacerbated inequalities within the industrial labor force and the lower middle class. The resulting discontent became evident during the 1950s, but it took center stage in the early 1960s as demonstrated by the electoral victories o f the Center Union party in 1963 and 1964. The victory of the centrist forces signified that the exclusivist and repressive political system in Greece had to change. Changes, however, were bound to effect the balance of power among the major players within the political system. "Either parliament, through its opening up to the masses, had to become the dominant force in this [throne, armed forces, Parliament] triarchy, in which case the army would lose its leading position with inevitable internal consequences for those holding posts within it; or else, the army had to prevent this by the overall abolition of parliamentary rule." The latter is what did happen. The 1964 Cyprus crisis was a consequence of the unworkable constitution that resulted from the Zurich-London agreements of 1959. In 1963 President Makarios of Cyprus announced his decision to unilaterally revise the constitution because it permitted Turkish Cypriots to frustrate the administration of Cyprus. Consequently, violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots broke out, and an uneasy peace returned with the arrival of the United Nations peacekeeping force in 1964. (Kaloudis 30) Negotiations were held between the two communities, but "since the Greeks persisted in believing that the basis of negotiations was enosis for Cyprus, coupled with compensations for Turkey, it was not surprising that they proved abortive." Even though the Cyprus crisis proved to be a serious problem for the government of Papandreou (who had secured a narrow victory over Karamanlis in the elections of 1963), what led to its dispute with the King was control of the armed forces, of which the King was the Commander-in-Chief. Papandreou wanted to replace many senior army officers whom he considered to be sympathetic to right-wing governments. He also believed that there was a conspiracy within the army against him. In the end, evidence emerged of a left-wing conspiracy within the army under the name of Aspida (Shield) which was rumored to be associated with the Prime Minister's son, Andreas Papandreou. In May of 1965 Prime Minister Papandreou, dismissed the Minister of Defense and sought to assume the post himself. Petros Garoufalias, the Minister of Defense and a friend of the royal family, frustrated the efforts of Papandreou to bring in officers supportive of him. The King, Constantine II, who had succeeded his father King Paul in 1964, accepted the dismissal of the Defense Minister but did not appoint Papandreou to take his place. Papandreou then offered his resignation, believing that the King would either appoint him or dissolve the parliament. "Instead, the King dismissed him and set about forming a new government from the existing parliament. It was a bold move with damaging consequences." While the Left continued to remain on the periphery as a result of the restrictions imposed upon it, the forces of the center demanded greater democratization of the Greek political system and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The establishment refused to do anything and the ensuing conflict caused fu rther erosion of the legitimacy of the political system. The new government under Stephanos Stephanopoulos, formed by the defectors, or apostates, from the Center Union, could do very little. Papandreou insisted that new elections would provide the country with a solution to the crisis. The elections were scheduled to take place, under a caretaker government, in May 1967. The Aspida affair and the immunity of Andreas Papandreou as a member of the parliament dominated the campaign. The caretaker government collapsed and the King asked Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, who had succeeded Karamanlis as the leader of the National Radical Union (ERE), to oversee the elections. The elections were never held. On April 21, 1967, a group of junior officers launched a coup to prevent a certain victory of the Center Union. The coup came at a time when "the younger leaders of Greek democracy were beginning to devise coherent reform plans." (Wilkinson 557) There was almost no resistance and the Left, the Right, and even those in the highest ranks of the armed forces were surprised. Despite the pleas of Prime Minister Kanellopoulos, the King recognized the civilian government that served as a front for the troika of Georgios Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Makarezos, and Stylianos Pattakos, the organizers of the coup. "A narrow, xenophobic, anti-intellectual tyranny descended on the country." The military dictators first attempted to justify the coup by saying that they were protecting the country from a communist takeover. In fact, the unpreparedness of the Left, (something that was true of the other political parties as well), led to a split in 1968 of the Communist party. One group remained loyal to the Soviet Union (the Communist Party of Greece of the Exterior) and the other (the Communist Party of Greece of the Interior) was Eurocommunist in outlook. The members of the troika thought that they were defending the Helleno-Christian civilization from secular and western influences resulting from rapid social and economic changes. The Colonels, as the members of the troika became known, were of lower middle-class background and resented the privileged political elite in Athens. In addition, the members of the junta believed that they were rescuing Greece from chaos because of the conflict between the monarchy and the parliament, a conflict which was enhanced during the years Papandreou wa s in power. An important, albeit less emphasized, cause of the coup were the professional grievances of a number of (especially) middle rank officers. Because of changes in the army following the end of the Civil War, able officers were often prevented from advancing and less qualified ones were preserved. But the most important reason for the coup was directly connected to the threat that the greater political mobilization that had occurred in Greece presented to the dominance of the military and to its corporate interests. The Colonels had no allies among politicians from the Left, the Right, or the Center. They were against the entire political spectrum, and political dissidents were imprisoned, exiled, or placed under house arrest. In December 1967, a counter-coup initiated by the King failed, and at that point the Colonels decided to discontinue governing through a puppet civilian government. Georgios Papadopoulos emerged as the strong man and became not only the Prime Minister but also the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Defense, Education, and Government Policy. A fraudulent plebiscite was held in 1968 to ratify an authoritarian constitution which preserved the monarchy but placed the institution under the custody of the military. The Colonels did not receive much popular support and their regime lacked legitimacy. An attempt was made in 1968 to assassinate Papadopoulos, but the opposition was scattered and unorganized. Mass opposition was inhibited because the not so "secret" police harshly treated those who dared to oppose the junta. The dictators purged the armed forces of undesirable elements, censored the press, outlawed political parties, shut down the parliament, and jailed, exiled and sent to labor camps political opponents. (Danopoulos 535) Mass opposition was also prevented because the dictators were able to maintain satisfactory economic growth. "Even Pesmazoglou (a highly respected opponent of the dictatorship) believes that the steady improvement in living standards that started in the mid1950s was not discontinued after 1967. As inept and corrupt as the Colonels were, they could not reverse the momentum of economic expansion that had begun previously. Why did the regime, despite the low level of resistance, fail to consolidate and legitimize itself According to Nancy Bermeo "the real barriers to the legitimation of the Papadopoulos-Ioannidis regime were less economic than institutional and cultural." The nature of the party system and the military as an institution explain some of the developments. Democracy had served the interests especially of the conservative Right and the high-ranking officers in the military. In 1967, despite important changes in the electorate, the conservative party (ERE) continued to be strong. ERE had controlled the Greek political system since the Civil War, with the exception of 1963-1964 when the Center Union of George Papandreou came to power for a brief period. Kanellopoulos, the leader of ERE, was willing to risk another election, convinced that even if Papandreou were to win the election of 1967, he would win the next. The leader of ERE also said that even with a Center Union victory, he and Papandreou had secretly agreed to collaborate in order to maintain tranquillity. The willingness of some conservative leaders to have elections was based on the belief that the electoral results could be manipulated, but others were inclined to have fair elections because of cer tain qualities of the Greek political culture. Greece introduced universal male suffrage in 1864, before Great Britain, and its nineteenth century constitutions were the most democratic in Europe. Even though these constitutions were never fully implemented, the fact that they were written and passed suggests that there was an interest in formal democracy among members of the Greek elite during the early days of the modern state. It is true that Greek democracy prior to 1974 was flawed and exclusionary, but it is also true that the longevity of the Greek parliamentary system, in place since the mid-nineteenth century, could be rivaled by few European states. The breakup of the coalition between the Right, the monarchy, and the army resulted from the military's attempt to gain full control of the political system. Isolated from power, the King and the Right reacted by not supporting the military dictatorship. Because the monarchy opposed the junta, a large number of the political elite refused to support it. The crown's opposition also led to divisions within the armed forces; navy and air force officers opposed the junta, and army officers supported it. As the opposition of the monarchy contributed to the lack of legitimacy of the dictatorship, so too did the non-cooperation of the Right inhibit its consolidation. Three factors made this outcome possible; first, the attempts by the junta to resurrect the anti-communist state had become unacceptable to the majority of the Greeks, second, the rejection by the junta of Greek parliamentary institutions as corrupt; and third, the attacks against the political elites. The Greek military as an institution also explains the failure of the dictatorship to become legitimate and to consolidate itself. The military has had a history of internal purges and has always been characterized by divisions between the high ranking (members of the bourgeoisie) and low ranking officers (of peasant background), who initiated the coup; between the various segments of the army; and between democrats and authoritarians. Also, the junta isolated itself from officers who believed that the military as an institution would be damaged by associating themselves with a group of conspirators who were enriching themselves. The naval mutiny of 1973 was an indication of the growing alienation. Finally, serious disagreements among core members of the junta regarding the path it should take resulted in the overthrow of Papadopoulos by Ioannidis in November 1973. (Verney 108-109) The climate in Europe, as well as elsewhere, also decreased the likelihood of consolidation and legitimation of the junta. Democratic principles, unlike authoritarian ones, were widely accepted, and an increasing number of regional and international organizations were committed to the promotion of democracy and being democratic was a necessary condition for membership. The European Union, for example, has a democratic membership, and a pre-condition for membership is economic and democratic stability. When Greece became a member of the European Community in 1981, it was made clear that the relationship would continue as long as Greece remained democratic. Given Greece's financial dependence on the European Union, an overthrow of the civilian government would prove costly. "In other words, a powerful external guarantee of both democratic consolidation and balanced growth would result." Despite the lack of legitimacy, despite the brutality of the military regime, and its public condemnation by its European allies, nothing concrete was done against it. The United States, seen by many Greeks as responsible for the coup, supported the junta, especially because it was viewed as a bastion of anti-communism and of stability in the Western Mediterranean. As a result, the dictators remained in power for seven years. The military dictatorship started to disintegrate when important political elites began to withdraw their support and could no longer accept stability at any price. By mid-1972, members of the business community, including Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, began to have reservations regarding the regime's stability. Serious problems emerged in 1973. The rate of inflation was very high, college students occupied the Law Faculty at the University of Athens, and naval officers plotted to overthrow the regime. The plot was exposed, blaming the King who was in exile in Rome, and Georgios Papadopoulos replaced the monarchy with a presidential republic. The government announced that the 1968 constitution would be amended and Papadopoulos was proclaimed as a provisional President until a plebiscite, scheduled for July 29, 1973, could be held. The plebiscite was characterized by ballot manipulation and voter fraud. The government announced that it received 78.4 percent of the vote and Papadopoulos was confirmed as President for eight years. He then proceeded to appoint Spyros Markezinis "to oversee elections, the proposed first stage in the introduction of a 'guided' democracy." The rule of Papadopoulos was short-lived. By 1973 the divisions within the junta had become evident. The hard-liners wanted to stay in power just because they wanted to do so, and they opposed the attempts at "democratization" undertaken by Papadopoulos. Works Cited Constantine P. Danopoulos and Larry N. Gerston, "Democratic Currents In Authoritarian Seas: The Military In Greece And The Philippines," Armed Forces & Society, vol. 16, no. 4 (1990), p. 535. George Kaloudis, The Role of the U.N. in Cyprus from 1964 to 1979 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 30. J.F. Brown, Nationalism, Democracy, And Security In The Balkans (Brookfield, USA: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1992), P. 12. James Wilkinson and H. Stuart Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History (Upper Saddle, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 557. Keith R. Legg and John M. Roberts, Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p. 45. Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 145. S. Verney and Theodore A. Couloumbis, "State-international systems interaction and the Greek transition to democracy in the mid-1970s" in Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (Leicester, London: Leicester University Press, 1991), pp. 108-109. Thomas D. Lancaster, "Mediterranean Europe: Stabilized Democracies," in Roy C. Macridis, ed., Modern Political Systems: Europe (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 264. Read More