Lessons of Reform and Revolution

When the chickens come home to roost
by Paris Ayiomamitis 5 Jun 2011

A DEFINING graffiti slogan of the May 1968 protests in France was “Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life”, signalling that change will only come when people change their attitudes.

The demonstrations of the indignant at Syntagma Square since May 25 could be a watershed in the country’s political history. A party- and union-dominated society has decided to break the shackles imposed by a corrupt system. This may not lead to a dramatic change in the short term. But, as with May 1968 in France – seen by many as a political failure but a social triumph – it could sow the seeds of real change at the grassroots level. Change, for the first time in Greece’s post-dictatorship period, may come, not from above, but from below.

A frequent criticism levelled against Greece in the past has been its lack of civil society. As long as a problem wasn’t in one’s own backyard, it ceased to be a real problem. Greeks protest all the time – but under union or political banners, and motivated by “selfish” criteria instead of the wider interests of society. It was never about a sense of community but the komma (political party).

People have always bemoaned corruption and the lack of meritocracy, but only over a cup of coffee rather than on the streets and at the polls. It was fashionable to mock northern Europeans as dry workaholics, contrasting them to the leisure-loving Greeks, “who know how to live life to the fullest”.

And as people were mesmerised by a false sense of prosperity – due in large part to borrowed money and a system that rewards cronyism – it is no coincidence that the same politicians get elected over and over again. As it is also no coincidence that politics in this country over the past sixty years have been dominated by three clans – the Karamanlis, Papandreou and Mitsotakis families.

The Greek comedian Harry Klynn hit the nail on the head when, back in the 1980s, he said that “Greece is a poor country with rich residents”. But now that the lenders have come knocking on the door of these “wealthy residents” – in large part due to the colossal mismanagement of the politicians they elected – Greeks have at long last decided to mobilise against the establishment that puts its own “interests” above the well-being of the electorate. And the proof of this is in the pudding. Health and education – fundamental indicators of a society’s health – are in a shambles and have been for decades, with no solution in sight.

The situation created in Greece after the fall of the military dictatorship was one in which the moral high ground went – and deservedly so – to those politicised intellectuals who fought the colonels.

But the system they created in the post-dictatorship era (Metapolitefsi) is now practically bankrupt and with it is going the romanticism surrounding the politicians involved, directly or indirectly, with the student uprising against the military junta in 1973.

It has taken an unprecedented financial crisis for people to realise that a corrupt system based on cronyism was bound, sooner or later, to fail. And fail it did. Popular disgust with politicians and what they stand for may appear to some as a belated overreaction devoid of any real substance because it won’t change the harsh austerity terms dictated by Greece’s lenders.

Others have dismissed the demonstration as a fad and just an opportunity for young people to let off steam and vent their frustration at the ominous future in store for them. That may be the case. But it may prove momentous for the country’s civil culture in the long run: that civil society can actually exist without being hijacked by unions and political parties.

Among the many slogans at Syntagma Square, the one that stands out is the one that reads “We have woken up” (Xypnisame). The hope is that this time we really have, or else the country will continue to be run by the same bosses and life will go on as it always has.

It’s as simple as that. ….source