The people spoke. Unlike in 2019, when MeRA25 won nine seats in Greece’s Parliament, in Sunday’s election we failed to clear the 3% hurdle, thus, electing no MPs. However, this freshly minted Parliament was condemned before it got a chance to convene. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the conservative party leader, who won handsomely, is about to dissolve it so as to secure another general election, in less than a month, to be fought on a less proportional electoral system that, he trusts, will deliver him a thumping parliamentary majority.

So, MeRA25 lives to fight another day. Bruised by an election outcome at odds not only with all opinion polls (which predicted we would be gaining between 50% and 80% more votes than in 2019) but also with the enthusiasm we encountered everywhere we went (e.g., with the large crowds that came to our rallies), we are dusting ourselves off and readying to go out there to campaign once more. Clearly, we have a lot of soul-searching to do – but only after the next election is over and done with and we have fought the good fight to make amends for yesterday’s failure.

For now, I leave you with two thoughts about the big picture that emerged out of the ballot boxes yesterday across Greece; a blue-cum-black picture reflecting the ultra-rightist tsunami that swept the land.

First, there is a cunning resemblance between what happened yesterday here in Greece and what happened last week in Turkey. President Erdogan of Turkey had presided over a people sinking fast into poverty, economic policies that are clearly not fit for purpose, and a logistical debacle following the lethal earthquake which cost thousands of lives. However, deploying cleverly a combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage, and huge doses of authoritarianism, Erdogan managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony. Exactly the same can be said about Mitsotakis: He presided over a steady diminution of median real incomes, had a terrible pandemic, many of our forests burned down on his watch, was caught red-handed eavesdropping on his political opponents and even his own ministers, behaved outrageously when 57 young people were killed in an avoidable railway accident etc. And yet, like Erdogan, deploying cleverly a combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage and huge doses of authoritarianism, Mitsotakis managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony.

Secondly, MeRA25 seems to have suffered because we tried to inspire our base with hard-hitting truths and a call to arms, rather than soothing narratives falsely claiming that we could costlessly turn things around for the many. For instance, we exposed the lie that Greece had turned the economic corner by demonstrating that, against the grain of the financial sector’s fibs, the Greek state and the Greek private sector were more bankrupt than ever; that the only way the many can recover some of their real incomes and control over their lives is by clashing with an ironclad establishment. It turned out that the voters did not want to hear bad news, nor cared for calls to arms. It is not that they are naïve enough to believe the rubbish about Greece’s so-called ‘Success Story’. They buy none of it. Nevertheless, they are tired of bad news; they are tired of struggles, battles and war cries.

This is the mountain MeRA25 must now climb: How to persuade bad-news-averse marginal voters to vote for us again without plying them with soothing lies.

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Erdoğanisation

By: The Progressive International Secretariat

In 1992 US American political theorist Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history”. The fall of the Soviet Union, he argued, heralded “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

By Western liberal democracy, he meant formal multiparty electoral systems, with established liberal institutional norms and the removal of many economic questions from the realm of politics full stop. For a while, he was right. The 1990s saw a wave of multiparty elections across the African continent. The former Soviet and Eastern Bloc states experienced the same, accompanied by shock therapy liberalisation of their economies and tremendous looting of public assets. Neoliberalism was strengthened at the national, transnational and international levels.

30 year on, ours is another planet. Neoliberal dogmas were shattered in 2008 and since then many countries have closed the space of liberal governance. In the United Kingdom, protest can be banned for being “annoying”. In Israel, the government seeks to overturn the independence of the judiciary. In India, minority rights and bodies are attacked. In Russia, the executive claims full power and shuts down alternative media. In Turkey, journalists and opposition politicians are harassed and arrested. The list goes on.

Each of these developments has its own particular dynamics but they are also part of a shared story. History is back. But where is it leading us?

A clue will likely come on Sunday in Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s twenty year rule will likely be extended. He is the odds on favourite to beat his challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential run-off.

Erdoğan helps tell the story of our age, an age of spreading Erdoğanisation. Coming to power in 2003, he fitted into the dominant Western framework for what a leader should be: modernising, free market, pro-European. 20 years on he is a nationalist autocrat whose mishandling of the economy hurts the pockets of ordinary people in Turkey. And yet his grip of power remains. How?

As Yanis Varoufakis wrote this week that by deploying a clever “combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage, and huge doses of authoritarianism, Erdoğan managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony.” Varoufakis sees a “cunning resemblance” across the Aegean in Greece, where last week right-wing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis won re-election and now looks set to secure a super majority in the Hellenic Parliament under new electoral rules he himself introduced. On Mitsotakis, Varoufakis writes, “he presided over a steady diminution of median real incomes, had a terrible pandemic, many of our forests burned down on his watch, was caught red-handed eavesdropping on his political opponents and even his own ministers, behaved outrageously when 57 young people were killed in an avoidable railway accident etc. And yet, like Erdogan, deploying cleverly a combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage and huge doses of authoritarianism, Mitsotakis managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony.”

This is not an Aegean ailment. Nor one confined to the eastern Mediterranean, although Egypt and Israel, with Sissi and Netanyahu suffer a similar affliction.

The world system is struggling to reproduce itself. As the global order breaks down, it generates insecurity and confusion, as well as hunger and deprivation. Into this gap steps the symbolic security offered by the hard right. Across the globe we are witnessing the hard right overtake the traditional right and swell its electoral appeal.

In some countries it is winning — Philippines, India, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Egypt — and in others it not in power but growing — France, Sweden, the US, Chile, Colombia, Brazil.

We can’t defeat this reactionary international by returning to the end of history. The cracks in the global system are too deep to paper over for long. Pretending that plaster can fix ruined foundations only strengthens the popular appeal of the new right.

We can share across borders the tactics and strategies deployed to stop the hard right in its tracks, such as in Brazil, Chile and Colombia, to name a few. But we need a real alternative to and a different plan. That’s where you and the Progressive International come in.

This world is dying so we have to build a new one. While every struggle can sow the seeds of a new world, to have the power to win it, we must “join forces across borders in a common defence of people and planet”, as our political declaration states. That way, we can build a hopeful counterpoint to the crumbling rule of neoliberalism and the alarming rise of the reactionary international’s hard men.

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