Greece goes to the polls
James Hughes-Onslow
Athens This Sunday 6,890,000 Greeks aged 20 and over will be electing 300 members of their Parliament in Athens and 24 'Eurodeputies to represent them at the assemblies in Luxembourg and Strasbourg. The turn-out can be predicted with some accuracy not just because, until last week anyway, the country was still enjoying blazing hot sun, but because voting is compulsory in Greece. Any adult under 70 not certified as a lunatic or convicted of a crime must have a pretty good excuse for not being at the polls — such as a medical certificate to say he is ill Or police confirmation that he was more than 200 kilometers from his local polling station on election day. Penalties are bureaucratic and fierce: identity cards, dnvIng licences, passports and business permits may be withheld from anyone who can't Produce his voting booklet. Oh for the good old days of the colonels' regime. So, not surprisingly, Greek voters take the business of getting to the polls very seriously, whatever the election issues may be; but this is the first time since before the military coup that they have had a good Chance of changing the government. It is also the first general election in which they have been asked to vote for the European Parliament and it could also be the last: Andreas Papandreou, the socialist opposition leader who looks like being the next prime minister, has said that he wants to withdraw his country from the Common Market and from NATo.
The present Greek constitution was very carefully drafted when the colonels' regime collapsed in 1974 in order to prevent violent lurches in any direction. Greece has after all experienced democracy for longer than any Other nation, punctuated by a greater variety of foreign interventions and local interruptions. As a result it is an extremely cornPlicated system for the voter to understand and for the politician to manipulate. Since the average Greek believes that he ought to he. running the country anyway and that, failing that, the system should be better than the men inside it, someone has given the matter very careful thought. The so-called 're-inforced proportion.al rePresentation' system is described as a sifting process in which there are three successive distributions of parliamentary seats. Starting with the objective of choosing 300 IV.IPs the Greeks elect their first batch on the simple proportional system in local constituencies which is used on the Continent and ln Ireland. The second batch is chosen only from those parties which have polled a sPecified percentage of votes (17 per cent for single parties, 25 per cent for two-party or 30 per cent for three-party coalitions) cast throughout the country in nine constituencies. Finally, 12 seats are given to 'Deputies of State', people of such prestige in public life that they are considered to be above the election battle.
The purpose of the first preferential voting system, as the Liberals keep telling us, is to prevent two-party domination. The second stage is designed to deter minority parties that might lead to unwieldy coalition governments. The third group, possibly open to abuse by patronage, is the Greek answer to the House of Lords. The system has led to considerable flexibility within the Athens Parliament, with constant regrouping among minority parties. Indeed during the current campaign the Leader of the Liberals, George Mavros, has joined the Opposition party and the leader of the proRoyalists, Spyros Theotokis, has joined the government's party, with bitter recriminations on all sides.
There is a striking difference in the portraits of the two party leaders displayed on posters throughout the campaign. George Rallis, the Prime Minister and leader of the New Democratic party, which has been in power since the military government collapsed in 1974, is 63 and himself descended from two former Prime Ministers; he is unsmiling but genial, with white hair, bushy eyebrows and spectacles. To unseat him, and thus endanger the relative prosperity that some Greeks have enjoyed in recent years and to jeopardise Greece's newly-won respectability in Europe and the Western Alliance, would clearly be an act of grave irresponsibility. Mr Papandreou, 64, founder of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and the son of George Papandreou, the former Prime Minister, smiles broadly from his poster with his right hand raised above his head, apparently a straightforward man of the people. In fact everyone knows that Papandreou is anything but straightforward, having been steeped in political compromise all his life. He has managed some remarkable contortions to put his party, which until 1977 was in third place, in the position of a likely alternative government. But this has only enhanced his reputation as a wily political operator amongst a sceptical electorate, which really doesn't expect him to stick to all his promises. The Papandreou position on the Common Market would do credit to Harold Wison and is certainly a good deal more pragmatic than that of the present British Labour Party. You don't hear so many theoretical arguments about the EEC being a capitalist institution: it's more a question of 'Why join an organisation that is so badly run?'. Papandreou has recently mention ed the possibility of a referendum on the Common Market, but this is a constitutional matter which is the prerogative of the President rather than the Prime Minister. Since the President is Constantine Karamanlis, founder of the ruling New Democratic party, it is thought unlikely that a referendum would be granted.
Similar ambiguity surrounds the opposition's position on NATO; there has been talk of removing American warheads and making the Balkans a nuclear-free zone, but Papandreou has had to be careful not to proceed too fast for fear of annoying the army.
Even the most ardent left-winger would prefer restraint rather than another confrontation with the military, so sooner or later it is the constitution and the preservation of democracy which become the major issue in a Greek election. In seeking a change Greek voters may, after seven years of conservative government and the colonels before that, simply be flexing their democratic muscles rather than expressing real enthusiasm for left-wing policies. It seems unlikely that either New Democracy or Pasok will gain the 150 seats required for an absolute majority. Compromises will have to be made, perhaps even with the Communists, and it could be that the shifty Papandreou rather than the solid Rallis is the man most trusted to do this delicate tight-rope act.
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