This comes via the BBC:
What is clear, once you get away from the incessant shouting on Greek TV, and the flash-bang battles between the anarchists and the police, is that this rapid breakdown of certainty is having a big, but immeasurable, effect on people’s political expectations.
The polls tell one part of the story. The Pasok party, which tried and failed to implement the first austerity bill until replaced by a technocratic coalition in October, is now down to 11%. (Epikaria poll, 16 February 2012)
New Democracy, the centre-right party that expected to form the government – it has been a two- horse race since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s – is also in trouble. Its own vote – 27.5% – is not enough to form a government. And 20 MPs just got expelled for opposing the bailout.
The Christian Orthodox hard-right party, LAOS, has also split, after leaving the coalition government during the austerity vote last Sunday. I heard two perfectly ordinary guys, sitting next to me in a cafe, comment: “I don’t care if the splitters from LAOS were once fascists. They are right.”
The far left is now polling a combined 43.5%. The extreme-right party Golden Dawn is on 2.5%. And there’s an air of mania.
My takeaway here is that people are desperate and they are willing to support any party that has a solution to their economic plight, irrespective of whether that party is considered extreme.
Read the full account below.
Source: Struggling Greeks losing belief in the state
This post originally appeared at Credit Writedowns and is posted with permission.
3 Responses to “Greece’s Extreme Parties Are Gaining Support”
gigs • February 17th, 2012 at 11:52 am
Sounds like the type of situation that brought Hitler to power.
Don • February 18th, 2012 at 11:49 am
This is sad to hear, we all have seen this scenario play out ending in a dictatorship. The politicians promising jobs, growth and free goods to whoever needs them (with no way to pay form the goods) . History will repeat itself once again.
Tobin • February 19th, 2012 at 2:53 pm
The writer has done a mistake…He includes in the "far left" 4 polkitical parties which the 3 of them are far from "far left". The left democrats who are more a social-democratic party than a left party. The Green's which is like the Greens in Germany -could you characterized them as far left???- and SYRIZA, a left party who voted the Maastricht treaty and believe in a democratic European Union and a european future for Greece. Are these parties "far left"? Please do not confuse your readers!
