The government may not have changed in Greece in 2024. There may have been no parliamentary elections, or any of the other “events” Harold Macmillan considers most likely to blow governments off course.
But the Opposition did change. And I don’t think that’s ever happened before.
It came about for two reasons.
First, because the 2023 elections produced a powerful government majority and a near powerless Opposition.
Which, objectively, created a power vacuum.
And second, because the weakened Opposition became so fragmented that every formation within it began to nurture hopes of filling it.
Meaning that the government wasn’t up for grabs, but the role of Opposition was.
Of course, that’s no bad thing. Political forces engaging in an ongoing process of self-redefinition is a core element of any healthy democracy.
And when a decade of instability came to an end in 2019 with the emergence of a stable majority, it was logical that the redefinition should extend to the Opposition. Though the level of noise and damage that came with it may not have been.
Today, all the polls reveal an absolute upheaval among opposition forces of every type. Second place may have been claimed, but nothing below it.
Commentators were quick to speak of a “new two-party system”, but that’s not what this is. Seeing as you need two roughly equivalent parties for a two-party system, and, for now, we have no such thing.
In fact, conditions would seem to preclude it. Why? Because the power vacuum is preventing the creation of a strong alternative center of power, while the fragmentation makes it unlikely any such power-center will emerge in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps because the Opposition itself neither knows what it wants nor how to achieve it. Dethroning the government is clearly beyond it, but it could at least exercise its oversight function a little more convincingly.
I’m not sure it’s even trying, but it’s having little success if it is. Even its more promising initiatives get drowned out by the cacophony of conflicting opinions and negated by their own internal contradictions.
Are we going to continue like this until the 2027 elections? I have to admit I can’t see anything or anyone capable of changing things.
Common sense tells us we need an alternative politics first, before we can start looking for who’s going to champion it.
But for now, I don’t see anyone making a serious effort to come up with something new.
And as long as policy generation remains a government preserve, I don’t see how a new second party can emerge to replace the first.
