As we took out leave of 2024, we also bade farewell to a drawn-out election cycle. Four elections between May 2023 and June 2024.
With no change to the overall picture. New Democracy (ND) won all four, consolidating a supremacy that now leads it smoothly into its sixth year in government.
Only the ND of Konstantinos Karamanlis, and the PASOK administrations of Andreas Papandreou and Kostas Simitis have ever achieved till now.
So the twin pillars of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ governance—stability and normality—do not seem to be under threat.
What’s left, then? Goals and expectations.
The expectations of a nation that has been generous in providing the government with the political capital it requires to fulfil them.
And the goals a government needs to set to meet the expectations of a people.
There is nothing unexpected or magical about these expectations. The second part of the survey conducted by Metron Analysis and published in today’s To Vima lists them all, and there are no surprises.
The government’s goals seem a little more confused.
Perhaps because they depend on the political and social context. Perhaps because the government itself has not clarified them as much as it should have. Perhaps because the everyday wears you down.
It is right and good to go after the kids’ mobile phones, it is interesting to wonder whether Androulakis or Kasselakis will serve as opposition, it is useful that the presidential election is coming up, and essential that we prepare for the inevitable natural disasters ahead, but the vision of a nation and a people has to extend far beyond such things.
On this horizon, stability and normality are necessary conditions. But they are not enough in themselves.
We also need the average citizen to feel that their everyday is getting better. That their lives are improving. That their expectations are being fulfilled.
This is what the government has to achieve in 2025, and in the whole period through until the next elections.
The grumbling and the discontent that are ever-present can only be countered with doses of tailored confidence and convincing optimism. With the language of results.
We’re still waiting for those goals to be rolled out. And for their implementation to begin.
In any case, the government has little by way of opposition and enough political capital to expend for the country’s benefit.
It’s just that, as we know from Alice in Wonderland, you’ll never find the way you ought to go, if you don’t know where you want to get to.
