A (literally) unprecedented alliance of the Far Right and the Left has left France all at sea today, without a government or a budget.
This places the whole of Europe at considerable risk, even more so because the haphazard “coalition of extremes” seems to have set itself a new target: forcing President Macron to resign.
In other words, destabilization and chaos are their goal.
Fortunately, in Greece, our extremes are too insignificant to wreak this sort of havoc.
Not that the ruthless opportunism of the Greek extremists who share the ideologies of the French coalition isn’t every bit as reckless and repellent. They would most definitely seek the same result, if they could, because it could save them from oblivion.
They won’t, but purely because they can’t.
It is no coincidence that, as the time comes to make a high-level but somewhat routine policy choice with no party political or ideological content, the opportunists at both extremes of the political spectrum are pursuing political goals that seek to destabilize before all else.
Anything more constructive is beyond them. Or, rather, that’s how little the country and our democracy count in their maneuverings.
Of course, the government majority has the parliamentary discretion to elect a President of the Republic and not submit the country to potential turbulence. In this respect, the 2019 revision of the constitutional rules on electing the president is proving to be a lifesaver.
But it’s just common sense. That’s not what the election of “the regulator of the constitution” should be about. It’s not even about the constitutional practice that has been followed since 1974 when the monarchy was abolished.
So it took half a century of presidential democracy in Greece—with all the presidential choices made over that time, fortuitous or otherwise—for the process for electing the president to deteriorate into a sordid party political transaction between actors of no consequence.
Some just want to have their say. And others to justify their existence.
The unfortunate thing is that sort of bullying and horse trading could end up damaging the institution of the Presidency as the “regulator of the constitution”.
The good news is that the Greek people have had the good sense to give the opportunists the support they warrant—which is very little.
That is why it would seem the presidential election can go ahead early in 2025 in line with the constitution rules, and all the dignity, consensus and seriousness the institution deserves.
If French voters had taken the precaution of quarantining their own opportunists in time, things might have worked out better for them, too.