By Richard Cottrell: The photogenic young engineer who just led his party to second place in the Greek general election is like an Olympic marathon runner.
Not entirely to Greeks it is true, but certainly to the rest of the world the brash young tousle-haired figure of Alexis Tsipras seemingly emerged from nowhere to crush the giants that have misruled Greece since WWI.
That’s not a slip of the keyboard. Just three family clans, Papandreou, Karamanlis and Venizelos, have been playing musical chairs with the seat of power for almost a century.
Now, thanks entirely to the artificially fabricated austerity crisis forced on Greece by the evil grasping triumvirate composed of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank, the ancient regime is, in all probability, busted forever.
Sunday’s general election failed to produce the winner that the EU-backed Greek quisling techno-premier Lukas Papademos hoped and prayed would nod through the next installment of the rape and pillage of the Greek economy.
He didn’t expect, however, the sunrise of the new Adonis in the surprising form of 32-year-old Alexis Tsipras.
Athens went wild on Sunday evening when it appeared that the Syriza radical left party captained by Tsipras, had come second with 16.7% of the vote, a whisker behind the traditional conservative juggernaut New Democracy, clinging on to 18.8%.
The Pan Hellenic socialists (Pasok) approached the departure lounge of Greek politics with a score of 13.2% and a measly 41 seats in the new Vouli, the Greek parliament.
Overall, the big winner was the Abstention Party, with 32%. Many of those who did vote demonstrated their repugnance for establishment toady politics by turning to a swarm of fringe parties.
The formation of a new government will not only prove exceedingly difficult but in all likelihood, any government formed out of the present shambles has no enduring prospects.
Moreover, the vacuum at the center of power will make it virtually impossible to maintain the velocity of the austerity program.
I like the cut of the young Adonis’ jib and I suspect he has a game plan of some kind.
According to the Greek system, the party that tops the poll, in this case New Democracy, has three days for the first crack at forming a government.
Even with a bonus top-up of 50 seats (a highly questionable example of gerrymandering) the ND leader, the dreary placeman Antonis Samaris, needs to find enough backers of the triumvirate rip off who will stay the course.
Samaris mutters about re-negotiating the compact, but privately he has assured quisling Papademos that he will quietly kowtow to Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington.
If he fails to stitch up a workable coalition, then the chalice passes to the next in line, which is Tsipras.
Syriza is now has 52 seats, almost half the combined total of New Democracy. He can turn to the rag bag of left inclined fringe groups: the Independent Greeks with 10.6%, the Democratic Left with 6.1% and even the communists, who turned in a healthy 8.47% thus earning a reward of 26 seats.
If there is to be a re-run, then it will be in a few weeks’ time, just long enough to allow an extra head of steam to build up behind Adonis and his party.
What is left of Pasok would take to the lifeboats and either the left inclined fringe parties join the party or go under.
Such an arrangement scarcely speaks of the smack of firm government. In any event, Alexis Tsipras has already described Greece as a colony or protectorate of the EU, having lost her pride, sovereignty and independence. It is hard to go back on those words.
My guess is that Adonis plans to force a new election, which he believes – I suspect with some insight – will vault Syriza to pole position.
True, if Tsipras throws in the towel, then under the law the remnants of Pasok will be asked to take a turn on the government-forming carousel. This is like installing a melting ice cream cone in the seat of power.
Pasok is tarnished by a vast and still evolving bribery scandal revolving around a prominent financial backer and ex-minister.
The scandal, clearly plotted and promoted at the highest levels of the Greek state, turned out to be the perfect sting.
It gets better. Sensing an opportunity to stuff the globalist smash and grab once and for all, entranced by the shining new Greek god of hope and justice, then most likely the abstentionists will swarm aboard and award Syriza a clear majority.
The wretched Papademos knows all this, of course. The question is, what exactly will he, or can he do about it?
Already the ripples of the election in one small EU state are spreading to distant waters. There is an up-coming referendum in another EU pocket state, Ireland, on pursuing the austerity punishment imposed on that country.
The Greek result will supply a powerful surge of adrenalin to the swelling camp saying no to the EU-mandated austerity program.
Rather importantly, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel suffered a serious set-back on the same day as the Greek revolt.
The ruling Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition collapsed in the voting in the northern regional state of Schleswig-Holstein. Only a wafer-thin margin of 1% separated Merkel’s party and the Social Democrats.
The vote was a backwash of the EU austerity crisis. German voters are turning to the ballot box to protest at German tax monies being used by Merkel to bail out improvident countries of Europe who refuse to get their budgets under control.
In fact there are serious economic woes coming Germany’s way. Germany’s mighty export machinery depends on well-lubricated export markets. With the whole of the EU sliding into recession, the German dynamo is beginning to slow and the voters are sensing rough waters ahead.
The political equivalent of women and children first is the order of the day.
Spain, which is Greece magnified five times, has plunged into headlong recession, with overall unemployment touching 24-plus percent. Youth unemployment, at 50%, is the same as Greece.
Spain will require the Everest of bail outs in the very near future. As of now, there is no idea where that money will be found.
If Merkel tries to pick the pockets of German taxpayers on such a massive scale, she and her Christian Democrats can say goodbye to the cares of office at the scheduled general election in the autumn of 2013.
The Dutch government has just fallen, another casualty of the austerity crisis. The Dutch, like the Germans, feel they are being subjected to unreasonably harsh constraints in order to bail out improvident regimes called to account for their past fiscal misdeeds.
The Dutch vote comes up in September. The main bogey in that election is the populist nationalist and immigrant baiter Gert Wilders, the alter ego of Alexis Tsipras in Greece.
Wilders has just demonstrated his power by bringing down the government, even though he and his Freedom Party are not even formal members of it.
But there is an umbilical cord that connects apparently disparate figures such as Tsipras and Wilders, which is namely the growing and acute suspicion of the over-weaning supra-national power exercised by international agencies, and in particular the European Union.
I have suspected for some time now that the EU is moving gradually towards the tipping point where its raison d’être would come under severe questioning. I think we are at exactly that point now, thanks to the stupidly overblown austerity crisis, which is no more than mask to maintain the liquidity of the euro, an artificial and largely unloved fiat currency.
At heart this is what the ‘austerity crisis’ is about, and really no more than that. The euro is a child of globalism and therefore its fate rests and depends up on the fate of globalist mania itself.
Wherever one looks, disillusion with the ‘European Project’ is rapidly spreading. In the UK local elections last week, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) made surprising inroads into the traditional Conservative vote.
Given that the hapless David Cameron’s Tories are set to be liquidated at the next election, along with their current Liberal partners, we can expect euro-skepticism to get a massive high octane boost in the British Isles.
If Cameron wants to keep his party together, and stand a chance of winning next time around, he must hold a referendum on the UK remaining in the Continental club.
There is a precedent. A now largely forgotten socialist premier called Harold Wilson held exactly such a referendum back in 1975. He asked voters whether the country, which had recently joined the club under the former Tory premier Edward Heath, should ‘stay in.’
Wilson pretended he had ‘re-negotiated the terms of membership’. In fact he wanted to silence his rumbustuous anti-European left wingers. The trick worked and he got a Yes vote.
Yet the ever-calculating Wilson stated that the issue had been decided for no more than a generation.
We are at that point right now.
The British are already semi-detached members of the European Club. They do not use the euro. They hold their noses at the stream of diktats and instructions pouring from Brussels.
My guess is that the English (if not the subject Scots and Welsh, thus posing considerable logistical difficulties) will seek a looser form of working relationship.
Thus Cameron will attempt to ‘re-negotiate’ the terms of membership, then hold a referendum. In practical terms, he has little choice.
Finally, I turn to France, which is currently celebrating the defenestration of the Little Napoleon, Nicholas Sarkozy.
No matter who is residing in the Élysée Palace, it is always a given that the Franco-German alliance underpins not only bilateral relations, but the EU and thus the wider European context.
In his doomed attempts to cling on to his presidential pants, Sarkozy turned into an anti-EU klaxon on maximum decibels, even though he had previously teamed up with Angela Merkel to create a new and entirely unconstitutional new European financial order.
The new president, Francois Hollande, will either turn into a carbon copy of Sarkozy (quite likely, as I earlier suggested here at End the Lie) or turn his attentions to the swelling mood of French voters against the imposition of the EU on their lives.
The far right candidate, Marine Le Pen, made great play with this theme during the presidential hustings. A record one in five electors agreed with her.
Hollande will ignore these sentiments at his peril, if he wants to be re-elected.
History may come to his aid. If I am right, then the EU has now begun the process of dissolving, at least in the terms that we understand its huge and cumbersome machinery right now.
Contemporary European politicians are in charge of increasingly redundant political forms that we have always called ‘parties’ for want of any better description.
The consensus that built these large agglomerated political dinosaurs is now breaking down, although old fashioned system machinists (Merkel, Cameron and Hollande, for example) are the last to realize it.
The future points to the end of the mass party system and in the direction of political forces that raid for votes across all traditional political boundaries.
We see that happening in Greece at this moment. Blair and ‘New Labor’ was an excellent expression of it. He called it ‘cherry picking.’
With the breakdown of the old superfluous and excessively heavy political superstructure, then we may anticipate either autocratic, top down authoritarian rule (such as that developing before our eyes in the United States) or alternatively, the steady withdrawal of consensus that supports gross sovereignty-consuming institutions such as the EU.
Unwittingly the gallop to the new world order, of which the ‘austerity crisis’ is such an important diadem, is actually promoting the dereliction of redundant political systems. Of course we may not however entirely like what we get in return.
Nonetheless, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Greece, one small nation on the periphery of Europe, may be offering an as of now imperfect but potentially important vision of the future.
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