Fourteen years have passed since the 2009 elections, but it seems to me that decades have passed. It is very difficult for me to remember how I then looked at things, what I felt, what I was afraid of and what I hoped for. And how could it be otherwise? The elections in October 2009 were, in fact, the last in the post-colonial period. So much has changed since then and, as usually happens in such cases, memory weighs down and overshadows those events that we no longer need. For example, who in 1977 remembered the 1963 elections? The events of 1964, 1965, 1967, 1974 condemned to oblivion those elections, the results of which were soon discredited. The same thing happened with the two elections in 2009. The events of 2010, 2012, 2015, 2019 completely overshadowed them. I am sure that the average reader of the article will not even remember that it was preceded by the European elections in June 2009. I, at least, completely forgot. The events of that summer, the protracted pre-election period, and conflicts within N.D. have even been erased from my memory. on whether elections should be held, the question of a presidential election to extend the term of Carolos Papulia.

Years of “Change”

For someone like me, who came of age during the reign of PASOK, the period 2004-2009 was both surreal and hopeful. Let’s think about it for a moment: for 30 years PASOK has been politically dominant. With Andreas Papandreou as a dynamic leader of the opposition from 1974 to 1981, as an all-powerful and populist prime minister from 1981 to 1989, and finally as a weakened but still dangerous, who continued to set the political game around, from 1989 to 1996 year. And then another eight years of another, but at the same time such a familiar PASOK.

It was PASOK that taught us that governments control the money tree, that is, the unlimited ability to increase the overall level of prosperity, even when they destroy the productive structure, “shut down” the economy, discourage exports, ignore investment, ignore innovation. The money tree has gone by various names, from the Delores package to the recycling of money representing fiscal policy. This has given us one of the most wasteful welfare states in Europe in terms of efficiency.

Period 2004-2009 was surreal because we found that N.D. he turned into PASOK II and that was the only way to dominate. This was reassuring, because Greek society would not, under any circumstances, tolerate a government that did not belong to Pasok. Kostas Simitis and Tasos Giannitsis learned this the hard way in 2001.

The march to 2010 began in 1980-81. The 11th member of the EEC had one of the lowest public debts in Europe (28.6% of GDP), which doubled in five years. When PASOK handed over power after eight years of absolute political and social dominance, the public debt was over 80%. Period 1989-2004 will be in some way a break with the past. The governments of Mitsotakis, Papandreou and Simitis will try, with more or less success, to reverse the prescribed course, to reform, to “open” the market. As a result, public debt is contained and remains relatively stable until Kostas Karamanlis came to power in 2004.

But the period of 2004-2009 will be even more catastrophic than the period of the 1980s. To explain this as simply as possible: in both periods, the country either spent money that it did not have, or money that should have been directed to other purposes ( in investments and modernization of production structures). But in the 1980s, a welfare state was built (ESI, relatively decent pensions, public education), which timidly began to be built in the 1970s. an unfair and inefficient tax system, this decade left behind a society that prospered and still had the ability to regroup when the country decided to increase spending along with increasing production capacity.

The ruling party went to the polls, wanting to avoid bitter glass, and the opposition was ready to take power along with the bomb ready to explode.

But the period 2004-2009 was a great anachronism. The policy of perks, raises, notoriously over-employment in the state led to a collapse in government revenues relative to government spending, a deficit that reached 16%, and an “unsustainable” debt of 130%. The problem was not only the global crisis that led to the ill-fated bailouts of banks and insurance funds, but also the collapse of public finances just before the perfect storm.

As 2008 draws to a close and we enter 2009, people in the know (and there are many) are sounding the alarm. But until the government and the prime minister begin to realize this, their policies will not adapt accordingly. Kostas Karamanlis’ best idea at the time was to find a rudimentary consensus with PASOK. But Georges Papandreou would have opportunistically rejected it, only to find himself tragically in a similar position at the end of 2011.

Thus, in the October 2009 elections, we have a paradoxical phenomenon: the ruling party goes to the polls with a prime minister who not only accepted defeat, but also wants to avoid a bitter glass, and with an opposition leader who is ready to compromise in order to win . a bomb that is ready to explode while he activates the mechanism, reducing the available seconds.

The 2009 elections were the swan song of PASOK I and completed the transformation of the ND. in PASOK II (see the opportunistic behavior of Antonis Samaras in the period 2010-2012) and created fertile ground for the political dominance of SYRIZA, i.e. PASOK III, which in 2015 repeated the tragedy of 2009-10 as a farce. The 1980s were decisive in shaping the preferences of the electorate. From then until today, he has been constantly looking for that mixture of macroeconomic populism, chimerical messianism and blatant anti-systemism that PASOK has taught us in its various transformations.

Purpose

After a difficult winter, on June 20, 2009, Athens welcomes the museum it has been waiting for years: the new Acropolis Museum. From 1974, when Konstantinos Karamanlis first articulated the need for a modern museum space for a leading monument of classical antiquity, to the second international architectural competition and a brilliant opening, Greece closed a serious backlog of decades.

Proverb

“There is money”

On the verge of a memorial myth, during a rally in Kozani, the famous phrase of Georges Papandreou sounded: “Everyone asks where you will get the money. There is money if you need it. If you attract them with investments” (…). Rest
this is history.

What have we seen?

Fang goes to Los Angeles

It was the film that introduced Giorgos Lanthimos to an international audience and made weird cinema an independent film stream. Fang may have divided domestic audiences due to its paradoxical narrative language and pronounced postmodern “construction,” but for the first time in decades, it earned a Greek production an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

What do I remember?

The country was sinking

In August 2009, Giorgos Papakonstantinou informed me that he had proposed to the President of PASOK to take over the duties of the press representative. In his estimation, economic issues will dominate the political debate, and as an economist, I will better understand PASOK’s communications policy. At the beginning of September, K. Karamanlis asked for elections to be held on October 4 in order to take the necessary measures for the economy. On election day, the governor of the Bank of Greece announced in Istanbul that the deficit was 10% of GDP, contrary to the position of the then prime minister and the government that it was 6%. The extent of PASOK’s victory was unpredictable. Who would have told me that night, when I was rejoicing at my re-election as a deputy of Larisa, that in three days I would be in the hot seat of the Deputy Minister of Finance in the State Accounting Department, while the country was plunging into the largest post-war financial crisis. The 2009 elections finally marked the end of post-colonialism.

Philip Sachinides
Former Minister of Finance

Fact

Writing history

“I, Barack Hussein Obama, I swear…” The big day has arrived: January 20, 2009. A day that will go down in history: despite polar temperatures, 1.8 million people gathered in downtown Washington to watch the inauguration of the first African-American president in US history. “We are here because we chose hope over fear and unity over strife and strife,” the 44th American president said, among other things. In four years, he will be there again.

New “December”

city ​​of Ealo

Saturday, December 6, 2008 Athens on the streets in honor of the feast of St. Nicholas. Invitations, visits, walks, parties. Shortly before midnight, word spreads that a fifteen-year-old student (Alexandros Grigoropoulos) has been shot dead by a special police guard in Exarchia. He is dead. Mass demonstrations, occupations in schools and universities, as well as violent incidents and destruction of shops, banks and public buildings will leave a heavy shadow in the city center.

Mr. Aristidis Hatzis is Professor of Legal Philosophy and Institutional Theory at the National and Kapodistrian Universities of Athens.

Editor: Dimitris Rigopoulos