Article about the European elections in Kathimerini by Yiannis Oikonomou, Member of Parliament of Fthiotida ND.

In the recent European elections, 5,752,593 of our fellow citizens did not go to the polls. Of course, this is not a homogeneous group of people. I would say that one part is not interested in politics in general and disapproves of the party system, a second part wanted to send a message to the party they voted for in the previous election (without wanting to vote for another party in time) and a third part feels that the political staff fall short of international developments and contemporary reality.

I would like to focus on this last part of our fellow citizens. Greece, since the foundation of our state almost 200 years ago, is a country of the European periphery. Despite the important steps we have taken, the permanent refrain of the parties in power, especially in recent decades, is “to become Europe”.

This attitude has decisively influenced the politicians and the ecosystem around them, pushing them to transfer to our country the same ideas and practices that are applied elsewhere, believing that in this way they contribute to the modernization of Greece.

But experience shows that the opposite is probably the case. These ideas are introduced unfiltered and with considerable delay. There is no rationalization of them, no attempt to evaluate their adequacy and their usefulness in the Greek reality, which has many particularities: value, cultural, social, political and historical. We also introduce them at a later time, when they have already been outgrown in their countries of origin.

Thus we are faced with the paradoxical phenomenon of making the ideologies of Blair and Clinton, from the 1990s, as points of reference in the political debate, which are completely out of date, since the world scene is now completely different. At the same time, while in Europe – as a result of the major crises of the last fifteen years – politics with a clear ideological and value sign has returned dynamically, in Greece apolitical or post-political visions of overcoming ideologies or de-ideologicalizing politics, with the abolition of every point, are projected as quintessentially reference or dividing line.

Perhaps, this explains the election, literally from “nowhere”, to top positions – whether in the central political scene, or in self-administration – of persons who invest in freshness, charm, attraction and brilliance. But people who, without much difficulty, could be classified in more than one party. The cases of Messrs. Kasselakis and Doukas are the most typical, but not the only ones.

These trends have disappointed a large part of the citizens, who are ahead of the parties and politicians. Creative people, who participate in the international happenings in their spaces and in the global discourse. People who understand well the international challenges, who know the global current stakes. People disappointed by the myopic Greek-centrism of a large part of the political system, which insists on putting forward issues that are not essential to the global situation and do not respond to the great challenges of today and tomorrow. Artificial intelligence, the imperative of a new social contract with the world of wage labor, trade competition with China, climate collapse, hypertourism, developments in biotechnology, the cultural crisis brewing in the West, are little discussed in the political and the television tables, while they strongly occupy the most progressive and creative part of our society.

Many of these people, who are far more numerous than we usually think, ostentatiously turned their backs on the recent European elections and abstained. They abstained because, in addition to everything else, they no longer feel any psychic identification with the political organizations. All of them ask and demand a substantial modernization that will focus on the important and the critical. To bring Greece to the present of international developments and not to what happened several years ago. Which will give political substance and content, away from wrapping and flourishes without effect.