Forty years ago today, the Chernobyl nuclear accident became the occasion for one of the most memorable cases of political discourse for the left in Greece.
Wanting to reassure public opinion regarding their comrades in the Soviet Union, executives and journalists of the wider area were remembered for their… lollies that we could – according to what they told us – consume without fear.
Today, the lettuce has been replaced by a political product, and some of the same people are trying to convince us that the electorate can “fearlessly consume” the… Alexis Tsipras. Who, with various jokes about his party name and other things, informed us from the Delphi Forum that he has finally made the decision to return to… save us from the current government. Of course, heleft out what it was that really brought Kyriakos Mitsotakis to power in the summer of 2019 and why the prime minister is still politically dominant, with his government being positively evaluated even by voters of other parties.
It was Syrrizanel‘s disastrous policies and regressions of 2015-2019, especially the nightmarish first half of the year that culminated in the referendum that no sooner threatened Greece with an exit from the core of Europe and plunged the country into a peculiar national division and the mythical “shitstorm”that followed. Continued disapproval Tsipras also said his desire to bounce back was linked to the need to return the country to normality and stability. However, one could very easily counter that another country is on his mind, since it is the government of ND and Mitsotakis that has demonstrably, and based on Greece’s partners, put the country on a path to normality.
As for stability, there is no better answer than the verdict of the citizens in the 2023 double elections and the 41% with which Mr Mitsotakis was re-elected prime minister. Because it was the citizens who sent a loud message of stability and continuation of the course that had been charted for the country in the previous years, while at the same time, in an equally loud way, condemning the populists and revisionists of SYRIZA and Mr. Tsipras himself, before he was badly forced to retire.
In fact, the fact that the citizens have already decided on Mr Tsipras’s future, and that they have done so a total of five times in recent years, is perhaps the most important thing. Five times they disapproved of him at the ballot box but he didn’t seem to get the message. The way he marched after 2019 led him to the double crash of 2023 and the exit before he decided to return as a self-appointed saviour. To return, so to speak, since for six months, that is, since the release of his infamous “Ithaca”, while he says he wants to, he doesn’t. He keeps his cards close to his chest about who will staff his effort or what his intentions are, letting his associates move through leaks. Nothing clear and we are at work to remember the (heavy) folk verse: “Returns, disasters.”
.
