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Greek democracy is unhealthy when most people can’t afford olive oil

One political party dominates in Greece but has so far shown little sign of finding a solution to rising hardship

The difficulty of finding olives and olive oil in Greece is symptomatic of the cost-of-living crisis and climate problems affecting many Greeks. Photograph: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/Bloomberg

Richard Pine
Tue Dec 26 2023 - 05:00

Last month, Greece celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising, in which students occupied the college in protest at the military regime that had ruled the country since 1967.

Many students were killed as a result of military intervention, but the protest contributed significantly to the fall of the regime and to the restoration of democracy, at least in theory.

The single word “Polytechnic” today evokes the entire scenario of resistance to fascism, but is also a way of questioning the level of democracy in today’s Greece.

Forty years after the students’ action, in 2013, the prime minister at the time, Antonis Samaras of New Democracy, unilaterally shutdown ERT, the public service Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, and threatened to replace it with a state-run company regulated by government.

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He was testing the legality of government intervention into the workings of the furniture of state, and Greece’s supreme court ruled him out of order. The court’s decision was another of those landmarks in defence of democracy, and was similar in spirit, if not in kind, to the Polytechnic revolution of 1973.

When the issue of funding for public service broadcasting is raised in Greece, the government shutdown of ERT is cited as a mark of the vulnerability of the service and, indeed, of democracy itself.

The recent discussion about the funding of RTÉ suggests a Greek Solution to an Irish Problem. In Greece we pay the licence fee compulsorily on the electricity bill: six times a year, a total of €36. No one complains. But there is plenty of reason to complain about the cost of living, including the price of olive oil which, believe it or not, can be compared to the state of democracy in today’s Greece.

Since independence in the 1830s, the transformation of land ownership and the means to wealth has, as in Ireland, encouraged the growth of a middle class with a mercantile mentality that extends to – and indeed supports – political life. To secure such a middle class requires a stable government.

The local elections in October reinforced the dominant position of New Democracy (ND), which has an overall majority in parliament and won control of almost all the regional authorities. Voters support ND for one very clear reason: there is no viable alternative.

Debate in parliament is minimal. One newspaper, Kathimerini, even referred to ND’s “absolute, unprecedented political domination” and suspected a reluctance to introduce much-needed reforms in finance and public administration. Essentially, Greece is a deeply conservative society, and Kathimerini used the headline “it’s in the DNA”.

The epiphany of left-wing Syriza in the 2010s briefly transformed the political landscape. It was the brainchild of Alexis Tsipras, who in effect welded together a coalition of 13 small parties – many of whose members were, like Tsipras himself, former communists. Such was the poverty of thinking in the main political parties in the face of Greece’s financial collapse that voters returned Syriza to power in 2015-2019 to show their frustration at conservatism.

But inept political management and weakness in the face of EU mandates made Syriza incapable of governing. The departure of Tsipras this year has removed the charismatic glue that held Syriza together and it is now almost nowhere on the political spectrum.

What has all this to do with the price of olive oil? Although a stable government is necessary, stability alone does not remove the hardship suffered by many households due to inflation. To consumers for whom olive oil is a luxury, used, for example, in salad dressing, the increasing price may not be noticeable. But it is an essential element in the “Mediterranean diet” based on vegetables, fish and dairy products (with low consumption of red meat).

Olive oil has been shown by research to prolong life and reduce heart disease. It is a mainstay of any Greek kitchen, and its absence is like a death in the family. It is in danger of becoming a luxury, as prices have shot up recently, due to a combination of rampant inflation and poor harvests due to climate change.

In the countryside, households still have access to their own trees, and even many city dwellers return to their rural roots. But urbanisation is increasing consumerist culture and putting more emphasis on the supermarket than the olive grove. I’m lucky; although I don’t have my own olive trees, I can barter with my neighbours: my fruit trees for their oil.

I was recently shocked to find that the lowest supermarket price is €10 per litre – almost doubled in the past three years. The crisis at the supermarket checkout is symptomatic of the division in Greece between the “haves” (mainly the self-employed) and the “have-nots” (pay-as-they-earn workers). It may not be a one-party state, but it’s very near to being a one-party parliament, with scant regard for the finesse, or even the spirit, of democracy.

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