3/18/2024 0 Comments Autumn alk dean blair![]() ![]() The Cold War entrenched in power - backed by the US and Britain - a monarchist, authoritarian right for whom political violence was customary. The Greek Civil War led to three decades of illegality for the Left, which had to operate under front organisations. In Greece, the process was delayed and took a peculiar course. Christian Democracy emerged - or, rather, was crafted with great resource and effort - as a broad church for a range of forces which had in the interwar years fought for political power under their own banners: national conservatives, industrialists, religious conservatives, liberals, fascists. Lineages of the Absolutist RightĪcross Western Europe, decades of post-war stability allowed for a transformation of politics from the mass, violent clashes of the 1930s into the more pacific confines of parliamentary democracy. And on the eve of the great display of European hypocrisy in Paris, it’s worth shedding some light on the recesses of the Greek right. New Democracy is only just behind Syriza in the opinion polls. But we should not lose sight of the Right. That it could hold office following the January 25 elections is immense. For seventy years anti-Communism - through state policy and force of arms - has kept the Left in Greece in opposition (sometimes in exiled opposition). Syriza and the Left are ahead in the polls. So in order to construct a cordon around Le Pen, Hollande will march with Samaras - whose interventions following the Paris killings have been more extreme than those of the National Front leader - and give him a fillip two weeks before polling day. and, at his own insistence, it seems, Samaras. Le Pen could be excluded by ensuring the presence of Cameron, Merkel. The march was to be Europeanized, unity of the nation replaced by another group selfie of European Union leaders. Whether by accident or design, Hollande - the most unpopular French president on record - happened on an elegant solution. “I represent a quarter of the French population,” said Le Pen, “how can there be national unity without me?” The question cuts right through the piles of left-wing verbiage claiming that rallying for the republic is the way to unite France against the Right. The march began to run into the political rapids two days ago when Nicolas Sarkozy and the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) called on Socialist Party president François Hollande to include Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Front in the parade. His presence underlines the political chicanery with which the European elites have responded to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. Where better, then, for conservative Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to roll up as part of his desperate election campaign to stave off victory by Syriza. It’s fitting, then, that today’s “ Republican march” of national unity in Paris morphed into a display of “European solidarity” - or, spelling it out more accurately, of solidarity between European political leaders facing angry electorates. There are a lot of significant elections in Europe this year - including Britain’s contest in May.
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