A temporary halt to Grexit and Drachmageddon

20 June 2012

Plus ça change…the more things change, the more they remain the same. That’s the way it seems to me, anyway, although many commentators on Greek affairs consider that the old certainties have crumbled.

But I have been here for over 30 years, and to me uncertainty has been a constant presence. So has a sense of fragility. When I arrived in 1980, parliamentary democracy post Junta was barely six years old.

Bank loans were impossible to obtain, so that people wishing to buy property arrived at auctions with plastic bags crammed full of drachma notes. Women had few rights: if their marriages failed, their husbands retained their dowries.

The first time I ever went to a Greek polling booth was in October 1981, when Andreas Papandreou, founder of the PASOK party, won a landslide victory and became the first Socialist Prime Minister of Greece. I was aware that momentous events were unfolding, but was mesmerised by the sight of national servicemen on guard at the door of the school/polling booth.

They stood rigidly to attention: their guns bore fixed bayonets. I gibbered: Why? The answer was that in the past ballot boxes had occasionally been stolen. Yesterday afternoon, in the inner Athenian suburb of Exarchia, notorious for its cells of anarchists and activists, ten masked people entered a polling booth, attacked the two policemen on guard, smashed the ballot box, and, for good measure, set fire to it.

In 1981 I did not have the right to vote. Now I have, and as a good Aussie sheila who naturally believes in compulsory voting I try to do my bit by urging people to exercise their rights. Some people, like my old neighbour, don’t need to be persuaded. He was up bright and early yesterday: the polls opened at 7.

‘All set, Kyrie Vassili?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely. It’s our duty, isn’t it?’

And he brandished his walking-stick.

There were quite a few walking-sticks in evidence, as it happened: Kyrios Vassilis and his age group can remember the hideous years of the Civil War and the dictatorship of the Colonels. They can remember the fear and the helplessness.

I haven’t discussed the matter with such people, as one has to be careful not to open old wounds, but I wonder what they think of the heightened profile of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party that seems to believe that violence against immigrants and liberals is legitimate. I wonder what they think about the

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A temporary halt to Grexit and Drachmageddon

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