Kevin Featherstone On The State Of The West & The Upcoming Greek Election

Professor Kevin Featherstone is Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) European Institute’s Hellenic Observatory. He was previously Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies at the LSE and Professor in European Politics at the LSE’s European Institute. He was also previously Head of the LSE European Institute. From 2009-2010, he was a Member of The Advisory Committee to Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou for the Modernization of the Operation of the Government.

By Aiden Singh, May 16, 2023

This interview was conducted on May 3, 2023.

Are there major changes within regions? Yes. But do these transform the international system such that we can say that the West is somehow being overshadowed, overcome? No, not as far as we can project. 

So in economic terms, something like 80% of the world’s official reverses are held in U.S. dollars or the euro. And in defense spending, some 70% of defense spending is done by U.S. or European allies. So I think the structural position of the West - in economics, in defense - remains one of superiority. 

I think, also, we could say, culturally, normatively that the West retains much influence. It wasn’t long ago when we were watching the protests of school girls in Iran for democratic rights. We see protests by very brave women in Afghanistan. In different areas, we see protests that are essentially on valleys that we would identify with the West historically. And in terms of media matters, the world watches Netflix, we Google, and we watch Hollywood movies.

I would certainly accept that, of course, there are intra-regional tensions. Threats of China with Taiwan are real. The Middle East remains highly unstable. Afghanistan has gone in a different direction. But to say that the international system is pivoting towards a different world order - that the West is not still in a superior position - I think is a very bald, unqualified claim. 

So I would say that the West remains in a superior position for these long-term, structural reasons. Both Russia and China crave participation in international banking systems, attendance at the G7. It’s a world order which still gives much structural power to the West. But the West can still be challenged, and challenged particularly in regional conflicts, without it being a matter of the international system being transformed.

Ukraine, I think, shows that the assumptions we made about Russian conventional forces were rather overblown. The Russian military might is not as strong as we thought it was. 

So, in short, I would say that my response is a much more qualified one, and to emphasize that we should be cautious of what seem to be fadish changing views of the international system because we’ve been through previous fads of Japan, the BRICS, etc. 

Question: In addition to your scholarship on the European Union, you also have a particular interest in the political economy of Greece. And you’ve previously served on several Greek advisory bodies. In fact, you were the first foreigner to be appointed to the Greek National Council for Research and Technology. 

Back in December, Greece reportedly repaid €2.7 billion Euros of loans it received under the first bailout during the Eurozone crisis early. What is the current state of Greece’s economic recovery?

Answer: There is a strong recovery, but it’s patchy. There are significant contrasts. There’s a set of headlines which are very impressive. In 2022, the GDP growth rate in Greece was 6.1%, well above the Eurozone average. This year, in 2023, Greece will grow maybe 2.5%, again significantly above the Eurozone average rate. So growth is good. Profits are up for firms. There is some improvement relative to the past in terms of foreign direct investment. And there are some showcase episodes of major investments in Greece, which would not have occurred in the previous 10 years. And the credit ratings have improved.

However, there are several concerns. One, progress with structural reforms has been moderate, rather than stunning. And the slowness of the structural reforms emanates, I think, from the period of the crisis and the bailouts where, with the loan conditionality, I and I think quite a few others would say that opportunities were missed for insisting on deeper structural reform. It’s in the makeup of the IMF - and the EU is relatively new to this game of bailouts with conditionality - that they’re not really set up to have a more fulsome, more penetrating program of structural reform. So opportunities were missed; the time constraints were too severe. There’s a lot of short termism. So some of their fixes were short-term quick fixes, rather than taking a slightly longer time horizon and really monitoring more deeper systemic changes. So the record for Mitsotakis since 2019 is of progress with structural reform, but moderate. That’s concern number one.

Concern number two is, do people feel the recovery enough? This may impact voting. Whilst profits are up, growth is up, and public spending is up because of the European Union’s recovery fund, it hasn’t fully filtered down to the social wage or to wages. And it’s interesting that in the current election campaign - there’s elections on May the 21st, which you know - one of the things the governing party, New Democracy, is claiming is that in another four-year term in office they would expect wages in the private sector to increase by 25%. Well good luck with that. I’m not quite sure how the government engineers a 25% increase over four years in private sector wages. 

Perhaps the final thing I would say in response is that the Mitsotakis government has had moderate success with structural reforms but there are long-term deeply embedded constraints in the capacity of the system to reform. It’s partly the structure of the economy: it’s small, there are a few very big players. There isn’t a natural constituency for liberal economics. There isn’t a constituency for rolling back the state. There isn’t a natural constituency for increasing flexibility and competitive markets. This isn’t so unusual given the scale of the economy. But it does constrain, provide systemic limits, to the ability of any single government to come in and make much more fulsome reforms to the economy.

So in short, yes there is a significant recovery; growth has been much much higher. But after the depths of a recession, that growth is not so surprising. What needs to be done is much more structural reform to make the economy open, more competitive, flexible. And there needs to be much more attention to social inclusivity, the social wage, etc, so that people feel the benefits of recovery and don’t become susceptible to populistic critiques and veer away from the economic program.

Question: Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis called parliamentary elections For May 21. The election will see PM Mitsotakis’ New Democracy Party square off against Syriza, whose leader - Alexis Tsipras - previously assumed the prime ministership during the aforementioned Eurozone crisis. There are also four other parties that currently hold seats in parliament. Can you briefly explain for our readers how Greece’s proportional representation system works and why analysts consider it unlikely that this election will produce an outright winner?

Answer: The long-term electoral system of Greece is exceptional. But the current new electoral system is not. 

The electoral system which will be used on May 21st is one known in many European countries: Belgium and the Netherlands immediately come to mind. It’s a conventional party-list system in which parties put their candidates up in order of preference across local districts. Now in Belgium and the Netherlands, the districts are much larger and the larger the districts, the fairer - the more proportional - the results. But in the Greek case, it is a party-list system within districts. This gives parties power - if you’re loyal to the party leadership, you’re placed at the top of the list; if not, you’re not going to win. 

It is however not entirely proportional in that there is a 3% threshold so that a party has to obtain more than 3% of the votes in a particular district to gain a seat in parliament. So it’s proportional with a 3% threshold.

An additional variation: there are 12 seats in the 300 seat parliament which are allocated according to national lists. So a small party could do poorly in every single district, but collectively across the country could obtain more than 3% of votes and would then qualify for one of these 12 seats. 

So, the bottom line is that it is highly proportional, though not fully proportional because of this 3% threshold. And it’s on that basis that almost no one expects any of the parties to obtain a majority in parliament. 

The opinion polls suggest that New Democracy, as the lead party, would get something between 33-35% of the vote, so a third of the vote. 

The electoral system was changed by the previous government, Syriza, in 2016. And in order to change the electoral system with immediate effect, two-thirds of parliament (so two-thirds of 300 members of parliament), would have had to vote for the change. The government didn’t have that majority, so the change of the electoral system was implemented in the election after the next. So they passed the law in 2016. The electoral system was not changed in 2019. But it is now changed for 2023. 

No one expects a party to get a majority, but almost everyone expects New Democracy to be the largest single party. 

New Democracy have said that if they come back to power, they will change the electoral system back to the more idiosyncratic Greek system known previously. And this is best described as reinforced proportional representation, such that in principle the system is proportional but with now two qualifications. The same 3% threshold being used in this election remains, but in addition the system has traditionally given an extra number of seats to the first place party. So it means that parties with support in the high 30 percent or above can get an extra 50 seats, making it much more likely that they would have a majority in a 300 seat parliament. In the past, this reinforced proportional representation system gave a bonus of 50 seats to the first place party. Now the proposed system for the election after this one is to give the first place party a bonus of 20 seats. But there would be bonuses according to the scale or the percentage of votes obtained. 

In a nutshell, the elections on May 21 will be on an electoral system that many people in Europe are familiar with: party-list. It is almost purely proportional. On that basis, given that the top place party would expect to get something up to 35% of the vote and not a majority, they will introduce legislation to change the electoral system back to what has been known for most of the post-war period, but instead of a 50-seat bonus for the first place party, it will be a 20-seat bonus for the first place party.   

Question: The election was called shortly after the deadliest rail disaster in Greece’s history killed 57 people near the city of Larissa. Greece has also been rocked by allegations of mass surveillance of government officials, opposition party politicians, and journalists. Opposition parties have accused PM Mitsotakis of being involved, though he denies wrongdoing. How much of a factor might these events be in the election?

Answer: I think there’s a difference between the two events in that the phone-tapping scandal - which last summer and autumn made international news headlines - didn’t impact that much on the percentage support in the opinion polls for New Democracy. The railway tragedy in February at Tempe did have an impact on the level of support, but New Democracy has recovered. So, as of today, the percentage support for New Democracy as the first place party is no more than three or four percentage points different from what it was in January 2022. So if you look at the graph line, New Democracy’s support has been remarkably stable. It took a hit temporarily during the railway disaster. It didn’t suffer so much under the phone-tapping scandal. 

How to explain that? I think there’s a kind of cultural acceptance in the Greek case that ‘of course they’re tapping the phones of the opposition, every government probably does it’; a kind of cynicism engrained in the system. The railway disaster was more challenging because this is a government that came to power on the basis of saying, ‘look we will give you competence’, and the railway disaster was the opposite of that.

Successive governments are guilty for the railway disaster; it’s an extreme case in which the European Union has given Greece, over many years, much funding to upgrade, to electrify the railway lines. All of the funding should have led to a high-quality modern railway system. The peculiar circumstances of the railway tragedy meant that in that particular section of the track between Athens and Thessaloniki, the control mechanisms required human intervention. The crash occurred just after 11pm. Before 11pm, there would have been two railway workers on duty; two people to look at the screens. The crash occurred minutes after 11pm when it was reduced to one person. The train was late. This particular railway worker, the camera shows, was looking away from the screen and did not see the evidence on the screen of the two trains about to collide, and that’s what the guy is suffering with. But we should not have been in the situation where a major railway line between Greece’s two biggest cities relied on human intervention to maintain safety controls: the investments from the EU were so large that the system should have been upgraded. It’s been left dysfunctional and it’s been left without proper implementation of the investments because of corruption amongst successive parties in government. 

So part of the protests on the streets was to say that ‘you’re all corrupt’; it was not just against New Democracy. It’s against, essentially, the system that everyone had grown up with.

But, to come back to the point, what are the lingering effects for New Democracy? I think they’re relatively small now. To repeat the points, the average of the opinion polls shows that the current support for New Democracy is two, three, maximum four percentage points lower than what it was in January 2022.  

Question: Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was violently attacked at a restaurant in central Athens back in March. Back in December we saw an anarchist group claim an arson attack on an Italian embassy car. Political violence is unfortunately not new in Greece, but is the risk of political violence in growing?

Answer: I think not, actually. As you rightly say, there’s some kind of history there. There were earlier times when the protests and the violence on the street was more pronounced; the crisis was deeper. In central Athens, there were protests outside parliament with Molotov cocktails being thrown at parliament. Parliamentarians were being attacked in restaurants. So there’s some kind of history, and what we’re seeing now cannot be described as an upward trend. In fact, it’s the opposite: it’s a declining trend. But the episodes are reprehensible. Obviously, they get media coverage. The guy who attacked Varoufakis has been arrested. I don’t think anyone expects political violence to impact the election, and certainly not in the immediate aftermath of the election. But is this a society which has some kind of subterranean disposition to protest, to express emotion when the politics go wrong? Yes, that’s the case. But then that was the case in 2008 when there was a schoolboy killed by the police. So there have been repeated flash points. But you could definitely not say this is an upward trend; statistically, it’s a lowering trend.  

Question: In February the Greek Parliament moved to ban parties whose leaders have been convicted of crimes from running in elections. The amendment affects parties like Golden Dawn and the National Party. Is this the right approach to addressing the issue of political violence? And how much of a political force is Golden Dawn today?

Answer: So the first question is obviously a brilliant one and is difficult to answer, so let me start with the second question.

How much of a force is Golden Dawn today? The short answer is that the high courts in Greece yesterday banned Golden Dawn from participating in the upcoming elections, which is consistent with previous court cases which found that Golden Dawn was a criminal organization (corrupt, etc). 

But there is a separate far-right party which will be able to stand in the election. It is called the Greek Solution (Elliniki Lisi). And opinion polls consistently show that it’s at about 4%, so it will get into parliament. It’s far-right nationalist. 

Golden Dawn was itself a self-avowed neo-Nazi party and members were found in their homes to have Nazi memorabilia. 

How much of a threat is the far right? Far less than it was. Recall that five to seven years ago, Golden Dawn in the European elections was getting something like 15%, so that’s a huge decline. The far right remains taboo in the sense that no party says that it will invite them to join a coalition. That’s more notable for Mitsotakis because he does have a more conventional nationalist right within his party. And the fact that a small party like Greek Solution (Elliniki Lisi) can get into parliament makes it more difficult for New Democracy to get anywhere near an overall majority, simply because in terms of the proportionality if a small party is getting 4% and is getting into parliament, it’s taking votes away from New Democracy.

So the far right and the far left are forces that make majoritarian governments more difficult to achieve, but the far right, in a party sense, is much weaker than 8 years ago. Does it mean that it’s been erased from society? No. Before the rise of the party political expression of the far right, sociologists here (in Greece) would talk about subterranean movements of far-right extremism. And some of those cultural attitudes - extreme nationalism, populism, fake news - continue in Greek society, but they will have much less impact on the elections this year than, say, in 2012.

On the first question - the moral dilemma - from a purely liberal point of view, no it isn’t: you’re creating legal obstacles to the full expression of views. However, what has been banned is a party - Golden Dawn - which was found to have been involved in extreme street violence (in fact, the murder of a singer some years ago) and also to be financially corrupt. So the narrative isn’t simply ‘we won’t allow you to stand for parliament because we don’t like your views.’ The narrative is to say ‘we won’t allow you to stand for parliament because you’ve been found guilty of criminal activity, corruption, and your party members were implicated in the murder of a singer.’ So this isn’t similar to Greece in the 50’s and 60’s, where the Communist Party was banned because it was a communist party. This is banning a party that preaches racial hatred, is involved in street violence, and also happens to be financially corrupt.