Impact of fires on Greece's upcoming elections not yet clear

04/09/2007

With New Democracy still ahead in the polls, smaller parties appear to have benefitted the most from public outrage.

By George Anagnostopoulos for Southeast European Times in Athens - 04/09/07

A wreath hangs on a burnt firefighting truck outside the village of Artemida in the Peloponnese peninsula. [Getty Images]

The Greek flag is flying at half-staff on public buildings, as the final death toll from five days of devastating fires rose to 65. With the assistance of 13 countries, the fires have finally been put out.

Given the scope of the disaster, many expected significant political fallout. Thousands lost their homes as villages were consumed. The blazes destroyed 500,000 acres of forests and farmland and more than 4.5 million olive trees. Countless domestic animals perished. The inferno, the worst the country has seen in a century, came just weeks before early general elections scheduled for September 16th.

While Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and his ruling New Democracy (ND) party blamed arsonists and "environmental terrorists", parties across the political spectrum focused their ire on the government's handling of the crisis, accusing it of incompetence.

Surveys taken after the fires, however, all pointed to an interesting phenomenon. Despite the barrage of criticism, ND remains ahead in the polls, by a margin of anywhere from 0.7% to 3.5%.

The same surveys suggest that two-thirds of the population were not happy with the way the fires were managed, and one out of two think it's mainly the government's fault. Nevertheless, the ruling party has lost only one or two percentage points.

PASOK, the main opposition party, does not appear to have benefitted politically from the situation. It ruled the country for more than a decade before being defeated by the ND in March 2004, and has been faulted for neglecting to amend weak environmental protection laws while in power.

Taking advantage of public anger, far-right extremists and other fringe parties are seen as making the best of the current situation, drawing concern that they could enter parliament for the first time.

Smaller parties are among those favoured. When asked, many voters of the two main parties seem to have drifted to marginal left- and right-wing parties, while about 11% say they are undecided.

"These fires have seen the popularity of the smaller parties rise," a report Tuesday (September 4th) by the British daily Independent quoted Dimitris Sotiropoulos, a senior analyst at the regional think-tank Eliamep, as saying. "This is as a result of the incapability of the state to prevent the fires, then to deal with them and finally to resolve the situation."

Widely circulated emails and blog posts are urging people to vote for anyone but the two main parties. Such calls express a general feeling among Greeks that it was not just the current government's fault that there was no infrastructure to handle these fires. Rather, many believe, this was a failure of successive past governments as well.

Politically, this means that five parties could make it into parliament. Greece could soon find itself with a weak government, dependent on an alliance with smaller political forces.

Southeast European Times correspondent Svetla Dimitrova contributed to this report.