The Minister of Education Nikos Filis obviously has the purity of thought that characterizes many of the “fighters of the Left”. The “Rigas Feraios” youth party of KKE Interior has always been likeable, ever since it emerged during the dictatorship.
In contrast to KNE, the youth party of KKE, the “Rigas Feraios” party was considered moderate and prone to forming alliances with other democratic parties.
Its evolution is well-documented. At the end of the 1980s, KKE’s leadership (Charilaos Florakis and Grigoris Farakos) agreed with Leonidas Kyrkos (of KKE Interior) to form the “Coalition of the Left and Progress”. It was the first step that got the ball rolling and brought everything else. The two parties from the traditional left formed a government coalition with the Right. Many Greeks could not believe their ears when the alliance between New Democracy and the Coalition was announced.
Times changes and recently it was the centrists (PASOK etc) who proposed an alliance with the transformed Coalition, only to get a resounding no. The Coalition won the elections and when it realized that was left with the hot potato, it proposed a consensus etc. The centrist parties refused to collude with SYRIZA, clearly in hopes that the governing party will have a worse future than PASOK.
The brief description of the political developments from PASOK’s major electoral win (in 1981) until its present decline is obviously didactic.
Of course, on the playing field today, aside from the reds and greens, there are also multicolored players who are hoping for a stray ball so that they can kick it too.
If they are monsters, it would be saner for the two major parties to reach an agreement so that the trimmings of the political process are outside the loop.
Stavros P. Psycharis
Originally published in the Sunday print edition
