Dynamics of Polarization in the Greek Case

Abstract

This article focuses on the dynamics of polarization emerging within Greek political culture in the postauthoritarian setting. Following a brief historical framing, we trace Left–Right polarization between the two major parties of the period: Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and New Democracy (ND). The party-based polarization of PASOK/ND was arguably the main axis of political antagonism in Greece from the 1970s until the end of the 2000s. By 2009, polarization had ebbed due to an ideological convergence of the two parties toward the center, but the onset of the 2009 economic crisis dislocated the established two-party system and facilitated the emergence of a new political landscape comprising many new political actors, most notably the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA. Using a predominantly quantitative methodology, we focus on a set of dimensions of polarization brought forward or re-activated within the context of economic crisis.

Keywords

crisis Europe Greece polarization populism

When can one conclude that a legitimate democratic agonism (meaning the respectful assertion of distinct political alternatives) has escalated into raw antagonism and that polarization has reached a risky threshold, mutating into a pernicious phenomenon? What role do political parties and other agents play in this process? How does Left/Right (L/R) polarization intersect with other culture-specific types of “formative rifts” (Somer and McCoy, this volume)? Is it possible to support qualitative accounts with quantitative data to make sense of polarization’s trajectory in a particular setting? In this article, we address such questions by analyzing polarization in postauthoritarian Greece, from 1974 until 2015. We use historiographical, discourse, and quantitative analysis to explain polarization in the Greek case.

In Greece, party polarization along the L/R axis was exacerbated by its civil war (1945–49), which ended when pro-Western forces backed by Britain and the United States defeated the communist-led alliance. The anticommunist legacy of the ensuing Right-wing state, and of the military dictatorship (junta) that followed in 1967–74, laid the foundation for ideological antagonisms that followed the junta’s collapse. That traditional cleavage has co-existed with other types of polarization organized around the ambivalent relationship between Greece and Europe, as well as Greece’s relationship with populist and antipopulist strategies.

Greek political culture has been historically conceptualized in terms of a fundamental division that reflects the country’s vacillating position within the European framework. The story goes back to the formation of the modern Greek state at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since then, Europe has functioned for Greece as both a model and an observer. We know from historical research that Greek citizens, persistently feeling the ambivalence from other Europeans—who were both fascinated by ancient Greece and disappointed by modern Greece—increasingly resented the continuous need to prove to Europe the worth of modern Greek achievement. Greeks felt continuously judged on the progress of the new state following its war of independence (1821–1830) and on its acceptance into mainstream Europe, the European Economic Community (EEC), the European Union (EU) and, finally, the Euro-zone. Harvard anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has described this potent yet ambivalent relation as crypto-colonialism (Herzfeld 2002, 25).

In this context, the standard explanation for the polarized dynamics of Greek political culture posits a division between two distinct, antagonistic, cultural, and political orientations. The theory of cultural dualism, introduced by Nikiforos Dianandouros, understands the Greek political/cultural space as divided between two camps: pro-European modernizers and euro-skeptical traditionalists. In essence, this schema implies that the construction of a modern state in Greece led to “intense social, political, and cultural struggles in which potential beneficiaries and potential losers in the redefinition of power relations within Greece played the central role” (Diamandouros 1994, 8).

Most important, this division has often been associated with the debate around populism that has diachronically marked the Greek case—after all, Greece is often described as a populist democracy marked throughout by a deeply polarized political culture (Pappas 2014, 8). To the extent that Diamandouros’s second camp of euro-skeptic traditionalists is predominantly populist (he himself calls it an “underdog culture”), polarization in Greek politics has been described as tending to “reduce the space for party competition to a single dimension, which presumably exists between a majority (the masses, the people, the underprivileged, the poor) and some minority (the elites, the establishment, the privileged, the rich)” (Pappas 2014, 58). Although this picture does not adequately capture periods in which “modernization,” the “middle ground,” or the “center” has functioned as the holy grail of party competition and identification (1996–2009), it can illuminate important periods of recent history.

Over time, the relationship between the dimensions of polarization has fluctuated between a L/R cleavage, a pro-European/anti-European cleavage, and a populist/anti-populist one. Whether we call it crypto-colonialism or cultural dualism, none can deny that polarized dynamics have marked political culture in postauthoritarian Greece and require urgent attention, especially in times of crisis that threaten the cohesion of many polities internationally. In what follows, we develop many of these analytical angles, briefly covering some of the highlights of the early period in question but placing more emphasis on recent developments to capture how all these cleavages have interacted with each other, ushering in a period of instability and democratic careening.

Axes of Polarization in Postauthoritarian Greece

The polarization matrix in the early 1980s

The 1980s were dominated by Andreas Papandreou and his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a Left-wing populist party (Stavrakakis 2014, 2016) that highlighted the socioeconomic demands of sectors of the population that had been largely excluded in the long period between the civil war (1945–49) and the junta (1967–74). In the 1981 general election, PASOK won an outright majority in parliament with more than 48 percent of the vote. Politically, “PASOK opted for polarization rather than moderation. Indeed, the new government adopted an openly and consistently confrontational political strategy” (Kalyvas 1997, 84). This is not surprising given that PASOK represented social strata that had felt alienated from equal rights and legitimate access to decision-making for a long time (Katsambekis and Stavrakakis 2017, 6–7).

The polarization strategy was not limited to PASOK. Both PASOK and the Right-wing New Democracy (ND) party used a “discourse which presented the social and political space as divided into two opposed fields” (Lyrintzis 1987, 671). They claimed to represent incompatible political camps and made conscious and unrelenting efforts to undermine one another’s legitimacy. Depictions of the enemy were thus instrumental in constructing the distinct identity of the two camps. On one hand, PASOK claimed that ND stood for authoritarianism, the oligarchy, and foreign interests (Kalyvas 1997, 86). Thus, “the Right was depicted as one and indivisible from the collaborationist Security Battalions of the Second World War through the Civil War, the subsequent repressive parliamentary regime and then the military dictatorship, up to its most recent reincarnation as New Democracy” (Pridham and Verney 1991, 46). On the other hand, “ND argued that PASOK’s ultimate objective was to subvert the democratic regime, while the government was often referred to as the ‘junta of PASOK’” (Kalyvas 1997, 88). Importantly, polarization was not just an elite phenomenon but affected the whole social fabric: it “was particularly felt at the mass level of politics as society became bitterly divided between the seemingly irreconcilable supporters of the two major parties.” Even coffee shops were separated “throughout the country into ‘green’ and ‘blue’ according to the partisan identities of their patrons. The press and state-controlled electronic media also engaged in partisanship, thus further reinforcing social and political polarization” (Pappas 2014, 28).

How can we make sense of this polarization dynamic? What trajectory has it followed in the years since? Arguably, PASOK incarnated both a horizontal ideological (L/R), and a vertical populist (top/bottom, high/low) type of polarization. At the same time, its anti-EEC and anti-NATO discourses of the 1970s were soon replaced by a more pragmatic orientation, perhaps indicating that these were of overdetermined, secondary importance. Let us start by considering L/R polarization.

L/R polarization trends, 1985–2015

Figure 1 shows the development of L/R party polarization in Greece from 1985 to 2015.¹ Following the divisions of the early 1980s, polarization decreased, though it showed volatility. To better understand the mechanism producing variability in the L/R polarization index,² we can split the period into two parts. The first part, which can be described as the period of PASOK and ND dominance, covers the elections from 1985 until 2009. The second part covers the period of the financial crisis, the bailout agreement, and the enforcement of strict austerity measures that signaled the end of that dominance.

Table 1 shows the sum of vote shares received by PASOK and ND together from 1985 to 2009. In this period, this sum was very high (from 77.4 percent to 86.9 percent), indicating that Greece was under a two-party system. Thus, for this period it makes sense to focus on these two parties.

Table 1

Sum of Vote Shares of PASOK and ND

Year	1985	1989	1990	1993	1996	2000	2004	2007	2009
PASOK+ND	86.7%	86.9%	85.5%	86.2%	79.6%	86.5%	85.9%	79.9%	77.4%

Party polarization in this two-party period took place mostly on the Left/Right (L/R) dimension. How did the L/R positioning of the two parties develop in this period? As Figure 2 shows, the period started with a large distance between PASOK and ND voters (0.38 in 1985), and it remained greater than 0.33 (i.e., more than one-third of the scale) in all election years until 2007. But the distance suddenly fell to 0.26 in 2009, as the voters of the two parties approached the center.

Comparing Figures 1 and 2 reveals that much of the polarization index variability between 1985 and 2004 can be attributed to movements of PASOK and ND voters. For instance, from 1985 to 1989 the voters of both parties moved toward the center and the distance between the parties became smaller. Figure 1 reveals a similar drop in the polarization index. Later, from 1996 to 2000, ND voters moved almost one-tenth of the scale to the Right (increasing their distance from PASOK), and in 2004 they fell back close to their 1996 position (decreasing their distance from PASOK). Figure 1 again shows a similar fluctuation of the polarization index during the same period. All in all, the trend is one of convergence: the two main parties and their voters moved toward the center, although the tendency was more pronounced on PASOK’s part, possibly reflecting global trends among social-democratic parties.

Clearly, this trend involved a gradual softening of L/R polarization—which morphed into a center-Left/center-Right opposition—and the dominance of antipopulist actors and discourses in the party system and the public sphere. Arguably, democracy was initially consolidated in the context of a polarized political system in which Left-wing (populist/progressive) and Right-wing (anti-populist/conservative) forces, represented by PASOK and ND respectively, defended competing programs and thus built and disseminated antagonistic collective identities (see Voulgaris 2001; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2018). However, polarization soon gave way to a discourse of consensus, accompanied by constant denunciation of populism by both the PASOK of Costas Simitis and the ND of Kostas Karamanlis, who launched a new communication strategy of Bill Clinton-inspired “triangulation” in the late 1990s (Katsambekis 2016a).

Religious populism in the new century

Two anomalies interrupted the aforementioned trend of decreasing polarization, in 2000 and 2007. The second peak (in 2007) was not related to a significant movement of ND or PASOK voters: although the positions of the two major parties had not changed significantly (in comparison with 2004), polarization rose to one of its highest values in 2007. Two factors explain why polarization was no longer as strongly dependent on the ND and PASOK distance. First, the sum of the ND and PASOK vote share dropped below 80 percent. Second, the smaller parties that were represented in the Greek Parliament after the elections of 2007 embraced rather extreme L/R positions: The Communist Party of Greece (KKE, 0.13), the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA, 0.26), and the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS, 0.81).

At that time, SYRIZA was under the leadership of Alekos Alavanos, who took more radical positions than had his successor Alexis Tsipras. Under Tsipras, SYRIZA’s L/R position moved closer to the center of the scale (contributing to the lower values of the L/R polarization index after 2009). In fact, the voters of all five parliamentary parties moved toward the center in 2009, resulting in the smallest value of the polarization index during the period in Greece.

The first peak of L/R polarization (2000) seems to coincide with one of the most striking developments in Greek politics around the turn of the century: the politicization of Church discourse. This politicization followed the decision by the center-Left (modernizing and antipopulist), Simitis-led PASOK government to exclude references to religion from Greek identity cards. This decision caused an extraordinary reaction on the part of the Greek Orthodox Church, a reaction that polarized Greek society and dominated political life and media coverage for most of 2000 and 2001.

The newly elected Archbishop Christodoulos led a campaign to oppose the decision, articulating a discourse that was marked by a clearly political profile. The campaign included mass rallies in Thessaloniki and Athens that were attended by hundreds of thousands of people, press conferences in the media, and an effort to gather as many signatures as possible calling for a referendum on the issue. This phase of populist mobilization ended in September 2001 after the Church’s referendum demand was declared unconstitutional by both the constitutional court and the President of the Republic, a very popular conservative politician (Stavrakakis 2002, 2003).

What is significant here is that by the early 2000s the initial vehicle of populist polarization (PASOK) seems to have shifted toward an antipopulist, modernizing position (Lyrintzis 2005; Katsambekis 2016a). And with ND also following an antipopulist trajectory, the populist baton was passed on to a religious institution that articulated a populist strategy with nationalist and anti-European elements and a conservative ideology (hence the peak in L/R polarization). Yet this rather episodic occurrence had no salient, long-term effects on L/R polarization or on positions toward the EU (which was one of the main targets of the Archbishop’s discourse, without, however, ceasing to be a target for funding programs initiated by the Church). At any rate, Archbishop Christodoulos’s death in 2008 has denied the Church a more active role in recent years; his successor being somewhat more conciliatory.

The austerity effect, 2009–2015

In many international contexts, economic and social dislocations (such as the Venezuelan Caracazo in 1989, Argentina’s default in the early 2000s, or the Greek debt crisis of the past few years) have triggered crises of representation that served as the springboard for polarization. Such crises are bound to create both populist mobilizations and antipopulist reactions, increasing polarization and potentially favoring a pernicious outcome. Especially in times of crisis, when ruling elites fail to deal with economic frustration and social dislocation, calls for political radicalization are often and summarily denounced as “populist,” establishing a deep populist/antipopulist divide.

SYRIZA’s meteoric rise in contemporary Greek politics, its elevation from a political outsider that attracted a mere 4.6 percent of the vote in the 2009 elections to a party of government that got 36.4 percent in the January 2015 elections (and almost replicating that result in September 2015) provides a suitable example. Between 2012 and 2015, the party’s discourse chiefly involved (1) putting forward an antagonistic representation of the sociopolitical field along an us/them dichotomy, and (2) elevating “the people” to the position of the privileged signifier representing “us” in a manner allowing diverse groups hit by the crisis to identify themselves with this position (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; Katsambekis 2016b). Needless to say, this populist stance became the target of a variety of antipopulist discourses in politics and the media that singled out populism itself—a synecdoche of political evil projected onto SYRIZA—as the source of the crisis and of the failure to effectively deal with it (Stavrakakis 2014; Stavrakakis et al. 2018).

Radically diverging from the Eurocentric conventional wisdom that stereotypically casts populism as reactionary, nationalist, xenophobic, exclusionary, and anti-European, SYRIZA argued for a politically integrated and solidary Europe, defended immigrants and socially marginalized sectors, and pressed for social rights, claiming to fight for popular sovereignty, social justice, and democratization (Spourdalakis 2014; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; Stavrakakis et al. 2018). SYRIZA has attracted populist voters who support positions that are very different from the leftist positions of the party on both the economic and sociocultural L/R dimensions (Andreadis and Stavrakakis 2017). In fact, even conservative populist voters who have strong pro-EU attitudes seem to have chosen SYRIZA over the Right-wing populist party ANEL (Hawkins, Rovira Kaltwasser, and Andreadis 2018). In this sense, SYRIZA is very different from many other populist parties, including the populist PASOK of the 1980s, although many similarities exist at the level of political communication and discursive framing. SYRIZA’s “paradox” was that it espoused a pro-European orientation that, at the same time, clashed with the dominant ordoliberal economic orientation of the euro-zone.

As we have seen, from 1974 onward a two-party system prevailed in which ND and PASOK, Right and Left, alternated in power. After the 1980s, the policies of the two parties gradually converged—with PASOK first adopting a social-democratic profile and then more liberalized economic policies—toward the antipopulist and EU-oriented center, and polarization subsided. What dislocated the system were the systemic failures associated with the 2008 global economic collapse and the way it was administered by dominant elites. GDP in Greece contracted by 20 percent between 2008 and 2012, and unemployment soared to 27 percent, with youth unemployment reaching 60 percent. The disastrous management of these systemic failures by the established political class resulted in wider intensification of social dislocations. This exacerbated indignation and discontent directed at the dominant regime of democratic representation (the two-party system) established after the transition to democracy, stimulating massive protest movements, including demonstrations, strikes, and square occupations (Stavrakakis et al. 2018). Once more, such a political choreography has not been peculiar to Greece alone; it bears striking resemblances to the historical trajectory of Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Argentina. But it has been one of the foremost examples of such a semiperipheral dynamic within the EU and the Euro-zone.³

In this context, the role of the Greek Indignants (aganaktismenoi) has been crucial (Pappas 2014, 83), signaling a second instance, after religious populism, in which civil society has taken the lead in reshaping the public sphere and overdetermining political developments. And yet institutions remained largely insular to these demands. At this juncture, certain social actors started searching for new vehicles of political representation that would overcome the fragmentation and political impotence of the multitudes, organizing them and gaining access to power. Indeed, it was obviously impossible for the ensuing frustration, anger, and despair to leave party identification and the political process untouched during a series of consecutive early elections (twice in 2012 and then in early 2015). The parties affected included those entrusted to implement tough austerity policies by the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (the so-called troika). Some of those parties, such as PASOK, have all but collapsed, with the main beneficiary being a former outsider, SYRIZA. As populism often does, SYRIZA thus emerged from the sidelines as a new response to the crisis of political representation, a crisis it partly created by attributing the blame for the socioeconomic dislocation since 2008 to the economic and political “establishment” (both national and European) to legitimize a populist re-democratization (Stavrakakis et al. 2018).

Polarization was a crucial strategy here, as it had been for Papandreou in the 1970s and 1980s (Pappas 2014, 29). Once more, then, the populist articulation of political antagonism has migrated to the Left, indeed the radical Left, following the short interval of religious populism in the early 2000s—and the radical Right populism of fringe parties such as LAOS that tried to capitalize on it. If, however, PASOK’s surge in the early 1980s was conditioned by the demands of previously excluded sectors to enjoy equal rights and access to decision-making, SYRIZA’s dynamic represented the demands of sectors hit by the crisis and alienated by the established party system and international/EU institutions.

In other words, if the PASOK of the 1970s and 1980s sought to express and represent social strata mainly Left of center, which had been excluded, marginalized, and mistreated for decades due to their ideological positioning (alleged or real), SYRIZA now claimed to represent those hit by austerity policies—those impoverished and marginalized because of the way the two traditional parties (PASOK and ND) had chosen to deal with the crisis. SYRIZA especially targeted people who were frustrated with PASOK’s turn to neoliberal policies, which had devastating effects on the electoral base it had built from the mid-1970s onward.

And what about attitudes toward Europe and the EU? The selection of SYRIZA’s coalition partner after the January 2015 elections, as well as the culmination of a bumpy negotiation with Greece’s Euro-zone partners and lenders in an extremely polarized referendum (July 5, 2015), initially seemed to point toward a confrontation with the EU. Yet SYRIZA’s eventual agreement to a new bailout memorandum may have signaled a turning point. As already noted, SYRIZA’s attacks on the troika and the hegemonic policies of the Euro-zone did not involve an outright anti-European agenda, which would have clashed with the crypto-colonial identification regulating the attachment of many Greeks to the European project (Stavrakakis and Siomos 2016). As soon as the fantasy of “changing Europe” met its pragmatic limits, revealing the paradox plaguing SYRIZA’s main demand (“Yes to the EU, No to austerity”), SYRIZA faced a dramatic dilemma. Like Papandreou’s pragmatic U-turn in the early 1980s, the SYRIZA leadership opted to compromise, accepting the EU-imposed rules and opting for continuity in the country’s geopolitical positioning. The compromise led to a split in the party, with the more Euro-skeptic faction establishing a new party, Popular Unity.

SYRIZA’s compromise with the EU was largely endorsed by the electorate in the September 2015 elections, in which SYRIZA reproduced, more or less, the result of January 2015. At the same time, however, the anti-European attitude, formed in the context of the continuing brutal enforcement of austerity and the failure of SYRIZA’s attempt to challenge it, only grew stronger. The party system in its form as of this writing—including SYRIZA—seems unable to represent this anti-EU sentiment in a consistent manner, but only the future can tell whether this will remain the case.

Polarization Beyond the Established Party System: New Challenges

The years 2012 and 2015 each saw two elections. Party polarization on the L/R dimension was low. Thus, we need to examine whether during this period the Greek electorate was polarized on other dimensions.

Our data from 2015 include numerous items that can be used to study polarization in additional dimensions, but the suitable variables in the 2012 study are limited. Table 2 shows the average scores on two dimensions based on questions asked in 2012. (The details of these questions are presented in the online appendix). The variables range from 0 to 1, with larger values indicating more negative attitudes toward the EU and the bailout agreements. For the first variable, the minimum value (0) corresponds to attributing no responsibility to external factors (the EU, Germany, the IMF, and credit rating agencies) and Greece’s participation in Euro-zone. The maximum value (1) appears when respondents think that all the aforementioned foreign actors are responsible for their economic situation.

Table 2

Attitudes toward the EU and the Bailout Agreement per Party in 2012

	Blame foreigners		EU membership is bad
	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
ND	0.57	0.213	0.20	0.289
SYRIZA-EKM	0.65	0.208	0.39	0.353
PASOK	0.61	0.276	0.26	0.291
ANEL	0.69	0.220	0.49	0.390
LS-XA	0.74	0.215	0.46	0.398
DIMAR	0.57	0.184	0.20	0.273
KKE	0.76	0.218	0.72	0.402
Total	0.63	0.226	0.34	0.349

The Greek electorate’s average blame-foreigners score is 0.63. This average score indicates that Greek citizens think that foreign actors are largely to blame for their difficult economic situation. The polarization index for the blame-foreigners dimension is rather low (0.10), indicating that most citizens are on the same side, that is, they agree on blaming foreign actors and institutions. The harsh austerity measures enforced under the bailout agreements are the main reason for the generally negative attitude toward the bailout and for blaming the EU and other foreign actors, especially since, as Teperoglou et al (2014) have demonstrated, all Greek political parties that have elected members in the Greek parliament have encouraged this view (for more details about blame-shifting to the EU, see Teperoglou and Andreadis 2012).

Finally, the average score for the item that measures negative attitudes toward EU membership is much lower (0.34), indicating that, besides the aforementioned blame attribution, the majority of the 2012 Greek electorate wanted Greece to remain a member of the EU.⁴ Of the two dimensions studied using ELNES 2012 data, this one has the higher polarization index (0.23), but, even in this case, the index is still not very high. This is because the only party with a clear negative attitude toward the EU is KKE, and its voters represent a small part of the Greek electorate.

To further illustrate the development of negative attitudes toward the EU, Figure 3 presents findings from the 2004, 2009, and 2014 European Election Studies datasets (Egmond et al. 2017; Schmitt et al. 2009; Schmitt, Hobolt, et al. 2016) and the Hellenic National Election Studies dataset (2012). The bars represent the mean value of attitudes toward the EU from 2004 to 2014 (0 is the most positive; 1 the most negative). In 2004 and 2009, before the crisis, the mean values are about 0.15, indicating that almost all Greeks evaluate EU membership as a good thing. After the crisis, the mean value increases significantly, to about 0.35 in 2012 and 2014, indicating that a significant part of the electorate no longer maintains its positive evaluation of EU membership. This development affects the trajectory of the polarization index along the EU membership dimension (depicted by the line on the diagram). In 2004 and 2009, the polarization index was very low (about 0.1), but as the portion of the electorate with negative attitudes toward EU membership grew, a rather different situation appeared after the crisis. In 2012, and even more so in 2014, polarization over EU membership is much higher, reflecting the role of European institutions in imposing austerity and the postdemocratic trend in decision-making.

For 2015, we have much richer data. ELNES 2015a includes a battery of questions about populist attitudes (see Stavrakakis, Andreadis, and Katsambekis 2017). It also includes statements from the Voting Advice Application (VAA) “HelpMeVote 2015” (Andreadis 2015). These capture the most important issues of political competition in Greece at the beginning of 2015 (the items used in this study are presented in Tables A1 and A2 in the online appendix). Three dimensions merit particular attention. The first comprises economic issues and attitudes toward the bailout agreements and the EU, the second comprises exclusively the items from a populism battery, while the third corresponds to sociocultural attitudes. On the sociocultural dimension, the polarization index is 0.17; on the populist dimension, it is 0.16. The highest polarization index, 0.29, occurs on the economy/anti-EU dimension. This finding shows that attitudes toward the EU were polarizing the Greek electorate, and that pro/anti-EU polarization was closely associated with the austerity measures enforced by the bailout agreements (similar conclusions can be drawn from following the Eurobarometer surveys).

Conclusion

Polarization has been present in Greek political culture throughout the postauthoritarian era, which began in 1974. As it reformulated cleavages emanating from the Greek Civil War, if not earlier, and purported to deal with a variety of challenges (e.g., democratic consolidation, socioeconomic incorporation of previously excluded strata, accession to the EEC, adoption of the Euro, and debt crisis), the political system has seen the dimensions and intensity of polarization fluctuate significantly. A brief review of some milestones in this trajectory, complemented by an analysis of discourse and opinion surveys, has helped us to somewhat clarify a complex choreography.

Polarization was established in the 1970s and early 1980s at both the leadership and popular level through the effective partisan performance of PASOK, which dominated the political field against a Right wing seen as incarnating, even in a much reduced form, the legacy of the exclusionary state that emerged after the Greek Civil War. Its institutionalization, however, also relied on the defeated ND’s vitriolic reproaches of PASOK. During this period, the L/R axis, together with the populist/antipopulist frontier, seemed to attract most of the symbolic and affective dynamic of political polarization. Although positioning vis-à-vis Europeanization was also invoked at the discursive level, this failed to influence policy and slowly receded from the horizon, a fact that seems to corroborate the crypto-colonial hypothesis rather than the “cultural dualism” thesis. Arguably, during this period polarization operated more as a booster of than an obstacle to democratization, since it did not lead to pernicious effects.

From the mid-1980s onward, polarization seemed to moderate, and eventually the two main parties and their supporters seemed to converge on the middle ground, with the exception of the period around the identity cards crisis and the inclusion of religious belonging. This trajectory seemed to follow international trends of postpolitical consensus and was made possible by the upward social mobility marking this period, the achievement of reforms giving access to previously excluded groups, economic development through EU support, and the dominance of antipopulist modernization discourses.

In terms of quantitative data, during the first period (until 2009), polarization was measured on the L/R dimension only; it depends mostly on ideological movements of PASOK or ND. Yet a significant drop in L/R polarization can be observed toward the end of this period, in 2009. This trend coincides with the onset of the economic crisis and the increasing inability of the established party system to manage it in politically credible ways. In the second period, 2012–15, L/R polarization remained low, possibly signifying that the dynamic emergence of the radical Left SYRIZA was not premised on identification with its radical ideological profile on the part of broader social strata. It seems that SYRIZA managed to represent new demands that arose (or re-emerged) during the crisis for two reasons: all other established political forces from the Left and Right had been discredited, and SYRIZA assumed the representation of popular grievances developed on other axes.

Yet those grievances were paradoxical and contradictory. To the extent that the administration of the crisis partly emanated from abroad (and was experienced as such) and largely ignored popular grievances and protests, it caused an internal split in attitudes toward the EU and Europe. Faced with an overwhelming challenge, Greece’s external environment was effectively represented in terms of a pervasive split between a “bad object” (the troika, EU institutions, etc.) and a “good object” (European orientation and belonging in general terms).⁵ With its populist discourse, SYRIZA managed to express this inherently divided orientation against the established party system. And yet, exactly like PASOK in the 1980s, its orientation following the July 2015 referendum seems to reveal the reluctance of political elites (including the SYRIZA leadership), as well as a significant part of the electorate, to put in doubt the country’s membership in the EU and its overall geopolitical positioning.

It may be that this development will leave an emerging Euro-skeptic orientation devoid of political representation. That will depend on whether the government as of this writing can partially satisfy—even at the symbolic level—demands pertaining to the elite vs. people dimension and alleviate economic grievances related to high unemployment, falling wages, and a collapsing welfare state; that is, to quote Melanie Klein, whether it can manage a more or less “smooth” passage from the “schizoid” to the “depressive” position (Klein 1975). In the 1980s, Andreas Papandreou managed to use polarization in a way that enhanced democratization on a variety of levels without destabilizing the country’s European course. Dealing with a more intrusive Europe seeking to impose severe limits on economic and popular sovereignty, SYRIZA’s task is much more formidable now. Much will depend on whether the currently orphaned anti-EU resentment will eventually find avenues of political representation establishing it, for the first time, as a salient axis of polarization. Could the Communist Party, KKE, or even Golden Dawn capitalize on this situation? Only the next general elections, scheduled for 2019, will adequately illuminate this question. At any rate, at a rhetorical level, and notwithstanding SYRIZA’s change of course, the discourse toward SYRIZA of parties such as ND and PASOK remains very negative, indicating that the ongoing democratic careening has no predetermined outcome.⁶

Supplemental Material

Online_Appendix – Supplemental material for Dynamics of Polarization in the Greek Case

Supplemental material, Online_Appendix for Dynamics of Polarization in the Greek Case by Jennifer McCoy, Murat Somer, Ioannis Andreadis and Yannis Stavrakakis in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Footnotes

Notes

Ioannis Andreadis is an associate professor of quantitative methods in the social sciences at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is a member of the steering committee of the Comparative Candidate Survey, and national collaborator for the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.

Yannis Stavrakakis has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham and is currently a professor of political discourse analysis at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since 2014 he has been directing the POPULISMUS Observatory.

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