Greece 2012

[Peter the Lefty]

ND was in the Papademos government if I am not wrong.

But not the Papandreau one. 

[Peter the Lefty]

ND was in the Papademos government if I am not wrong.

But not the Papandreau one.  

Yes but what do you mean saying this? The fact is that there's still a majority against the memorandum and this is the reason why ND and PASOK are below their former numbers.

What I'm saying, and what Jaichind is saying, is that PASOK claims that a government whose parties got 41% between them wouldn't have democratic legitimacy, yet in 2009, they had no problem forming a government whose only party got 43%.  I didn't realize that there's a magic number between 41 and 43 that they think gives democratic legitimacy.  

[Peter the Lefty]

God, I hope that Hollande manages to mitigate the German austerity.  That is, if he even cares.  Which I'm now getting the sense that he doesn't. 

[Peter the Lefty]

God, I hope that Hollande manages to mitigate the German austerity.  That is, if he even cares.  Which I'm now getting the sense that he doesn't. 

Actually I've been kinda surprised of the rather firm tone that Hollande/Ayrault/Moscovici have taken with Germany, became suddenly kinda, tensed.

That being said, a tone is a tone and some words are some words, Sarkozy had used us with so much impressive big words, and...

True things will happen on the end of June, 28th iirc...

Well, he keeps telling Greece that it has to stick to its previous commitments or be kicked out of the eurozone.  Seems like he's sold out to me.

[Peter the Lefty]

Nah, there hasn't been something like that, it's not at all the Hollande/new govt style. The point is that Hollande focuses more on building new general rules for the Politico-Economic ruling of Euro Zone rather than on focusing on Greece particularly.

The point is that he supports the austerity measures that've already been imposed.  So, he's part of the pro-austerity circles, even if he's more pro-growth than the rest. 

[Peter the Lefty]

I believe that should there be a third election, Dimar voters would "vote utile" for Syriza, at least a number of them, in order to get Syriza the majority premium of 50 seats. So Dimar has their last shot at being in charge with a nice parliamentary group...

Not only that- if Dimar didn't enter government, they'd probably lose a lot of their moderate voters to PASOK.  

Exactly. DIMAR ran on a platform promising to join the government whichever party came first and acting as a moderating factor that would stop the extremes from ND and SYRIZA from taking total control of the government. And that's exactly what they did.

For example, they vetoed Samaras's intention to put in the government fascists like Voridis and Georgiadis and to repeal our version of the DREAM act which opened a path to citizenship for immigrants that came here as kids and attended greek schools.

Wow...you'd think PASOK would've vetoed that decision anyway.