Mitsotakis must avoid repeating his predecessors' mistakes
By Thanos Dimadis
The new celebratory victory of Mitsotakis and the resounding defeat of Tsipras and SYRIZA is the answer the people gave to the questions and dilemmas posed by the dual ballots. Questions such as who is worthy and who is unworthy to govern the country, whose pre-election commitments are reliable and whose are unreliable, and whose programmatic staffing in terms of content and political power emits credibility or vileness. The electoral downfall of Tsipras and SYRIZA was predetermined, just as the continuation of their decline until their final political annihilation is inevitable. Buildings collapse in a strong earthquake because their foundations are weak, just as political formations like these disintegrate when they expand overnight, fueled by opportunism, fabricated ideologies, and a mania for pursuing their opponents. SYRIZA emerged with callous indifference stemming from the era of its omnipotence, considering mortal enemies anyone who stood in the way of the fiction with which it plundered political rationality and rational realism, turning the public life of the country into an infinite asylum, with staged persecutions of politicians and journalists and corrupt practices that were legally condemned through a Special Court and were condemned again today through elections.
Alongside Tsipras and SYRIZA, the majority of the people simultaneously rejected the orchestrated attacks, character assassinations, and manipulated publications through which the army of paid celebrities and anonymous benefactors conducted their politics, injecting into Greek society the new wave of tomorrowism with targeted, defamatory, homophobic, and vulgar speech taken from the headlines of the '80s and '90s. In SYRIZA, convicts, amoralists, and unprosecuted individuals found refuge, condemning the notion of excellence but essentially attempting the deconstruction of democracy. They sought to level any notion of professional, social, and academic excellence to transform democracy into a demagogic regime where mediocrity is rewarded, hard work for success and recognition is futile, and the opinions of experts carry minimal weight as they are considered equally valid as the opinions of anonymous trolls and proponents of Populism.
A new page is being written in Greece's modern political history, one that certainly holds more optimistic prospects than what our history recorded in the previous decade. New Democracy won, but Mitsotakis is the one who emerged victorious, and the victory is credited personally to him. Now, the great challenge for Mitsotakis is not to repeat the same mistake made by his predecessors in the prime minister's chair. Kostas Karamanlis and George Papandreou received similar broad-scale popular mandates to "change everything," but they proved to be inferior to the circumstances and the expectations of history.
By 2027, Mitsotakis has the duty to deliver a Greece where citizens know that the state protects law-abiding citizens, justice does not tolerate impunity with slow-paced dispensation, they have access to secure healthcare, the elderly have a dignified life, the youth have a future in the private sector and entrepreneurship, the political system is subject to substantive and not superficial accountability, and bureaucracy gives way to productivity. By 2027, Mitsotakis has the duty to deliver a Greece where citizens will be proud of their homeland, their values, and their culture, where the potential of the nation is fully realized, and the country stands strong and united in the international community.