The Greek General Election of 2009: PASOK – The Third Generation

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Notes

Given the proximity between the two last elections, no space is given here to review the trajectory of the parties taking part in this election. Interested readers are referred to the recent WEP electoral note about the previous election (Dinas 2008a). For other recent reports in this series, see Luther (2009), Wilson (2009), and Lisi (2010).

In adopting this strategy the main struggle was to convince the public that this pessimistic picture was due only to the global financial crisis.

Since 1974 and with the exception of the 1990 administration of ND, each newly elected government in Greece has renewed its mandate in the next election.

The electoral system that gave to PASOK an easy parliamentary majority with 44 per cent vote share is the same as the one under which the 2007 election was held, i.e. a mixed system which clearly favours the winning party: 260 seats are distributed proportionally among the parties passing the 3 per cent threshold and the remaining 40 seats are given as a bonus to the first party.

Reflected also in Portugal – see Lisi (2010).

The only obscure point in this otherwise innovative initiative was the ex-post declaration on TV by the vice-President (a position re-discovered by Papandreou, since it has been almost never used by Greek governments – a yet another sign of the new Prime Minister's influence by the American system of government) that candidates older than 60 years old will not be given further consideration. Ironically enough, the vice-President, a historical PASOK figure, was born in 1938.

Although this might seem a very anecdotal argument, it should be seen in combination with the main puzzle of this election, Karamanlis' arguably irrational choice to call this early election.

The question compares the leaders of the two major parties in terms of who is considered to be more efficacious as a Prime Minister. Given that one of them is the current Prime Minister whereas the other (either during PASOK's term or during ND's administration) has never served in this post, there is a clear bias in favour of the first. That worked well for PASOK during its last term in office and when all other indicators were unfavourable for the party, but it soon had the reverse results, since it was also used extensively as a sign of ND's primacy during Karamanlis' term.

The most telling example of this pattern was ND's re-election right after the outbreak of the fires just before the 2007 election.