Greek election results analysis posted by Richard Seymour

A bit of psephological analysis has been carried out on the recent election results in Greece.  The first finding was that in Athens, about half of police men and women voted for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.  So, think about that next time you see the kindly officers helping protesters on their way with tear gas and batons.  The more substantial survey, however, is here.  I don't have the time to fully parse these, but the key points as appropriated from Facebook are:

• The shift toward Syriza in the core working class vote.  Syriza got 27% of the public sector workers and 21% of the private sector workers. The bulk of its electorate is in generations 35 to 65. 
• The rise of the radical Left throughout the whole working class.  The radical Left (Syriza-KKE-Antarsya) got 55% of the blue-collar vote in the public sector and 45% in the private.  The 'lower' down the working class, the higher their vote.   The radical Left increased its representation among all age demographics except those over 65.
• The dissolution of PASOK in the working class.  Only 10.6% of traditionally strongly PASOK public sector employees votes for the party this time, while only 7% of private sector workers did.  Less than 7% of professionals, lone traders and small to medium bourgeois voted for the party, another demographic which PASOK has historically done much better out of.  Their worst result was among young voters (18-24), from whom they received just over 2% of the vote.  Their highest vote was among pensioners, with 23%.
• The crisis of the traditional/liberal Right.  Only the peasantry (self-employed farmers) remained to a certain extent faithful to their traditional representation on the Right, with over a quarter voting for the New Democracy.
• The fragmentation of the petty bourgeois vote, and the displacement of far right votes.  Most of the Nazi vote is petty-bourgeois, and is formed by dissaffected rightwing and far-right (LAOS) voters. The Golden Dawn received 19.2% of the petty bourgeois vote, the Independent Greeks 13%, and the New Democracy 9.6%.

The flurry of constitutional wrangling to one side - and today's financial and political panics over a Eurozone exit will undoubtedly be used to pressure DIMAR into commiting suicide by throwing itself into a coalition with the austerity parties - is entirely short-term, intended to buy time for the bourgeois parties, the state bureaucracy and the troika to cobble together some solution viable for capital.  But their ability to do so for any length of time depends on their holding the initiative, which they won't if the struggles - strikes, occupations, protests - continue.  Meanwhile, the forms of political representation emerging are profoundly strengthening the Left in ways that could only be reversed by means of a shattering defeat of the working class.

Labels: austerity, class struggle, eurocommunism, european union, greece, left, marxism, neoliberalism, socialism, troika