Sunday, June 24, 2012
Greek election results analysis posted by Richard Seymour
A detailed analysis of the latest election results has been published in Dawn, the Synaspismos-aligned newspaper. The results confirm a trend toward sharp social differentiation, with class, age and geographical boundaries hardening. The main findings are:*Class polarisation. The business and employer class gave 35.9% of its vote to New Democracy and 20.3% to Golden Dawn. Self-employed farmers also gave New Democracy 35.9% of its vote, and Golden Dawn received 7.5%. Meanwhile, SYRIZA mobilised 32.5% and 32% of public and private sector workers, respectively. Intriguingly, it mobilised similar proportions of the unemployed and artisans, and slightly higher shares of the vote among the sub-categories of skilled workers and middle manager ranks in the public sector.
*Age polarisation. Existing breakdowns had indicated a sharp polarisation by generation, with voters over 55 years old giving the two main austerity parties a far higher share of the vote than the rest. This analysis confirms the trend. Among 18-24 year olds, only 2.4% voted for PASOK, but 45.5% votes for SYRIZA. Those over 65 gave 49.4% of their vote to New Democracy and 19.1% to PASOK. Interestingly, the generation politically formed in the dictatorship era and the struggle against the Colonels seems to be the last stronghold of the two parties which emerged as the dominant forces in the metapolitefsi.
*Spatial polarisation. Being unfamiliar with the geographical terrain in Greece, I don't find it easy to parse the results. The imprecision of Google's translation makes it harder. But it seems we can see the following trends: key to New Democracy's victory was the mobilisation of bourgeois votes in high to medium-sized areas; SYRIZA mobilised voters in working and middle class urban areas; PASOK held on to a high percentage of votes in middle income, medium-sized urban areas; while LAOS had mobilised an upper middle class urban vote, Golden Dawn's vote is more purely popular, based in the areas with a high concentration of employed workers.