As Greece takes a seat at the United Nations Security Council for the 2025-2026 session, and professor Konstantinos Fountas becomes president of the council of Geneva-based Cern – the world’s leading laboratory on particle physics – the country is certainly taking its place among the nations of the world.
At home, however, there is less to celebrate. The ruling party, New Democracy, has expelled one of its former prime ministers, Antonis Samaras, for criticising the government’s centrist policies, including February’s legislation for same-sex marriages and its alleged “appeasement” approach to Turkey. Samaras has been supported, to some extent, by another former New Democracy premier, Kostas Karamanlis, who has been widely tipped as a possible presidential candidate.
The question of Greece’s relations with Turkey has always been problematic: the “old enemy”, which dominated most of the Greek territory until its war of independence in the 1820s, is the endless source of refugees attempting to cross the short distance between Turkey’s mainland and the nearby Greek islands such as Lesbos and Chios. Recently, the UN High Commission on Refugees expressed concern over the drowning of 17 such migrants in November off the coast of Samos. Turkey has shown little willingness to co-operate with Greece on curbing or regulating this constant flow, despite hundreds of fatalities – many of them children – since the refugee crisis began 10 years ago.
More significant, perhaps, is the fact that 50 years ago Turkey invaded the predominantly Greek island of Cyprus and remains in force, occupying approximately 40 per cent of the island, and causing a big headache not only for Greece and the ethnic Cypriot Greeks but for the United Nations, which has been trying to resolve the problem ever since. The hardline attitude of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stymied any attempt by the Greek government to reach out to Turkey for a peaceful end to what is, in effect, the illegal occupation of Cyprus by the Turkish military.
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Criticism of the Greek premier, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, for “centrist” policies is perhaps misleading. Mitsotakis himself comes from a deeply conservative political background, and any tendency towards neoliberalism is motivated principally to keep New Democracy in power – a task made easier by the almost complete disintegration of parliamentary opposition. In an age where coalitions or some other form of powersharing are becoming the parliamentary norm, the one-party rule by New Democracy is exceptional. The age-old rivalry between New Democracy and Pasok came to an end with the dramatic decline of Pasok and the temporary rise of left-wing Syriza during the financial crisis of the 2010s.
Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) was held together largely by the personal aura of Alexis Tsipras and voters’ desperate need to escape the New Democracy-Pasok stranglehold on Greek political life. It kept Syriza in power, despite the objections of the EU, for much of the crisis, from 2015-2019. But Tsipras was succeeded as leader in 2023 by Stefanos Kasselakis. In a dramatic turn of events last month, much of the party walked away from Kasselakis’s divisive leadership; he has now formed his own party, Democratic Movement.
In these circumstances, as Mitsotakis knows well, voters have little option but to support the only party that can offer political stability. Addressing the UN General Assembly last month, Mitsotakis stressed Greece’s geopolitical position regarding the Middle East and eastern Europe as a justification for its seat on the Security Council. He also referred to the 2023 Athens Declaration, which supports peaceful resolution between Greece and Turkey but which Erdogan is likely to use to his own advantage. In relation to Cyprus, Mitsotakis affirmed Greece’s commitment to the country’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”, which, again, is unlikely to cut much ice with Erdogan and is an area where the UN’s own diplomacy has signally failed over the past 50 years.
And while Mitsotakis, when speaking at Cop29, the controversial UN climate summit in Azerbaijan, argued for “more honesty” about its trade-offs in energy transition, asking for “more resources to prepare to save lives and livelihoods”, the EU Commission rebuked Greece at home for delays in mandatory updating of its national energy and climate plan. Again, on the world stage Greece seems to be a leader; domestically, it’s a different story.
Neither neoliberalism nor the “radical left” seems able to solve the problem in most people’s minds: the almost unbearable increases in the cost of living. The average household spends between a third and a fifth of its available income on food, with a sharp decrease in consumption of meat, rice, olive oil, fish and alcohol; people are even eating less bread, fruit and vegetables. People at risk of poverty include public servants, whose average take-home monthly pay is €850-900 and who not only have to feed themselves but also to pay rent because owning their own dwelling is financially out of the question.