The truth is that for at least the last 20-30 years we have been putting up with in fact oligarchic minority governments, because simply the People never choose ANY single party from the available ones such that the party in power would be in a position to form truly majority government. Although this does not become immediately apparent, we can understand that fact by perusing the various electoral laws which, by an array of blatant alchemies, try to secure formations of governments on the basis of the comparably few votes they extort via their clientelist relations and the voters they manage to fool into voting for them, so that their party will eventually manage to form, for an extra season, a majority government in Parliament: In short, to secure the mandate to roam wherever and do whatever they like as the legally dictator-elect. This is despite the extant security valves contained in the Constitution. Corruption existing across the rest of the power structure secures a ‘legitimized’ anticonstitutionalism, and thus guarantees the petty dictatorship of any political heir contemplating holding this power post that touches on the everyday reality of every one of us.
In other words, the more the People cut down on voting with specific party-led criteria so as to preclude majority governments, which after their rise to power, treated People like doormats, the more the subsequent electoral laws afforded ‘premiums’ and promoted with a number of alchemies, the first two parties strengthening bipartisanship in this way and twisting the true picture of the electoral vote. Thus, for years now, (and at least since 1990 onwards) we have watched our vote being snatched in such a way that who we vote for and who our vote actually supports are increasingly becoming two completely separate things. In fact, none of us knows exactly how many votes went to each party, and of course, none of us can actually check any official statement attesting to this fact.
If statements and data about our National GNP, our deficit and the rest of our economic issues can so easily be tampered with (and so much so when these data are theoretically subject to scrutiny by foreign, independent auditors) what can stand in the way of the same people to tamper with an electoral result, which after a certain point in time, cannot be really checked or monitored by truly above the board auditors?
And we have not even touched upon the issue of juggling the vote at the level of the vote count, which can now take effect via the tampering with the voting eligibility catalogues (for example, via naturalizations, voting by proxy, etc) even via the simple change in recording whereby 30 votes suddenly become 300, as a witness to this fact told me in private communication, and in particular in the case of municipal-level elections and of course, off the record.
Thus, trees voted not only once but unfortunately they seem to enjoy an active voting career, along with the dead and other similar phantoms.
In sum, elections are a totally corruptible process we should not place our trust on, particularly during times like these, where so many instances of fraudulence, twisting and tempering with state data have come to light and of course, along with the optimistic fact that in their overwhelming majority the People has not been in favour of either bipartisanship or of candidacies by heritage.
This is additional proof that The People’s messages are gagged and censored and systematically twisted, so that we come to believe that in their majority our co-citizens are mindless, self-destructing and sold-out turncoats.
Clearly, living under this feeling, due to the twisted, corrupted and invalid data we are being fed by corrupt people at key positions who take full advantage of this oligocratic (power by the few) goebbelist state apparatus, we the People are led to believe and generalize the bitter impression that what we are actually seeing is what is happening to most of the People. An impression which is of course wrong and is easily proven otherwise, not only on the basis of the above but also on the grounds of this simple commonsensical syllogism:
If People were really sloth, if they had all sold-out, if they were truly condoning governmental action, there would be no reason for every GAP (George A. Papandreou) to get through the pains of an inter-channel address followed by an interview of select journalists – only to blackmail us (by saying that the markets, the WMF and all sorts of financial vultures will tear us apart, as if they were not already been hot at this job under GAP’s own auspices); there would be no need for the Gestapo-styled commenting of every Kapsis, and the constant shaking of the boogieman of market threats, so that the government can succeed at culling our reaction. No one takes aspirin without some fever or pain and no one gets into the trouble of making all these moves if he is unaware of a mounting and dangerous reaction movement by the People on whom they are trying to force their (governmental) will.
So, given this situation, what do we do?
Clearly, we do not as yet possess a Popular civil societal mechanism (that is, auditing capacity by the People, with a large number of elected Citizens’ jury-like body to monitor vote counting or electoral results); neither do we have the means to check the route of our individual vote, so as to preclude any chance of adulteration or other ways of vote-snatching, particularly these days that even the personal votebook has in fact been annulled, while the vote receipt is not given unless expressly demanded, let alone of the fact that these receipts are single-ply and thus no copies can possibly exist; neither are these receipts identical in number with the number of the eligible to vote Citizens per electoral station.
So, it is really possible for any juggling or adulteration of results to take place at every point along the way and after the simple vote count at the electoral stations. This is something we should keep in mind in general.
The ideal would have been for us not to offer them the raw material which they would subsequently juggle, i.e., abstain from voting by at least 90% (given that party-cronies of all sorts will always vote). But particularly at this time and place, even something like this is dangerous, because we do not as yet have in place a Citizen-led mechanism capable of proving that, as Citizens, we have all abstained from voting. Thus the state apparatus can easily claim that our staying off the ballots was as usual, and fix the result at will.
So, the best defence of practical use at this time and place, would be our certain cancellation of our vote, so that it will be impossible for it to be counted, especially during the first count, which takes place in the witness of Citizens, who are later asked to countersign the electoral register. In case we do not feel like dropping a cancelled vote into the ballot, we shall have to play a very dangerous game that I would personally never recommend, because no candidate should ever have a blanche cheque that the party nominations amounts to at this time: we must vote not for a small party (because these small party votes will be used to support bipartisanship) but a third party already in Parliamentary representation and which HAS NEVER cooperated in the post-junta period in legislative preparation with the two primary parties, excluding of course the Oecumenical government of the past; and of course, no third party which has supported the present government and the memorandum.
Casting such a vote decreases the probability of its being snatched and we strengthen a pressure politics which will scare the oligarchy and will secure a much more memorandum-reactive politics, at least on the surface. In the case that even the last ‘anti-memorandum’ and ‘anti-bipartisanship’ parties betray their pre-election platforms, we as People must be ready for totally different moves.
Let me repeat that in my opinion, choosing to cast a valid vote into the ballot is a two-edged knife and certainly not the best path to choose for the elections of this time and place, regardless of what kind of elections they are, because our goal should be to preclude the coming of an all-powerful government and ideally to set the scene such that no majority government can ever come to power again, because only then will there be any chance of doing away with this atypical regime of parliamentary dictatorship. This regime that ignores demonstrations, ignores Popular ridicule and demands, the regime that can in no way be controlled by the Parliament and has been attuned to ‘we have decided and decree henceforth’.
What, in other words, was asked by both K.Karamanlis (in October 2009) and G.Papandreou (during the inter-channel address on 25 October 2010) so that they could continue to govern unruffled by any Popular reaction, and whatever Constitutional safety valve must not be given to them.