By early afternoon the rain had stopped; rivulets were forming in gutters and carrying the slogans downstream to their final ignominious destination when we made our way down to the Press Centre at the Hotel Grande Bretagne.
The Centre was quiet with only a few officials in attendance manning the reception desk. Messages tacked to a large notice board informed journalists where and when the party leaders would vote: the President of the Republic in the Plaka, Prime Minister Karamanlis and George Mavros in Kolonaki, Andreas Papandreou in Ambelokipi, and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Harilaos Florakis, in Peristeri. In a small room off the reception area, cameramen adjusted their equipment while a television camera mutely focused on a group of Louis Quinze chairs awaiting the political luminaries who would visit the centre later in the day. In the main room, the names of press agencies and journals were in place on rows of green, felt-covered tables, with telephones and typewriters at the ready. A video screen, on which the results would appear later in the day, stood at one end. Reading the place markers, we saw that the foreign press contingent would be headed by the Associated Press and Reuters, each with a table to itself, followed by TASS, sharing a table with RAI (the Italian television network) and HSIN HUA (the People’s Republic of China news service). The Times (presumably of London), would be sitting cheek by jowl with Pravda, and the New York Times with Novosti and Springer. In the basement, telex machines were ready to relay messages.
That night, despite the constant’ activity, the Centre was peculiarly subdued as correspondents focused on the election results and prepared their stories for dispatch around the world. At about two in the morning, a local television commentator announced that Associated Press was devoting approximately seventy percent of its world coverage to Egyptian President Sadat’s visit to Israel, twenty percent to the Greek elections, and ten percent to other international events.
The complicated, three-phase process of sifting ballots and allocating seats would take several days, but by nightfall it became clear that the political scene had undergone some radical changes. Mr. Karamanlis’s New Democracy was still in power, but with a smaller majority. While the political scene was changing, so was the face of Mr. Karamanlis’s party: A new generation of young technocrats such as Milto Evert and Stephanos Manos had pulled in an astonishing number of votes while members of the Old Guard, among them George Rallis, were in trouble at the polls. With the exception of a few of its representatives, such as Melina Mercouri who won a seat in Piraeus, the personalities in Mr. Papandreou’s party were relatively unknown, but PASOK’s grass roots campaign.had paid off and they were to be the major opposition party. The Centre Union (EDIK) suffered a major setback (Mr. Mavros resigned as party leader a few days later) winning eleven percent of the vote. Mr. Stefanopoulos’s ultra-conservative National Alignment (Rally) party had won almost seven percent, the Socialist Alliance almost three percent, and orthodox communists remained steadfast, delivering to KKE a little over nine percent.
Yet the future of the Greek political scene remains an enigma. Perhaps the most telling result in terms of plurality was the fact that the splintered, left-wing forces polled almost forty percent of the votes. Perhaps more significant, the wounds of the Civil War that have coloured the political spectrum for several decades seem to be healing and the ‘communist threat’ is now only a feeble rallying cry. But then, that episode in Greek history came to an end almost thirty years ago—far removed from the reality of today’s electorate.
Garden of Delights
FROM our correspondent in the suburbs: after an election, politicians have only to think up ways of fulfilling their campaign promises. For the rest of us the aftermath is far more back breaking: we have to tidy up after them and get rid of all the posters and papers which the elections inspired. Hardly a wall, a pillar, or a column was not pasted over with election propaganda and to such heights that it seems many party workers must have spent most of the campaign on stepladders. This was accompanied by a massive deluge of flyers that blanketed Kifissia. For any citizen with a bit of private garden facing onto a public road, the task of cleaning up this debris was particularly meaningful and the contents of several wheelbarrows of pre-election matter held secrets that might have saved us (had we only known it) a considerable sum lost on pre-election bets.
The victory of New Democracy, of course, had been clear several weeks earlier; every thorn on the rosebushes had picked up at least one picture of Miltiades Evert. The communist party results had been obvious, too: the Florakis slogan was recognizable under every tenth dahlia. When twenty-five percent of the total haul went to PASOK, it was a particular surprise since the PASOK flyers arc green and had passed unnoticed in the shrubbery. When the final sorting out of the contents of the wheelbarrows was accomplished, three lone papers were yet to be classified. One began by claiming that Mr. Rallis, Minister of Education in the last cabinet, was a thirty-third degree Mason, which may have accounted for his having a hard time making it back into Parliament. The second was an anonymous and partially-unreadable warning not to vote for any candidate who supported dimotiki. The third, most astonishing of all, had our name on it: it was the electricity bill which had been left unnoticed under the garden gate.
Up North
A CONTRIBUTOR, who accompanied her husband to northern Pindos where he was an election overseer, sent in this report. The small mountain village we visited is located thirty kilometres from the Albanian border and one hundred from Kastoria. The main road through the village, which runs from Kastoria to Yannina, was not completed until 1970. A year later, electricity was brought in. ‘Rather late,’ commented one of the villagers. Our school now has less than twenty children.’ In the last twenty years, the population has been drastically reduced and today numbers four hundred and thirty. With the remittances from villagers now in North America, Australia and Germany, however, the houses, burned down first by the Germans, and again during the Civil War, have been rebuilt, the cobblestone roads have been paved with cement, and the local church has been elaborately decorated.
We arrived early Friday afternoon. The ‘court representatives’ are lawyers appointed by the Ministry of Justice to oversee elections; my husband had been assigned to the women’s election centre (women were given the right to vote in 1952, but the sexes vote separately). We were greeted by the president of the community who accompanied us to the coffee shop across from the municipal building where the first introductions were made. Over the next few days, he escorted us to all five of the village coffee shops which constitute the nerve centres of the village. That night, I noticed that I was the only woman circulating in the village; it was after dark and I felt like an intruder in this society of men. We stayed in a small house which proudly declares on top of each veranda: ‘Hotel Pindos: cold shower ten drachmas, hot shower twenty drachmas’. After dinner we visited one of the coffee shops to watch the Prime Minister delivering his speech on television. The cigarette smoke was thick, and I envied the village women watching in the comfort of their homes. Ί told our constituents to vote as early as possible,’ the village’s president told us. ‘By noon, the others will have arrived.’ This was in reference to the former inhabitants of a nearby, abandoned village. Although resettled near Kastoria, they were still registered in their old district and would be returning to vote. On Saturday, the election was the only subject of conversation. ‘The majority support Karamanlis,’ someone said, ‘but now that our children come from the big cities and the universities they have different ideas.’ Everyone was up by six on Sunday morning. The overseers, guards (three soldiers at each centre), and party representatives, were all at their stations ready for the polls to open. The men of the village — each and every one a homo politicus— approached the task at hand with intense seriousness. It was important that not only their party, but the preferred candidate win since he would show interest in solving problems specific to their village. Escorted by Kyria Georgia, the president’s wife, I attended church services. Except for the priest and the psalm singer, not a single man was in sight. They had been lured to other gatherings. After the service, an old woman distributed thin, yellow, aromatic candles for a memorial service. ‘She made them herself,’ Kyria Georgia explained to me, ‘from the wax of her bees.’
At noon, the president, assisted by a young boy, brought food to the party representatives, overseers, and soldiers stationed at the two centres. One party representative complained that his wife that morning had started the fire in the stove with his party’s ballot slips. ‘Fortunately I had some others hidden away,’ he sighed with relief. Meanwhile the ‘other villagers’had arrived. Despite intermarriages and business connections, there was a detectable coolness between the two communities, attributable to their different political persuasions. In the streets, the old women in their local costumes were in striking contrast to the blue-jean clad youths with high-heeled boots. By six in the evening the district’s results were known. The New Democracy had won, albeit with a reduced majority, but PASOK had captured a surprising of number votes.
The president arrived home crestfallen. Wc were seated around the table in the kitchen. ‘There is a big difference between these results and those of the last elections,’ he said. ‘And I know why. No one carried out as loud a campaign as PASOK!’ which he pronounced ‘pashok’ with the local Macedonian accent. ‘Have you seen anything but their green letters in the village?’ The EDIK representative observed that one housewife was forced to whitewash her house to cover the slogans painted on its walls. Another explanation was offered to account for the turn of events. The New Democracy’s party’s ballots carried a photograph of Mr. Karamanlis. Some of the women who did not know how to read had been told to cast the ballot bearing a photograph. Confusion arose when an independent candidate also printed a photograph on his ballot. ‘He got votes not intended for him,’ the president noted ruefully. The plea of an old woman to my husband at the polling station echoed in my ears: ‘Help me, my boy. I don’t know who Γ II vote for, but I want “the good one”.
Soon we were joined by PASOK’s representative who was making an effort to contain his emotions and to restrain his sense of triumph. Kyria Georgia vigorously stirred the soup in the kettle. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and hissed softly in his direction, ‘Shame on you!’
