Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

The Greek people choose

The clean lines of the Parthenon, high up on the Acropolis, stood out clearly in the early March sunshine. Down below, outside the Greek Parliament, a man pushed his supermarket shopping trolley down the hill towards Syntagma Square, where much of the public drama of Greece’s contemporary tragedy has played out prior to the recent general election. Balanced across the trolley was a discarded metal bath, on its way to be sold for a few euros. So it is that some residents of Athens eke out their existence in 2012.

Inside the Parliament, I met with Alexis Tsipras, the 38-year-old leader of SYNASPISMOS, part of the SYRIZA Coalition of the Left, which is attracting support from increasing numbers of Greek voters, as the general election on 6 May clearly showed. SYRIZA won almost 17% of the vote, up more than 12 percentage points since 2009 when it polled 4.6%. Now it has 52 MPs, four times more than previously. This vote put SYRIZA within just 2% of the Conservatives, New Democracy, the largest party. Under the Greek electoral system, the largest party automatically receives an additional 50 seats, so New Democracy, although its vote declined by 14 percentage points on Sunday, now has 108 Members of Parliament, an increase of 17 since 2009! This 50 seat ‘bonus’ masks the sharp decline of the Conservatives who, having lost the 2009 election with 33.5% of the vote, have now lost a further two-fifths of their voters. A large part of the Conservative loss (10.5% of the vote) went to the Independent Greeks, a new party on the democratic right, which campaigned on a staunchly anti-IMF platform. PASOK, the Socialist party, saw its vote decline by 30 percentage points (from 43.9% in 2009 to 13.2%) and its Parliamentary representation shrink from 160 to 41. The KKE Communist Party’s vote rose slightly to 8.5%, adding five more MPs to make a Parliamentary Group of 26. The new Democratic Left party, which split from SYRIZA in 2009 and absorbed some of PASOK’s recent losses, won 6% of the vote and 19 seats. Several smaller parties, including the Greens and the Social Contract (a splinter from PASOK, on similar lines to the Independent Greeks’ splinter from New Democracy) collectively received some 19% of the popular vote, but individually received insufficient support to cross the 3% threshold required to enter the Parliament. The nationalist LAOS (5.6% in 2009) also dropped to 2.9% and failed to win representation, while Golden Dawn, an anti-immigration fascistic party, polled almost 7%, gaining 21 seats as it entered Parliament for the first time. Turnout was about 65%, so that one in three electors didn’t cast a ballot. This drop in voter participation is partly attributed to economic difficulties which prevent the poorest voters from travelling from larger population centres to their own towns to vote.

READ MORE

Photo: At the Greek Parliament: Maria Sotiropoulou of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Tony Simpson, Alexis Tsipras, and Panos Trigazis of SYNASPISMOS.

The Spokesman 118

  This new issue of The Spokesman can be bought from our sister website.

Turkey versus Democracy

Khatchatur Pilikian is a long-time friend of the Russell Foundation whose insights are greatly appreciated.

His recent paper Turkey versus Democracy given on the 3rd February at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London can be read in full on the Russell Foundation website.

The full article is available as a PDF.

The Israel-Palestine situation demands truth and reconciliation. We hope to aid that process

Desmond Tutu and Michael Mansfield, guardian.co.uk
Thursday 3 November 2011

Opportunities to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination. All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

The full article is available on our Russell Tribunal page.

Countless United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions have been passed and violated; The Goldstone Report has been attacked and dismissed and the recent UNHRC fact finding Mission on the Freedom Flotilla incident, condemning Israel’s actions in the strongest possible terms, has been rejected as biased by Israel and was hardly mentioned in the higher spheres of the UN. The reason most often given to explain this lack of political action being that ‘it will harm the peace process.’

We are made to believe that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a never ending one and that, when it comes to this issue, International Law is irrelevant.

But civil society knows better. This conflict is about International Law and nothing else. Not harming the peace process means not harming more than 17 years (from the Oslo agreement in 1993 until now) of settlement building, bombing, murder and assassination, Israeli army aggression, land grab, US vetoes, dispossessions and humiliation of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

Civil society also knows that under a facade of bland statements ‘condemning’ Israel’s actions, the EU, the USA and the whole international community are in fact actively complicit in those crimes.

That’s where the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) comes in.