[Ismini Vlassopoulou/InTime News]
We often talk about the curse of the second four-year term. Indeed, the examples of the second terms of late premier Costas Simitis or New Democracy’s Kostas Karamanlis are relatively fresh in our collective political memory. Both started out dominant and ended up crawling toward a painful end. Fatigue reaches its peak, stamina drops and many ministers who handle critical files begin to mutter that fatal “Well, this is Greece.” From a mutter, it then becomes a popular argument that justifies inaction and the absolute fear of taking political risks – over anything.
But there is another curse that we should not ignore: that of the third four-year term. And I am very much afraid that the prime minister and his government fell into its trap after the electoral triumph of 2023. In a sense, it is something completely normal. You see the map being painted all blue, you look with disbelief at the percentage exceeding 40%, which was considered an unattainable dream. You look around and you see no opponent, neither today nor tomorrow. The sycophants then begin with the narrative, “Well, Mr President, you are heading for a record,” which can easily seduce any politician. The media start publishing weighty analyses arguing that “there’s no way he will lose to X, he will be there for another 10 years.”
However, life abhors a vacuum and loves surprises. Especially in politics.
The trap of the third term can prove corrosive at first and destructive, if it is not quickly uprooted from the minds of the leadership. The feeling that you have no opponent causes intolerance to criticism, even to the warnings of close associates who do not have their own agenda. But, most importantly, when you are blinded by the chimera of a possible third term, you begin to weigh the political cost of your every move in grams. Anyone who suggests something groundbreaking gets the response that someone usually says in their first term: “Let us win the elections first and we will do all this later.”
But politics is not a competition for who will enter the Greek Guinness Book of Records. We need ambition, but ambition for the country, to radically change things in health, education, justice, transportation, in sectors that concern the average Greek and that require a lot of work, breaking eggs, and a backbone. It may not work politically, but at least someone will have fought the battle.
We are in the middle of a second four-year term and we see on the horizon the worrying signs of the curse that accompanies it. Perhaps the best antidote would be for everyone, from the prime minister down, to stop worrying about the third term. You would not be wrong if you called me naive. Those of you who have been reading this column for a long time out of some kind of perversion will say that “you have been writing the same thing for many years, my friend.” You may be right, but if we all start muttering, “Well, this is Greece” together, nothing is going to change in the third or any term.