We have become a politically boring country for some time now in an ocean of generalized chaos and it seems strange to us. It is, after all, one of the rare times when the “Greek paradox” works in reverse in relation to the rest of the West.
Some people wonder “but who votes for Zoe?” or “but is it possible for Karystianou to go so high in the polls?” They obviously forget what is happening in the rest of the world. Imagine if we had a prime minister here who would write whatever he wanted under the official portraits of his predecessors, describing one as stupid or the other as useless. Or who would suddenly change the name of Athens’ international airport from “Eleftherios Venizelos” to “Mitsotakis-Venizelos.”
Does that sound strange or improbable? It is not, if you look at the White House or the former Kennedy Center, now the Trump-Kennedy Center. These things are happening in the “capital” of the Western world and although unprecedented they no longer surprise anyone; they are part of the new political normal. When the rules of politics and acceptable behavior loudly collapse worldwide, the improbable becomes extremely possible here too.
The problem for a country like ours is that other certainties are collapsing along with the rest. We believed, for example, that if a crisis with Turkey erupted, Washington would intervene to prevent an escalation, while maintaining equal distances on the substance of our differences. Now, we cannot be sure whether it would intervene or how equal the distances would be. We also had another certainty: that the European Union would be the safe institutional haven for a country that wanted to leave its woes and historical “accidents” behind. Today, the EU is indeed a large institutional and civilized family, but it is lacking in leadership and rife with major intra-family disputes. It is not certain that the tracks on which former premier Konstantinos Karamanlis put us to avoid “derailments” are as sturdy as in previous eras. Our two main pillars of “security” are not so given or solid.
For now, however, people abroad see us as a positive paradox. Whether we disprove them and embark on another misadventure remains to be seen in 2026. The problem, you see, is that the certainty that the traditional two-party system created in the period after the restoration of democracy has collapsed along with everything else. There are many candidates to express anger and disappointment, but few who can convince us they can govern.
As 2025 draws to a close, we see, on the one hand, the dangers of an extremely unstable and unpredictable international scene and, on the other, the anger of a large part of Greek society. The responsibility is great, especially for those in power who must prove in difficult circumstances that they are hearing society and that they are not just falling back on the argument: “Do you see anyone else who can govern you?” Recent experience, and not only in Greece, shows that sometimes societies respond to this dilemma in a not so rational way.