Social Democracy: the case of PASOK
The Greek Election result has occasioned comment on the nature of the new hard-right New Democracy Government, why Syriza was defeated and, the only bit of unqualified good news, the failure of the Nazi Golden Dawn to get any MPs after a hard-fought campaign by anti-fascists.
One thing that has not been much commented on is the fortunes of PASOK, in effect the Greek version of the Labour Party, which has formed Governments in the recent past.
One reason for that is that PASOK no longer exists as such. It is now part of the centrist Movement For Change which secured 20 seats in the 2019 Greek Election.
The founders of PASOK played an important role in the collapse of the Greek military junta in 1974 and by 1981 they were able to form a Government, the first socialist one in Greece since 1924.
The Party embarked on a ‘modernization’ course from the mid-1990s, perhaps not so dissimilar to New Labour and in 2001 it was a PASOK Government that took Greece into the EU.
The financial crisis which followed the 2008 crash saw PASOK in various Governmental formations implement austerity measures.
The result was a very significant decline in its support so that in elections in 2015 it got between 4-6% of the vote.
The process has a name ‘Pasokification’ underlining the impact implementing austerity measures that hit its own electoral base can have on a social democratic party.
The above, merely schematic, might just been an interesting detail in the recent history of the left were it not for the fact that in the UK there are still commentators arguing that Labour should follow exactly the same course. Below is a link to a piece by Matthew d’Ancona in the Guardian (9.7.19). Admittedly d’Ancona is a Tory so he might have his reasons for suggesting that Labour should destroy its electoral support.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/08/labour-centre-ground-jeremy-corbyn
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