The Greek Political Circus

Prime Minister George Papandreou surprised everyone with a call for a referendum then suddenly backs out, reportedly out of pressures from the Euro political elites…

From the Daily Mail, (bold emphasis mine)

EU leaders have forced the Greek leader George Papandreou to back down on his promise of a popular vote on the European debt treaty.

So what is it about the EU and referendums?

The Brussels elite positively loathes them - or indeed democracy in general.

But those pesky nation states keep insisting on them. And every now and again they get the wrong answer - voting No to a proposal blessed by the high priests of the EU (Denmark 1992 over Maastricht, Ireland 2001 over the Treaty of Nice, France and the Dutch over the proposed European Constitution, Ireland again over the Treaty of Lisbon).

The standard Brussels response is to demand a second vote, usually after offering a few debatable concessions. That got the Danes off the hook and the Irish twice. More cynically, plans for a European Constitution were dropped after the French and Dutch votes, only to be reincarnated as the Lisbon Treaty (much the same package but a different wrapper).

But this time the European high command has gone a stage further. No sooner had Greek prime minister George Papandreou announced a referendum on the Greek bailout plan - to the shock and fury of the Eurocrats and their allies in the chancelleries of the big European states - France, Germany and Italy all denounced the Greek leader's move as bordering on betrayal

Papandreou had his own internal reasons for proposing a referendum. His main opponents back home in Athens are the New Democrats, who are against the bailout plan because of the tough conditions attached but at the same time want Greece to stay in the euro. Papandreou wanted to force them to face the contradictions of their stance - either to back savage spending cuts bringing rioters onto the streets or to recognise that Greece could not survive in the euro.

He was also looking for a popular mandate - the kind of thing you are meant to do in a democracy - for cuts that slash public sector wages and pensions and to apply pressure to the big powers to offer more favourable terms to Greece.

But New Democracy is that in name only. It was against a referendum, presumably because it saw advantage in perpetual political grandstanding.

With his MPs and Cabinet ministers defecting and Papandreou facing a no-confidence vote, we may well see a new short-term National Unity Coalition government, made up of technocrats not politicians, formed in Athens to do the bidding of Brussels.

Well up to this writing, there has been no coalition government yet.

From the Bloomberg,

Prime Minister George Papandreou struggled to hold on to power after Greece’s largest opposition party rebuffed his overtures to form a national government, raising the prospect of elections that could delay aid needed to prevent default.

Opposition leader Antonis Samaras rejected sharing power with Papandreou and called on the premier to quit. Papandreou, 59, scrapped a referendum on an accord with the European Union to avert a split in his party before a confidence vote scheduled for midnight tonight.

“I never excluded any topic from the discussion, not even my own position,” Papandreou told lawmakers in Parliament. “I am not tied to a particular post. I repeat I am not interested in being re-elected but just in saving the country.”

While the highly fluid developments in Greece remain a potential tinderbox, as shown above, the direction of political actions still seem to emanate from Brussels than from the 'people of Greece'. Plutarchy-Oligarchy over Democracy.