---AP---
---Reuters---
Greek conservatives head for slim victory: exit poll
By Dina Kyriakidou
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's ruling conservatives appeared headed for a slim majority in Sunday's parliamentary election, exit polls showed, after a campaign marred by forest fires.
If official results match exit polls, the government's thin parliamentary majority will make it hard to tackle the difficult reforms aimed at bringing the euro zone's second poorest member in line with its partners.
Conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and socialist leader George Papandreou, both heirs to prominent political dynasties, seemed to be losing support to smaller parties.
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The exit polls showed the right-wing nationalist Popular Orthodox Rally party, or LAOS, winning enough votes to enter parliament for the first time on a platform that includes immigration quotas and opposition to Turkey's bid to join the European Union.
Karamanlis has described LAOS as "extreme."
Parties need at least 3 percent of the vote to be represented in parliament. RASS-MARC showed LAOS winning a projected 3.5 percent.
The other two parties projected to remain in parliament are both left-wing — the KKE communist party and the SYRIZA left-wing coalition. Exit polls predicted KKE would win between 6.4 and 9 percent, and SYRIZA would get between 4.5 and 6 percent.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070916/ap_on_re_eu/greece_election_7
http://www.enet.gr/online/online_text/c=110,id=86946592
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a0ynrhtkPaHI
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2469345.ece
Sunday, 16 September 2007
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Greek elections show mounting discontent, a victory for Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
by Laura Petricola, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 09/20/07
ATHENS, Greece — The Sept. 16 parliamentary elections here handed the conservative New Democracy Party a 4-percentage-point re-election victory over the liberal opposition PASOK party.
New Democracy won 42 percent of the vote and PASOK got 38 percent. Greece's "unreconstructed" communist party, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) won 8.2 percent, an increase of 2.3 percentage points over 2004, and Siriza, a left-wing coalition party, got 5 percent of the national vote.
LAOS, a populist, religious-oriented right-wing party, got into Parliament for the first time with 3.8 percent.
Only 74 percent of the nearly 1 million registered voters cast ballots. The lower turnout reflects a steadily increasing trend towards abstention by Greek voters, which polls have linked to disillusionment with the two-party system.
The KKE nearly doubled the number of deputies it will have in Parliament, to 22. In large city centers, the vote for the KKE was 10-12 percent, reaching as high as 18-19 percent in some working-class neighborhoods. The KKE vote was highest among working people in the private sector and among youth, the unemployed, the self-employed and small farmers.
In the countryside, in villages that put up strong resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, the Communist vote was particularly impressive. Along the same lines, islands that were used to exile Communists by the postwar, right-wing dictatorship also posted high vote tallies for the KKE. The former exile island of Ikaria (Dodecanese), for example, handed the KKE a first place showing with 36 percent of the vote.
The election results represent a victory for KKE, which has been slowly but steadily increasing its political power in the post-1991 era, having doubled its percentage of the vote since that time. The party said its vote tally reflects support for the actions and struggles it has led over a period of years, combined with a widening radicalism in Greece, with many voters casting a ballot for the KKE for the first time.
While the ruling-class parties, New Democracy and PASOK, still command the lion’s share of the electorate’s support, they lost significant votes to KKE and to the other alternative parties.
Young voters particularly, age 18-24, turned their backs on the two-party system. This reflects the shift in voter consciousness, as working people increasingly turn away from center-right and center-left positions.
Both New Democracy and PASOK push the neoliberal agenda of “free trade” and privatization that is dictated by the European Union. These policies are steadily forcing the vast majority of working families here into economic ruin and, as one KKE election poster warned, the worst may be yet to come.
The incumbent New Democracy Party also came under criticism during the election for its mishandling of the fight against widespread wildfires last month.
What is clear is that the high vote for the two dominant parties does not correspond to the level of strong popular discontent.
As a result, the KKE calls for “organized and intensive action in cooperation with radical forces that are developing to build a strong popular front against the anti-people measures New Democracy will promote.”
It said that through mass action, “forces that are still entrapped in the two-party logic” can be won to more left-wing positions.
Source:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/11745/1/391
Other sources:
Site of KKE
http://inter.kke.gr/ english
http://www.kke.gr/kke_ru.html russian
http://fr.kke.gr/ french
Daily newspaper of KKE
http://www.rizospastis.gr/
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