Antisemitism and the Greek Election

Unless one has been living under a rock for the past few weeks, the parliamentary elections that will take place on October 4 have grabbed the attention of every Greek, regardless of how politicized he or she may be. Greece faces serious financial problems along with a crisis of confidence in the country's institutions, brought about, at least in part, by civic unrest, significant legal and, especially, illegal immigration and a series of financial and political scandals. And as the parliamentary election is coming only months after the election for the European Parliament, there is great interest to see whether the trends discerned in the results of the June election will be confirmed in the October one.

Greek Jews have not been elected members of Parliament since before the second World War (interestingly, one of the Jews who was elected to the Greek Parliament in the 1920s was a distant relative of French President Nicolas Sarkozy). Clearly the great reduction in the number of Greek Jews as a result of their mass deportation to the German concentration camps where the great majority of them perished has affected their involvement in Greek politics. However, numbers alone can not explain the almost complete absence of Greek Jews among the candidates in parliamentary elections or in the middle and upper echelons of Greek political parties. Antisemitism has also played a major role in discouraging members of the generally reticent Greek Jewish community in seeking greater involvement in the political process.

Many, no doubt, recall the 1996 attacks by the current president of LAOS (and at the time New Democracy MP) Georgios Karatzaferis on professor Christos Rozakis, solely on the basis of the professor's alleged Jewish Ancestry which, according to his accusers, made Rozakis unsuitable to represent Greek interests as deputy foreign minister. Greek antisemites apparently have long memories. Even thirteen years after the Karatzaferis episode and eleven years since Christos Rozakis was appointed to the European Court of Human Rights, where he has been serving for more than a decade as one of the the Court's two vice-presidents, Greek antisemitic blogs (see here and here) are still harping at professor Rozakis' "anti Greek" and "traitorous" behavior, while pointing out his Jewish ancestry as an explanation for his alleged misdeeds.

Needless to say, Rozakis is not the first or only politician to be painted with the "Jewish ancestry" brush, which in Greece is tantamount to disqualification from holding public office, at least in the eyes of the country's many antisemites. Former PASOK prime minister Kostas Simitis has also been accused(!) of Jewish ancestry (for example, here and here), as has the late Andreas Papandreou and, of course, his son and current PASOK leader, Giorgos Papandreou. The alleged involvement (I have no idea if it's real or not) in PASOK's present electoral campaign of the American PR firm founded by David Axelrod, who worked for the election of U.S. president Barack Obama, has been mentioned as yet another example of Jewish (Note: not American or even foreign) involvement in Greek politics. In fact, even being identified as a (non-Jewish) Greek politician who has spoken against antisemitism is a disqualifier in the eyes of national socialist antisemites. It appears that this is all part of some nefarious Jewish plot for world domination. Which really explains the lack of involvement of Greek Jews in Greek politics: After all, why get your hands dirty in seeking world domination when the gentiles (or, in Greece's case, crypto-Jews, like Rozakis, Simitis and the Papandreous) will do it for them.