Greece Moves Closer to a Second Round of Elections
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Friday May 11, 2012 12:55 pm
So we’re headed for a second election. And of course, that’s the reason Tsipras rejected the PASOK offer today. Polling shows that his Radical Coalition of the Left party now leads in a hypothetical second round. That would give him far more leverage and the potential to form the government on his terms. The legacy parties cannot form a government without Tsipras and Syriza, so he holds all the cards.
In fact, Tsipras has already changed the game in Greece. All of the talks about forming a government now start from the proposition of renegotiating the debt deal. That’s a starkly different formulation from what we saw before the election, which basically drew a contrast between the legacy parties that wanted to maintain the deal, and the fringe parties that wanted to cancel it. With the fringe parties basically winning the elections, maintaining the deal is no longer an option.
Of course, this open talk of defying the deal has pushed the country closer to default and a Eurozone exit. In a darkly amusing detail, Reuters notes that many banks, perhaps expecting this moment, “never erased the drachma from their systems” and would be ready to quickly return to the currency if Greece decided to leave the Eurozone.
Well, you may leave something out when you code new, but you hardly ever throw anything away.
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the rest of the world how democracy is suppose to work.