A careful observer, let alone a participant during an official election period, can give us useful insights about the way a society functions and a country is run.
Australia and Greece, countries so close historically yet so distant geographically, economically and culturally, are two important case studies for someone who wants to understand how western societies and democracies operate at different stages of development.
In Australia the private dominates the public. The private economy or the non-state mediated economic sphere in people’s lives is the main driver of economic output. In Australia, less than one third of economic activity is due to government expenses. In Greece, even now, after so many years of recession and austerity measures, government expenses account for almost 55 per cent of the total Gross Domestic Product.
In Australia, people’s lives begin and end in their homes, in their work places, in their sporting arenas or in their local community organisation. In Greece, individualism on the one hand and an omnipresent and weak state on the other, which is used and abused by a very sizable proportion of society and by so called vested interests, rule supreme.
An election campaign in Australia and in Greece is ‘run’ by those and for those who are directly affected: politicians, politically oriented media organisations such as Skynews or the ABC, peak bodies of various business and community interest groups. In Greece however, because the state is omnipresent and it directly affects with its mediation the entire spectrum of economic, social and individuals’ lives, an election campaign is much more visible and is discussed by many more citizens.
In Greece, a country with a work force of under five million people, the state employs more than 600,000 people on a permanent basis and tens of thousands of others on short contracts. This public sector, historically, was always setting the agenda in terms of wages and salaries, in terms of rights. In Greece, a country of now more than 1.3 million unemployed people, the unemployed and millions of pensioners look towards the state in order to secure, for however long, an income. If you take away tourism, which contributes to 15 per cent of the GDP, and a portion of the heavily recession-affected building industry that used to account for almost 20 per cent of the GDP, all other economic activity, all other aspects of individual, institutional, private and public life was and still is heavily mediated by a weak and abused state. A state that becomes an instrument of intervention in the hands of whoever wins power and government. In such a country where clientelism amongst other factors plays an important role in determining outcomes, almost everyone has high stakes in an election campaign.
Regardless of the recent trends such as the disappearance of huge outdoor election rallies, the presence of a pre-election period in the media and the engagement of the people in the political process, before and after the onset of the multiple crisis, is still substantial in Greece.
This is not the case, on the other hand, with an Australian election period. In this country you don’t have an omnipresent state directly affecting people’s lives in the way you have in Greece. In Australia you have a state and institutions that function regardless of the outcome of an election campaign. The directions of the policies adopted as a result of an election outcome might change but the structures are still there. Also, in Australia, the political engagement of people is much more broadly defined. You have a civic society, as well as an estimated 36 per cent of the adult population being involved in community organisations, and this form of political-communal engagement does not exist in Greece.
Having experienced professionally from a close distance many election periods in both Australia and Greece, my preference is for the ‘Australian way’. Even though in this still ‘lucky country’, according to a Lowy Institute survey this year, people are increasingly ambivalent about democracy.