This is the fourth and last in a mini-series of posts about how to beat populism at the polls. The first post emphasized the availability of a liberal leader, the second post stressed the need of establishing the leader’s authority over a party, and the third post was about the requirement of a credible and realistic policy agenda that would benefit the broader middle classes. This post suggests that the liberal leader utilizes a moderate discourse, aims at achieving political compromise, and defends institutional legality. As with the previous posts, the empirical case analyzed is contemporary Greece, and especially the more recent defeat of left populist SYRIZA by the liberal right-of-center party of New Democracy (ND) led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis. It bears repetition, Greece’s lessons are perfectly portable! So, if you’re interested in the forthcoming presidential elections in the US, please take note.
4/4 RHETORIC, CONSENSUS-BUILDING, INSTITUTIONAL LEGALITY
Throughout the opposition years, Mitsotakis was consistent in using a moderate political discourse which, on the one hand, emphasized the need to reinvigorate Greece’s damaged liberal institutions while, on the other hand, worked toward consensus-building and political compromise. To those ends, and in sharp contrast to the populists’ polarizing motto of “either Them or Us,” Mitsotakis offered a vision of national unity in which the government should not work for “the many [hoi polloi] but for all Greeks [holloi].” Above all, he sought to create an electoral majority consisting largely of entrepreneurial middle-class ordinary people to whom he proposed a sensible policy agenda centered on four issues of general concern: economic growth, public security, state functionality, and halting Greece’s human drain that continued unabated for over a decade.
Mitsotakis castigated the populist government of having “highjacked” the state, for having established “cozy arrangements” with oligarchs, , and for appointing scores of political cronies to prime state positions in a bid to establish illiberal political domination. Instead, he promised to fight nepotism (also vowing to keep his own relatives out of government or key state positions) and introduce strictly meritocratic criteria for state appointments. Time and again while in opposition, Mitsotakis pledged to stamp out populism and restore the badly harmed institutions of liberal democracy in Greece. And, progressively, he also emerged as one of the most important liberal leaders in the EU. In September 2018, he called on the European Parliament to activate disciplinary action against the populist government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He, in fact, likened Orbán to Alexis Tsipras, holding that both leaders were equally keen at violating the liberal institutions in their respective countries. In early 2019, Mitsotakis requested the ejection of the Hungary’s Fidesz party from the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) to which ND also belonged until the former party dropped its right populist rhetoric.
