Editorial To Vima: Presidential election alchemy and Tsipras’ defeat

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ petty partisan games with the constitutional amendment regarding the election in Parliament of the President of the Repblic have not persuaded even his own MPs.

In addressing Parliament, instead of defending and supporting the importance of an institutional change that is not limited to current politics, the PM attempted to exploit the constitutional revision process as a tool to advance his political designs by demanding that main opposition New Democracy commit itself now to supporting the re-election of President Prokopis Pavlopoulos in 2020.

The problem is that the Constitution must not be amended to serve fleeting political objectives. It must be revised in order to establish the framework for a functional democracy over the long haul.

De-linking the election of the President from holding a general election (currently Parliament must be dissolved and elections held if the candidate does not garner the requisite majority) is a weighty issue on which all political parties ostensibly agreed. Breaking a potential protracted deadlock through a direct popular election of the President as Mr. Tsipras proposes could lead to altering the rules of our form of government.

The rejection of SYRIZA’s proposal by Parliament yesterday was a political defeat for the PM, as he failed to persuade even some of his own MPs.

It has thus been decided that the parliamentary majority that emerges after the next general election can elect the President with a one-vote majority (151 out of 300 MPs). That is because the change of the related constitutional article was supported by over two-thirds of MPs yesterday.

The government’s games with the constitutional revision undermined every effort to reach a parliamentary consensus, even on articles where there was room for agreement.

As a consequence, one has lost an opportunity to make changes that would take into account the experience and lessons gleaned from the painful repercussions of the economic crisis.

Thus, the effort to address the ills that were highlighted in the education system, the judiciary, and public administration has once again been put off indefinitely.