Types of democracy

It's less than three months to go from the next edition of the Athens Democracy Forum, taking place in the Greek capital from September 27-29, 2023.

Politicians and policymakers, academics and activists, journalists and youth will be challenged to advance and discuss concrete solutions to address the most pressing issues of our time.

Since 1992, Francis Fukuyama has often been called upon to explain how his prediction of the definitive dominance of the liberal democracy model after the fall of communism has been tested by events - by the internal convulsions in Western democracies and by the apparent success of authoritarian regimes such as China. But his theory has never lost its appeal.

With a motley concoction of small parties on the far-right of ruling conservatives New Democracy, the government is seeking to assess the reasons that led some 700,000 people to vote the way they did in the recent elections and the political response to lure them back to the center ground. 

New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis called for a stable government for the next four years from the polling station in Kifissia, where he voted.

"Citizens and democracy are the focus today, it is a day of joy and responsibility. We are voting for the second time in just a few weeks so the country can have a stable and efficient government with a four-year horizon," he said.

With the formerly ascendant, Nazi-inspired Golden Dawn party broken, its leadership in prison, and the anti-Western left defanged, Greece's political fringes are looking more gauche than sinister.

In other news, Poland faces new EU infringement procedure over #LexTusk; Slovaks show greatest apathy for European elections; and Czech government delegations go dry on official flights after unseemly incident.

Greece's president appointed a caretaker prime minister on Wednesday to form a government that will lead the country to a repeat election on June 25, after last weekend's inconclusive vote.

Political leaders participated in Greece's legislative elections on Sunday, sharing a common vision for greater equality and social justice.

"It is again confirmed that we do not know ourselves and that we take our fantasies for real," a Turkish friend wrote to me on Monday. It is difficult to feel just how much many Turks hoped that, at last, they would see an end to the slide towards greater autocracy and towards greater distance from the European Union. 

In other news, Polish parties try to outdo each other over child handouts; the media is in the headlines in Czechia; and Slovakia's new technocratic government gets to work.