IN the French election a victory for François Hollande, a socialist who has rejected the fiscal pact, would be the first challenge to the policies Angela Merkel and EU technocrats have imposed on Europe but the result of the Greek elections may have even greater symbolic significance. Depending on what happens there, Sunday could be the first day of a European spring.

The first act of the ongoing Greek tragedy ended last November, with the resignation of the Papandreou government. Popular opposition to austerity — along with Merkel’s and Nicolas Sarkozy’s fear of a Greek referendum on euro membership — brought him down. The Greek elections will mark the end of the second act, with a cast of dominant parties and politicians exiting, stage right.

The caretaker government, led by Lucas Papademos, is a coalition of Pasok and New Democracy, the dynastic parties which have ruled Greece for 40 years and brought it to its present predicament. Their election campaigns have brought surrealism to the hustings. The overwhelming rejection by the Greek people of the IMF-EU measures has forced the two governing parties to argue against the very policies they ushered in and are still implementing. Imagine if not a few but every Lib-Dem and Tory politician were to campaign against coalition policies.

The polls are disastrous for both parties (New Democracy has about 20 per cent of the vote while Pasok has fallen from 44 per cent in 2009 to about 15 per cent). Despite the fact that the electoral system offers an astounding 50-seat bonus to the party with the most votes, it seems that no single party will have a working majority in the next parliament.

The only way the parties can continue their austerity measures will be to form another coalition government — if they can manage to scrape together the requisite 151 seats. The campaign has been characterised by attempts to promote nonexistent differences and by vitriolic attacks on each other; but the reality is that these formerly great parties are more dependent on one another than ever.

Part of this picture — its most worrying aspect — is the rush to the right by mainstream politicians competing to display their nationalist credentials. Coalition ministers Michalis Chrysochoidis and Andreas Loverdos have spread panic about immigrants as criminals and carriers of infectious diseases, and have set up detention camps in order to contain this ‘threat’. Meanwhile Athens’ Mayor Kaminis has, with Chrysochoidis, organised campaigns to ‘cleanse’ the city of migrants, while the coalition plans an anti-immigration wall on the Greco-Turkish border.

This attempt to mobilise the politics of fear is risky. It plays into the hands of the far right and might well see the extremist Golden Dawn party, which organises violent attacks on migrants, entering parliament. — The Guardian, London