Zitat

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Aber der Trick des ausgekochten Politikers Papandreaou hatte mit Demokratie ungefähr so viel zu tun wie das Reuebekenntnis des Reineke Fuchs gegenüber König Nobel mit echter Reue.

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Über die Motive Papandreous werden die Historiker wahrscheinlich noch lange diskutieren. Es gibt allerdings einen interessanten Präzedenzfall in seiner Biographie. Als er 2004 von Kostas Simitis die Führung der ausgelaugten Pasok übernehmen sollte, setzte Papandreou durch, dass darüber das ganze Volk abstimmen konnte.

In einem Interview nach diesem Plebiszit beschrieb er seine Überlegungen damals so:

Zitat

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my whole approach was “OK, now we must renew”. And not just the party, but also the political system and, most of all, what I might call the “political way” – the way we do politics, from which people had become more and more alienated...
I said that I would like to be elected not only by the party central committee, which was a throwback to a more hierarchical party, I wanted immediately to make politics more participatory and direct.

I proposed, and it was accepted, that we change our party constitution before I was elected so that the leader would be elected directly by the public; both the membership of the party and non–members. We opened up the polling stations to everybody who wanted to vote, somewhat like a primary.

...We didn’t have a category of “registered supporters”. But this immediately raises the issue: what forms of relationship should a voter have with political parties? We wanted to experiment with something new. We said: “Let’s see what happens if we open up the polling to a wider public”. Would this mobilise people? Would they want to participate? Is this something that could work? We were happily surprised. Over one million voters participated in a country of around ten million. It wasn’t as if I had someone who was running against me, instead it became almost like a plebiscite in favour of direct democracy. People said that they want to be able to participate, and many today call it just that – a plebiscite. For us it was a profound moment, and coming away from this we understood that we have to make major changes to allow voters to participate much more.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-o...ndreou_2255.jsp

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Einiges spricht dafür, dass bei dem studierten Soziologen Papandreou neben der ausgebufften Machttaktik auch idealistische Vorstellungen von neuen Formen der politischen Partizipation eine Rolle gespielt haben. Dass ein noch so idealistisch gedachtes Referendum in der aktuellen Situation nichts mit seriöser Demokratie zu tun hätte, steht auf einem anderen Blatt.