Popular Sovereignty

Abstract

When populism came to power in the early 1980s, it had to serve its own creation of ‘the people’. With Greek society now clamoring for all kinds of benefits, most often through general strikes and street demonstrations, the populist governments used three means to meet such demands while also keeping the opposition at bay: state grabbing, institution bending, and the stepping up of political polarization. By the end of the decade, the Greek economy had developed serious imbalances and depended on borrowing from abroad. And reformism had become practically impossible.