New Democracy in an old one: Greece’s election

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Children alone and filthy, adults crammed behind fences in prison-like conditions. The treatment of immigrants in America's detention centers has hit center stage in the public consciousness and in politics. We ask about the push to reduce the migrants' suffering. And the Women's World Cup final this weekend is expected to be thrilling. The quality of play has increased dramatically since the last tournament, and the amount of money pouring into the sport these days means it's only going to get better. But first, in 2015, the leftist Alexis Tsipras became the prime minister of Greece in an earthquake election win. He took over a country mired in an economic collapse that had begun in 2009 and that rattled the whole eurozone. He's credited with helping to hoist Greece out of its debt crisis. But on the streets, it's clear there's still much to be done. In May's elections to the European Parliament, Mr. Tsipras's Syriza party did so poorly that he called a snap election. So this weekend, Greeks go to the polls again, and the clear favorite is Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a man described as the polar opposite of Mr. Tsipras. Can he and his New Democracy party bring the stability that the people clearly want?

Greece today feels like a country that has just about picked itself up and dusted itself down after the trauma of its economic crisis earlier in the decade.

Jeremy Cliffe writes Charlemagne, our column about European politics.

Normality is returning to Greek life in many ways, and at the same time, the country still bears the scars. Youth unemployment is still around 40%. The debt is still 180% of GDP. And so it's in this environment that Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of the conservative New Democracy Party, appears to be on the verge of an election win and becoming Prime Minister.

And tell me about Mr. Mitsotakis.

Mr. Mitsotakis is in many ways a caricature of the old Greek establishment that Alexis Tsipras, the current Prime Minister, has set himself against. He comes from a very established conservative political dynasty. His father was Prime Minister in the 1990s. He studied in the US and worked as a banker and in consulting, made quite a lot of money. He's very sort of smooth, urbane, speaks almost perfect English. I followed Mr Mitsotakis on the campaign trail near Thessaloniki in the north of Greece as he toured several quite traditional conservative towns. People there were really excited to see him.

Why has he become so popular?

I think Greeks recognise that the country has come out of the very worst of its crisis, and I think they want something of a normalisation. And Mr Mitsotakis, who's quite a sort of calm, soothing character, seems to offer that, particularly to the sort of swing voters who maybe had traditionally voted for the centre or centre-left in Greek politics, then swayed to the far left to vote for Mr Tsipras in the midst of the crisis, and now perhaps are looking for something a bit more steady and stable.

Well, let's pick that apart a little bit. What is Mr. Mitsotakis' platform? What will he do if he gets into power?

He pitches himself as a centrist modernising character who wants to essentially accelerate Greece's progress out of the crisis and make the country respectable again and make it a desirable investment location. So he wants to cut taxes. That is the central plank of his political platform. And he said that he's going to start that by the start of next year if he becomes prime minister. He wants to digitise the public administration in Greece, which is still very sclerotic. He says he's inspired by the example of digital government in Estonia. He wants to cut red tape and trim back the system of licensing that tangles up private business in Greece. And he wants to sort of represent Greece to the world in a way that draws investors to the country to buy up infrastructure, to invest in the country's economy. And he says that this is all about pushing the country's growth rate up to a level where it can really start whittling away at its debts and growing back out of the crisis years. One of the towns I went to with Mr Mitsotakis was Chilchis, which is near Thessaloniki. And that had been a town that had suffered quite heavily in the economic crisis, and actually where some voters have been turning towards the extreme right. Now, Mr Mitsotakis has a sort of two-card trick that he reckons can build him a big electoral coalition. He wants to win over and The evidence suggests he is winning over centre ground, perhaps younger voters with pledges to modernise the Greek state and to attract investment. He talked in the town square of Kylikis about the need to get taxes down, which seemed to be very popular. But he also is appealing to the political right as well. Where I was with him is close to the border with what used to be called the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Which had been locked in a long name dispute with Greece because Greece has a region called Macedonia and claims the traditional historical Macedonian identity. And the Cyprus government had done a deal with the government in Skopje to rename the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Northern Macedonia, which Mr. Mitsotakis says is a concession too far.

So would you describe him as a populist?

That's certainly not a phrase he would use to describe himself. He characterises himself as a sober technocratic type figure and contrasts that with Alexis Tsipras, who he would call a sort of a demagogue who chases the crowd. But there are certainly some populist elements to his political appeal. He's opposed moves to allow gay couples to adopt, which again, seems to be pandering to reactionary sentiment. But I would see that in a broader context. He wants to build an electoral coalition running from the centre-right to the hard right of politics. And his supporters would say that's necessary.

What platform is he presenting here? What are his plans if he should get into power?

Well, he's trying to tread a line between being reassuring and offering stability and promising change that will get Greece out of its sort of long period of crisis-bound problems. And I asked him about this in his car on the drive back from his day's election campaigning. And he essentially said he wanted to try and combine those two things. So reassurance and transformation.

After 10 years of crisis, the Greek people are tired. You know, they're fed up with, you know, the politics of populism. And I think that they're looking for a a more realistic, more pragmatic approach to politics. We have a very comprehensive plan regarding our main agenda, which is how do you grow a stagnant economy? How do you create jobs? And of course, how do you help people with disposable income? So I think this is— the mood of the country has changed. We're no longer in sort of in that anger phase that brought Mr. Tsipras into power.

Essentially, he's trying to be a broad, big tent sort of leader, who can be reassuring enough to buy himself the political room to reform Greece and get it into a better economic state.

What's your take on that, the reasonableness of his plans and the degree to which in Greece today he can push those through?

Well, the basic substance of his proposal seems perfectly reasonable. The Greek state is too expensive, it's too old-fashioned, it's too bound up with vested interests. And if he can take on those problems in the way that he says he wants to, then I can see his broader strategy, which is to use reform of the state to make make Greece more investment worthy, bring in the investment from outside and get the growth rate up, and then start paying down the debt or making the debt more manageable. At the same time, you've also got to consider the broader international backdrop. Europe's economy has recovered, not spectacularly, but it has recovered since the worst of the eurozone crisis. And the question is, how long is that going to last? The next downturn appears to be around the corner. There are concerning noises coming out of Italy where the populist government in Rome is on a collision course with the European institutions about its spending plans. We saw in the last eurozone crisis how problems in one southern European country can create contagion and spread to others quite quickly. And so yes, on paper, Mr. Mitsotakis has some sensible ideas, but can he deliver it given both the internal political constraints and also potentially difficult international circumstances?

Jeremy, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

This week, the Trump administration has faced a flood of fresh criticism of its treatment of migrants detained at the Mexican border.

"Free the children now!

Free the children now!" On Monday, Democratic lawmakers toured detention facilities in Texas and expressed outrage at the conditions they found. "This is not a shelter. This is a prison." And on Tuesday, a report came out from the Department for Homeland Security's inspector general saying that migrants were being detained for longer than is legal and in terrible conditions. Border Police apprehended nearly 133,000 migrants in May, the highest recorded number in 13 years. Many were children separated from their relatives and detained on their own.

What I witnessed was a nightmare.

Bill Hing is a law professor, part of a team who inspected a facility in Clint, Texas last month.

We saw a prison. There are block-type buildings. It's surrounded by fences and there are security cameras. And then there are guards at different points around the facility.

There were about 350 children living in a facility designed to hold adults for a few hours.

The youngest child that was on his own that I interviewed was 5 years old. This child was dirty. A very nice, sweet boy. His nose was running, his hair was dirty, his face was dirty, his hands were dirty, his pants were dirty, his shirt was dirty.

The agency running the facility, Customs and Border Protection, is meant to detain children for 72 hours or less. But in an overwhelmed system, many children are stuck much longer.

This child, I believe, was there for more than 12 days, and he had not bathed. I said, "Are there showers? Are there facilities?" They said yes, but basically he was shy about doing it on his own, and he was expected to do it on his own. No one was there to help him.

Professor Hing says that during the Obama administration, there were family detention centers, but they never separated children from their relatives. And from what he saw, those facilities were at least cleaner.

The reason this is so much worse is it's children on their own without their parents or their— or an adult that are expected to care for themselves. The 2-year-old that was assigned to one of my colleagues was expected to take care of herself. And the only reason she was taken care of was because a nice 16-year-old A girl who was in the same detention room with her took responsibility for her out of the kindness of her heart.

The children had no idea what would happen to them. Several had phone numbers for relatives in America who had not been contacted.

The Trump administration is attempting to send a message: Don't come. You're not welcome here.

Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, insisted that reports of deplorable conditions for adults as well as children were exaggerated. That was then contradicted by this week's report from the Department of Homeland Security.

The report found in some of these facilities, children were being kept without access to showers, limited access to clean clothes. In some cases, they weren't receiving hot meals. And adults were being kept in rooms that were filled beyond capacity to the point where there was standing room only, sometimes for periods of a week or so.

So what are the political implications of that, Ben?

Both the House and the Senate drafted bills in order to appropriate $4.6 billion for the various immigration agencies in order that the suffering of the people in these detention centers be alleviated. However, in the House, they were far more specific in the way they drafted the bill such that the money would go towards ensuring that these kids have soap and toothbrush and toothpaste, access to showers and clean clothes, and also to ensure that there is oversight both in how these centers are run to prevent these kind of abuses recurring, and also in how the money is spent in general so it's not funneled towards other enforcement priorities such as ICE raids. So the Senate version of the bill was much less restrictive in the way in which the money would be spent. That means that it passed the Senate very cleanly. It was 84 to 8. The House Democrats' attempt to get the final bill to include these restrictions on the ways in which the appropriated funds could be spent was undermined by a group of moderate Democrats who were determined to pass an appropriations bill as quickly as they could, and as such, acquiesced and passed the Senate bill without change, contrary to the wishes of House leadership and the Hispanic and Progressive Caucuses.

I guess one question I have is why this is a discussion entirely about allocation of money to fix the problem and not about sort of legal remedies. We keep hearing stories that appear to— that these conditions appear to break various laws. I mean, why is this not a legal recourse question as much as it is a funding question?

So there are currently cases pending that challenge various aspects of the administration's treatment of detainees. In the past few months, it's not that cases aren't being litigated, but rather that by virtue of the nature of legal proceedings, these are taking a certain amount of time and the legal remedy is insufficiently swift in order to alleviate the suffering of kids who are currently in these centers.

How is this playing out though amongst the public? How are they reacting to seeing these pictures, hearing these stories about these conditions?

The public at the moment is incredibly upset about this issue. The combination of these reports, the photograph that emerged the other week of a Salvadoran migrant floating in the Rio Grande with his daughter, all of these things have really upset people, but as we've seen before, for example, with family separations last year, the anger at the way the administration is treating migrants does fade away, whereas it seems that the desire among some parts of the American population for draconian enforcement is a fairly constant feature.

What about the degree to which this problem will grow, the flow of people still coming into the country?

Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, predicted that the flow will actually reduce once we get official figures for June. He predicted that it would be reduced by 25%. The Mexican government has preemptively published CBP figures that would indicate that he's right, although obviously these are unconfirmed. It's also not clear what the cause of this reduction is. The administration is very keen to explain it by saying that Trump's strong-arming of the Mexican government in order that they send 6,000 soldiers to the border with Guatemala is responsible. It might just be that it's a much hotter month in June than it is in May and border crossings always drop when you get to the hotter months of the summer, but ultimately, the reason why people are coming from Central America predominantly to the border between Mexico and the United States and trying to cross, the reasons are extremely complex and nothing being discussed presently addresses the root causes of migration. So without some sort of serious change to the conditions in certain Central American countries, it's difficult to see why the flow of migration would suddenly decrease to the kind of levels that would please the Trump administration.

Andrew, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks very much for having me.

One day, the Netherlands and America will go head-to-head in the Women's World Cup final.

USA! USA! This is a massive moment.

This tournament has seen higher viewing figures than ever before. That's partly because of higher-profile slots from broadcasters. But also, play is improving, as more and more countries follow America's lead in professionalizing the game.

Europe is catching up to the US. This is seen quite clearly through the figures.

Maggie Schultag has been following the World Cup for The Economist, and she's also the captain of The Economist's women's football team.

The number of professional and semi-pro players in Europe almost doubled between 2013 and 2017. However, having said this, we're still seeing a huge problem with pay inequality. In the Women's Super League, which is one of the richer competitions actually in women's sport, female footballers still earn 100 times less. Than Premier League male footballers. The global wage across the world is around $7,000 per year. So clearly this is still an issue. However, having said this, people are becoming more aware of this being an issue, and as more money comes in and the sport develops, we should hopefully see a rise in this too. For anyone who's been watching women's football for a while, I think it's very clear that the standard has just improved drastically, particularly so since the last World Cup. And when I say the improvement is drastic, I totally mean it. In this World Cup, we've seen some amazing set pieces from the women's teams, and I think that's really kind of encouraged people who were not into the sport before to take it a bit more seriously than they did, which is great.

I mean, it's easy to see that the quality of play is very high, certainly in this tournament. But I mean, how do you quantify it?

So this is where it gets a bit more difficult because it's notoriously hard to quantify. The obvious measure which a lot of people go to is the number of goals scored, because obviously that's what we see. But this is kind of a flawed way to look at it because if you think about it, any amateur team can essentially score as many goals as the teams in the top tiers. So just to give an example of this, The Economist women's football team recently won a couple of their games 2-1, 2-1, and 3-0. It's the same as the scorelines we've seen in the World Cup games. So, you know, it doesn't really work. The rarity of scoring as well means that one great game can totally skew the sample, and we've seen this in this World Cup actually. The game that comes to mind is USA's win against Thailand, where they scored 13 goals. A much better way to quantify this, and probably the most accurate that we've come across, is to look at the number of passes in an average game. This seems better because it's a figure that decreases as you go down the divisions, so it's obviously reflective of the quality of play. An average game in the Premier League has about 900 passes, whereas fourth-tier men's football has around 650.

So why is that, though? Why would a better side have more passes?

It makes sense because high-quality games involve teams who are usually pretty good at retaining possession. And there's a high correlation between that and actually winning the game. Low-quality games feature a lot of kind of hoofing the ball around the pitch, kind of aimlessly, which doesn't result in a lot of clean passes.

So on that score, how does the Women's World Cup this time around stack up?

So data that we've received from Opta, which is a sports analytics firm, shows that after the England-US semifinal, the average number of passes in this Women's World Cup for a game was 830. That's a 10% increase since the last World Cup. This puts the standard of the Women's World Cup above England's championship, whereas during the last World Cup, they were well below it.

And so the important question here, come the final on Sunday, who's your money on?

I don't want to say it, but it's got to be the US.

That is the right answer.

The Netherlands-Sweden semi-final, to be honest, was one of the more dull games we've seen so far. And unless the Netherlands really pull something out of the bag, I think the US should go all the way. The US has actually beaten Netherlands in 6 consecutive games.

Then it's time for me to place a bet.

Correct.

Maggie, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here on Monday.