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“decentered/destabilized” citizen and a perceived out of touch and increasingly inept state.
For example, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s the once dominant center-left Pan-
Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) party began to fall out of favor as it failed to
address growing concerns over the economy and minorities, remaining, instead, faithful
to outmoded post-junta modemist∕nationalist discourses (Tsakalotos 2008). This
ultimately weakened the party’s political hegemony and precipitated its fall from power.
Yet, even well into the 1990s the two dominant political parties in Greece, PASOK and
the center-right New Democracy (ND), continued to react to growing public concerns
over security (variously defined) in accordance with the nationalist∕sovereignist political
discourses and sensibilities of the post-junta era, with very little if any success. An
infamous example of this includes the “undocumented migrant roundup” programs of the
1990s ordered and justified by classic nationalist∕sovereignist “us versus them” rhetoric:
a bumbled, police-driven effort to quell public fear resulting in few arrests and the onset
of a IegalZpolitical quagmire that would draw criticism from human rights groups around
the world (see Antonopoulos 2006b). Once again, the state demonstrated its inability to
manage a phenomenon perceived to be contributing to the destabilization and insecurity
of the citizen.
Moving into 2000, Greeks were coming to struggle with a culminating variety of
serious social, political, and ideological problems. The post-junta governments had
deployed failed social policy after failed social policy (Petmesidou & Mossialos 2006),
suffered from ongoing structural weakness and inefficiency (Danopoulos & Danopoulos
2001), openly struggled with political clientelism and corruption (see Featherstone 2008;
Featherstone & Papadimitriou 2008), and seemed increasingly powerless relative to