“Do Left and Right still matter today? Is it only effectiveness and good management that count?” At first glance, the question sounds reasonable. But a policy is not evaluated only by whether it “works” on paper, but for whom it works, at what cost, and with what social consequences.
Konstantina Michou | 09.10.2026 Opinion
“Does Left and Right still matter today? Is it only effectiveness and good management that count?” At first glance, the question sounds reasonable. But a policy is not evaluated only by whether it “works” on paper, but for whom it works, at what cost, and with what social consequences.
The malice and destructive character of New Democracy and its policies are not hidden in some abstract “ineffectiveness,” but in their very core. These are policies that deliberately plunder public health and education, dismantle labor rights of decades, hand over public wealth and infrastructure to private oligopolies, and compress popular incomes irreconcilably so that the profits of the few may grow. The governance of New Democracy must not be treated merely as a “management choice,” but as a raw social war from above, which breeds poverty, exclusion, and the sense that the life and dignity of the social majority are expendable before market indicators.
Precisely because these policies are deeply antisocial and class-based, they cannot be defended openly. For this very reason, the so-called “de-ideologization” was invented. This constitutes the basic ideological weapon with which New Democracy and its entire political milieu, as its satellites, baptize destruction as “one-way street” and “common sense,” thereby imposing and shielding New Democracy in power.
The dominant narrative presents privatizations, the shrinking of the welfare state, and the deregulation of labor as “objective technocratic necessity.” When the barbaric policy of New Democracy is baptized as science, every opposing voice is automatically ostracized as populism, relieving the party of the need to account for the inequalities it produces. Apolitical rhetoric focuses exclusively on macroeconomic indicators, detached from real society, turning the profits of large conglomerates and surpluses into the measure of a country’s success, while supposedly neutral “technocratic” management functions as a shield of protection for oligopolies.
The narrative of the Transcendent Center and correct management is supported not only by the governmental core, but is objectively utilized by the entire political spectrum. On the one hand, entire political currents, typically placed in the broader progressive, center-left or left space, trapped in consensus and a systemic realism with reassurances to the centers of power, abandon rupture. Converging on basic economic choices, they function objectively as cushions and decompression valves, reinforcing the narrative that there is no alternative. On the other hand, the forces moving on the right and the far-right/fascist formations, while posing as supposedly anti-systemic, in reality confine themselves to a toxic rhetoric of hatred, identity, and religious exploitation, leaving the core of capital entirely unscathed. These noisy mechanisms conveniently polarize the scene in terms of diversion, offering the coveted alibi to New Democracy to present itself as the only “serious, institutional and Western modernizer” against the darkness. To this web are added the media, the think tanks, and the technocratic elite, playing the role of multiplier, baptizing ideology daily as scientific correctness and marginalizing anyone who questions the establishment.
These phenomena are the symptoms of a deeper problem, which stems from alignment with the rules of the market and international centers, where the institutional framework operates steadily in favor of the few. As long as political forces are trapped in a logic of managerial misery, either recycling illusions that “savior” governmental solutions can exist within the same suffocating system, or resorting to a sterilized entrenchment that settles for a safe but harmless denunciation with no outlet for the people, the prospect of overthrow is numbed. This double entrapment is destructive because it disarms society. On the one hand it deceives it with false hopes of supposedly leftist managements that ultimately become integrated, and on the other it leaves it prey to inertia, turning politics into a communication product for an abstract middle space and allowing leaderships to compromise with the networks of power and the bankers.
The de-ideologization of politics remains the absolute ideological weapon that keeps New Democracy in power, with the contribution of all its satellites. If the political forces of the center-left opposition do not wish to be characterized as satellites and enablers of neoliberal policy, they must definitively abandon apolitical rhetoric, reassurances to supranational institutions, and entrapment in the middle space. They must return to clear ideological confrontation, reconnect with the real social fronts in workplaces and neighborhoods, fight for housing, education and health, opposing a program of rupture with the oligopolies and the centers of power. Against this raw neoliberalism, popular conservatism too should defend social cohesion, support for domestic production, protection of public space, and national sovereignty against foreign decision-making centers, instead of functioning as an agent of markets and cartels and being merely bigoted and with a toxic rhetoric of hatred. Systemic management will not bring change. Change will come only when society finds its voice again and demands policies that place human dignity at the center. With the fascists, no one even needs to bother. If the remaining forces do their job and respond to the real problems of society, these mechanisms will disappear on their own to the margins.
