Pseudo-democracy: Greek edition

I give the USA a lot of grief over being a pseudo-democracy, as well I should considering there are 10 million adult citizens barred from voting and nearly a 100-fold difference in voting power based on residency. But the home of democracy is hardly much better, and in the latest elections it has certainly declined to the status of a pseudo-democracy.

Consider this: the large right-wing parties gained only 44% of the vote, while the large left-wing parties gained 50%. Yet the new Prime Minister is from the right-wing ND party. Ah, but this election was not about the traditional left-right issues, it was on the question of austerity. Well here, the pro-austerity parties only won 42% of the vote compared to the 46% of the anti-austerity parties, and yet the new government is pro-austerity! In the May election, which was negated because there was "no clear winner", the result was even more striking, with the anti-austerity parties winning 60% of the vote.

So how is it that a majority of the electorate voted left-wing and anti-austerity, but ND - a pro-austerity right-wing party - is the winner of the election? Well, prior to these elections ND passed a new electoral law that gives the largest individual party a 50 seat "bonus", which is sizeable in a parliament of only 250 elected seats. This law was explicitly designed to give the two largest parties, ND and PASOK, a workable majority even if they only won 40% of the vote. In other words, the large pro-austerity parties were basically guaranteed to win the election, because they would pick up the bonus seats. The anti-austerity parties, by contrast, were fractured, so none would be able to get the bonus seats. The system is so skewed towards the pro-austerity parties that the 32%:60% May result gave a hung parliament, while the 42%:46% June result gives a win to the pro-austerity coalition!

This result can certainly not be considered anything other than anti-democractic. And worse than the US situation, where the abuses of democracy are archaic holdovers, this law was only engineered in 2008.