Communists say no to Greeks abroad vote

THE Greek Communist Party (KKE) parliamentary spokesman Antonis Skyllakos said last week that Greeks living abroad should not be given the right to vote in Greece's general elections.

The Interior Ministry is set to change the law so that members of the Greek Diaspora can vote in their countries of residence but Skyllakos said his party believed this could lead to the "will of the Greek people" not being truly reflected.

He argued that most Greeks living abroad were not in touch with developments in Greece and that the political parties would not be competing on a level playing field.

The new bill would grant more than a million Greek citizens residing abroad the right to vote in general elections in Greece by casting their ballot at one of hundreds of polling stations that would be created around the world.

"This is a very important piece of legislation," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos has said.

Currently, Greeks living abroad can only have a say in the election if they travel to Greece to cast their ballot. There is no overseas voting system.

This is not, however, because Greek politicians consider the Diaspora an insignificant voting bloc because they account for an influential percentage of the total electorate.

During the 2004 general election, the interior ministry estimated that more than one million of the 9,794,594 Greek citizens who are registered to vote are permanent residents abroad; but only about 30,000 of them travelled to Greece to vote that year, according to media reports. The potential for greater Diaspora influence in parliament is therefore considerable.

According to the foreign ministry's General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad, as many as 5.6 million people of Greek origin reside in more than 140 countries around the world. Many of those could apply for dual citizenship following the incentive of a vote, swelling the Diaspora vote further.

The country's two biggest parties - socialist PASOK and conservative New Democracy - already go to great lengths and spend millions of euros to convince as many eligible voters from abroad as possible (namely Cyprus, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States) to travel to Greece to vote in the general elections scheduled every four years.

In 2004, for instance, New Democracy launched a special website for its overseas Greek party supporters, as well as a telephone hotline, to assist them in making travel arrangements home to vote. PASOK, likewise, set up dozens of offices in more than 20 countries where party supporters assisted Greeks with their travel arrangements to Greece to vote.