Roman Gerodimos, Bournemouth University

As polls closed in Greece on July 7, with pollsters predicting a convincing victory for the centre-right New Democracy and a defeat for the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras, an unusual sense of calm prevailed across the country. Rarely has a Greek election night been so quiet.

New Democracy’s incoming prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, went out of his way to unite and manage expectations. His supporters were just relieved to have ousted Tsipras. Tsipras himself looked relieved, having managed to reverse his party’s losses at the recent European Parliament elections, to win a respectable 31.5% of the vote, which will allow him to remain as a strong second pole in the system. With 39.9% of the vote, New Democracy will have 158 seats in the Greek parliament, an outright majority.

Smaller parties all put on a happy face for their own internal reasons, with the exception of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which failed to pass the 3% threshold to elect MPs. It looked as if Greece had finally attained what it had been desperately seeking for one long decade: a sense of normalcy.

Exactly ten years ago, in the summer of 2009, the first signs that Greece was in economic trouble started to become apparent. As the markets’ confidence in Greek bonds collapsed, the government turned to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Within weeks it had entered a vortex of excruciating negotiations, conditional bailouts and tough austerity measures that went on and on. To an extent these are still going on and, in different forms, are expected to go on for much of the 21st century.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the crisis and austerity on Greek society. Beyond the obvious effects – unemployment reaching 25%, hundreds of thousands of mostly young and well-educated people leaving the country to seek employment abroad, pensions and public services facing severe cuts – the political system was rattled. One of the two main pillars of the post-1974 system, the centre-left PASOK, collapsed. Far right parties such as Golden Dawn and the xenophobic, homophobic Independent Greeks – entered parliament.

The crisis has been the single biggest challenge to Greece’s survival since World War II. Its root causes, the way Greeks were stereotyped in the world’s media, and the way lenders and successive Greek governments designed and implemented austerity measures, all became sources of collective shame and humiliation. This in turn polarised a political culture that has been historically prone to bouts of instability and violence.

Rise of violence

Tsipras weaponised and normalised this populist narrative of victimhood, pitting the “innocent people” against “the corrupt elites”, including Greece’s EU partners and lenders. As I have shown in my research, this narrative was also used by far-left radical groups to justify revenge and aggression.

Political violence tripled between 2008 and 2018. Far-left violence was 3.5 times bigger in scale than far-right violence, which itself soared. Low-level incidents are a daily occurrence with thousands of them having taken place during the decade of the crisis, especially before Syriza got into power. Radicalisation and extremism have been particularly prominent among young people. While many are politically apathetic, those who do engage tend to do so in radical ways. Golden Dawn drew most of its supporters from the 18-25 age group, while Syriza has consistently topped the polls in that group.

The January and September 2015 victories of Syriza, which governed in alliance with the Independent Greeks, acted as pressure valves that allowed Greek society to vent a lot of its anger and frustration. That radicalism, which was such a prominent element of Greek political culture during the first period of the crisis, gradually ran out of steam.

From January to June 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, the flamboyant poster boy of the “Caviar left”, led catastrophic and slightly surreal negotiations with EU and IMF lenders. These ended up costing Greece billions of euros, triggered a bank run and capital controls, caused it to default on its debts to the IMF and brought it within hours of exiting the Eurozone. Eventually, Tsipras did a U-turn and, in late 2015 began implementing all of the lenders’ requests, effectively showing that there really was no alternative to austerity.

Mitsotakis’s moment

Since being elected leader of New Democracy in 2016, Mitsotakis worked hard to renew his party. In the space of three years, he managed to turn an out of touch, old-school, conservative party into a modern, liberal, social media savvy electoral machine. While banking on his image as a well-educated and professionally successful technocrat who will cut taxes and facilitate foreign direct investment, he also placed strategic emphasis on the youth vote.

He voted in favour of civil partnerships for same-sex couples and spent time meeting with drug addicts in rough parts of Athens. He also carried out a radical renewal of New Democracy’s parliamentary candidates and party workers, promoting many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. In doing so, he managed to build up support in the crucial 18-24 demographic, reaching 27%-30% in the recent elections, and so ending Syriza’s monopoly on the youth vote.

Whether Greece has really entered a new era of normalcy will become apparent fairly soon. One of the first moves Mitsotakis pledged to take is to scrap the so-called “asylum” law, which forbids police from entering university premises. As a result of the law, urban university campuses have become hotspots of crime, vandalism, drug-dealing and anarchist propaganda and public opinion has recently shifted in favour of taking action. However, far-left groups still carry street credit in universities and in the urban pocket of Exarchia in downtown Athens, where law-and-order has completely collapsed.

On election day in Greece, the only incident that broke the peaceful hum of post-election dinner parties took place there: a previously unknown anarchist group stole and burnt a ballot box, threatened electoral clerks and threw tear gas. What happens at Exarchia over the next few months – whether and how the government decides to enforce the law and how young people and wider society react – will be the best indicator of whether Greece has truly turned the page.

Roman Gerodimos, Associate Professor of Global Current Affairs, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

John McAlaney, Bournemouth University

British Airways (BA) has received a record fine of £183m after details of around 500,000 of its customers were stolen in a data breach in summer 2018. The fine was possible thanks to new rules introduced last year by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gave the British regulator powers to impose much larger penalties on companies that fail to protect their customers’ data.

But fines like these don’t just act as a business deterrent because of their financial cost. They are a method of public shaming that we can use as a form of social control to force companies to act more ethically. And research on consumer behaviour has demonstrated that social (dis)approval can be a more powerful motivator than financial factors.

The public nature of the fine is embarrassing for BA, as it reminds the public of the data breach and delivers an official verdict that the company was at fault. The huge size of the fine also indicates how serious the breach was. As a result, BA will rightly be worried about what damage the fine might do to its reputation.

Reputation is a valuable commodity for companies, and in some instances can be more important to consumers than the price of products when they are choosing who to buy from. We tend to make simplistic conclusions about the people and groups around us based on their behaviour, a phenomenon known as fundamental attribution error. This suggests a fine could lead consumers to conclude that if a company cannot protect its data – regardless of whether it has any value – then it should not be trusted on other aspects of its operations.

Although GDPR has hugely increased the size of the penalties for breaches, BA isn’t the first organisation the UK has publicly fined for breaking data protection rules, and others include Facebook, Uber and the Royal Mail. Given the importance of reputation to companies, there’s a chance these organisations would have rather accepted a higher fine in exchange for the amount not being made public.

Establishing social norms

The fine won’t just have an impact on BA either. Online data breaches are relatively new phenomena, but this sort of public shaming is an old method of social control. It sets and reinforces social norms and standards about what all organisations should be expected to be able to achieve, a message that can be intended for both businesses and the public.

My research has shown how social norms have a powerful influence over people’s behaviours and attitudes. We judge ourselves and others in relation to adherence to our collective perceptions of how we, as a society, believe we should be performing.

It’s not easy for a society to reach a consensus on what a social norm should be for a new phenomenon, especially in situations where we are uncertain about our own degree of knowledge and understanding. For most people, hacking and hackers remain a relatively murky and ill-defined threat that is hard to define or quantify, and the dangers of having your data released into the wild aren’t easy to see.

But there is evidence that consumers are becoming more concerned about businesses that do not keep their data secure, particularly after the introduction of GDPR. High-profile businesses receiving major fines could help spur this process further.

New normal

But that’s not the end of the story. At the time of the breach, BA described it as a “sophisticated, malicious, criminal attack”. This sort of narrative implies it’s difficult for organisations to protect themselves against highly motivated and technically skilled criminals. Hollywood portrayals of hackers as hoodie-wearing lone geniuses support this idea that it’s impossible for any organisation to fully prevent attacks.

While not exactly putting a positive spin on a company’s involvement in a data breach, this idea does limit the damage done to its reputation. It assumes that organisations are already doing everything they can reasonably do to protect their systems and customers.

Hacker communities take a very different position, arguing that many large organisations fail to take the basic steps that could be expected of them, despite having the resources to do so. If this is the case, we can expect to see more companies hit by penalties that could be even larger (the UK’s rules allow fines of up to 4% of a company’s turnover).

But social norms are fluid. What can seem shocking or extreme at one moment can quickly become the new normal. Heavy fines always cause financial pain to organisations, but if they become widely used and publicly reported then there’s a risk that they become seen as the cost of doing business, as arguably has happened with fines relating to health and safety. This would make fines less damaging to a company’s reputation and so less useful in forcing firms to do their best to protect customer data.

As such, only a strategic use of fines will help the public see how serious it is when organisations fail to live up to the data standards our new laws have set. If this is achieved then it may help the public understand the seriousness of data security, and in turn take greater responsibility over their own safety online.

John McAlaney, Associate Professor in Psychology, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.