Timing can make all the difference

Greek MP Yannis Lagos, of the extreme far-right Golden Dawn party, is escorted by anti-terror police. PHOTO/AP

Two governments did brave things last week.

One of them quit and called a new election even though it had a viable majority in parliament. The other arrested the leaders of a neo-fascist party on charges of heading a criminal gang. And you can't help wondering if things would have turned out a lot better if a couple of other governments had had the courage to do the same thing.

Last Saturday, the Tunisian government that has been in power since the country's first free election in 2011 announced that it would resign. Ennahda, the leading party in the ruling coalition, had not tried to impose its Islamic values on the whole population but the situation in the country was starting to feel like Egypt. So Ennahda quit.

Like any post-revolutionary government, Ennahda faced a huge economic challenge, and its inevitable failure to create enough jobs to meet the expectations of the young had eaten into its popular support. But what really brought it into a confrontation with the secular majority of the population was two assassinations of high-profile opposition leaders.

Nobody thinks that Ennahda was involved in the killings of Chokri Belaid last February and Mohammed Brahmi in May (both with the same pistol). At worst, people think that the government was not severe enough in cracking down on the Salafists, Islamist radicals who are widely suspected of responsibility for the murders.

With many of its former voters suffering from the dire state of the economy, Ennahda will probably not win the next election (which is to be organised by a caretaker government). But Tunisia will still be a democracy, Ennahda will still be a legal party, and there will not be thousands killed by the army in the streets. Unlike Egypt.

If President Mohammed Morsi had had the wisdom to do what Ennahda has done, even at the last moment, Egypt would still be a democracy today.

And now to Greece, where the ruling coalition of centre-right and left-wing parties has taken decisive action against Europe's most violent political movement, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn Party, over the past two weeks. The sweep culminated in an anti-terrorism operation early last Saturday morning in which police stormed the homes of party leader Nikos Michaloliakos and five other Golden Dawn members of parliament.

Only three years ago Golden Dawn was a tiny fringe party that ranted about "subhuman foreigners" stealing Greek jobs and polluting the Greek gene pool, and got less than 1 per cent of the vote in the 2010 election. Then came the debt crisis that has plunged Greece into poverty - and in last year's election it got 7 per cent of the vote.

Waving Greek flags and the party's logo (which looks quite like a swastika), Golden Dawn's bully-boys took over the streets, attacking immigrants, gays and leftists. It had the support of some senior police officers, and its members were arming themselves for some final confrontation. But Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's government moved first.

Greece is not a great power, so what happens there matters less than that of 1930s Germany for instance, but without this prompt action it could have ended up the same way. It's a lot easier to be wise after the fact, but it is the job of politicians to be wise before the fact. Some pass the test; others do not.