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Nikos Konstandaras is the managing editor and a columnist at the Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini.


MY country is hurtling toward an election that will decide its fate — whether Greeks will fight on to remain part of Europe’s core or succumb to their own weaknesses and turn inward, choosing isolation, anger and uncertainty greater than that from which they wish to flee.
The vote on Sunday will change our lives — determining not only whether we remain in the euro zone but also the nature of our society and the fate of the democracy that was re-established just 38 years ago after a dictatorship. We are bitterly divided between those who want to carry on with the reform process and those who want to turn back the clock. Our partners in the European Union are frightened of the consequences of our vote, but seem otherwise indifferent to our fate.
At a moment when the choices should be as clear as possible — between reform and stagnation, between Europe and isolation, between painful progress and the deceptive comfort of surrender — the issues are hopelessly confused by false expectations, by false choices and by the total failure of a political class that can’t propose solutions to the country’s problems and can’t forge a minimal national consensus on what is at stake and what needs to be done.
We face a choice between two deeply flawed alternatives. On one hand, there is New Democracy, a center-right party that has done much to undermine Greece’s economic reform and revival over the past two years. It refused to support the bailout agreement signed by the Greek government, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund on the grounds that it would stifle growth and so it undermined initiatives like tax reform that would have helped combat tax evasion by self-employed professionals and businesses. Yet it is now presenting itself as the responsible force that will stick to austerity and keep Greece in the euro zone.
On the other hand there is Syriza, a fractious coalition of 12 radical groups that has anointed itself the herald of leftist change throughout Europe and declares that it will immediately annul the bailout agreement while demanding that our partners continue to lend us money. The latter course could lead to the country’s swift exit from the euro and a chaotic and unpredictable future.
Since last October, after the first suggestion that Greece might be forced out of the euro zone, we have lived with desperate uncertainty. Suicides, once few, are on the rise as the pressure becomes too much for some. Meanwhile, families and the disorganized and underfunded social security system can no longer cope. In a country of fewer than 11 million people, more than a million are jobless. Everyone else lives in fear that he or she may be next as companies close or lay off workers. Migrants are leaving and Greeks are emigrating. A recent study conducted on behalf of Panteion University in Athens suggests that 7 out of 10 Greeks between the ages of 18 and 24 hope to seek their fortune elsewhere.
This uncertainty has inspired radical choices. A cousin of mine, and his wife, left with their young child a few weeks after she was offered a job in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They reasoned that one job in Dubai was more secure than two in Greece. In villages around the country, the unemployed and pensioners from cities and towns are returning to the land to clear fields and grow crops that they feel they and their extended families will need if the economy gets even worse. A friend, a successful lawyer, is thinking of going into farming as he sees his clients falling by the wayside. My elderly parents follow the news carefully, anxious about possible shortages of medicines. Having lived through many ups and downs, they are more sanguine than most: “Whatever happens to the many will happen to us as well,” my mother says.
The insecurity shakes us to our core. When I go to the A.T.M., I hold my breath until I hear the reassuring whirring sound that says the machine will give me what I’ve asked for. I wonder whether I will be so lucky next time. My wife and I have been working for more than 25 years, saving for our children’s education, because even though about half our salaries go to taxes and social security, we know that we must pay for private schools, that we cannot count on state hospitals, and that our pensions are not guaranteed. (All this because others do not pay taxes, and because successive governments did not do their work.)