What goes up must come down

Tom Petty said it best in his beautiful song "Learning to Fly": "What goes up must come down." Pretty basic stuff, you might say. But it's not really, not when we're talking about politics and politicians in particular, who almost inevitably believe that once they are elected and climb up to a certain point on the ladder, they will be there for life.
The governing leftist SYRIZA party is a pretty typical example of this mind-set. It is not the only one, of course, but it is the most recent. We're getting ahead of ourselves, you might say. We've got a general election coming up on July 7. That's very true. Regardless, though, the difference between SYRIZA and the conservative main opposition New Democracy is too great and the time too short for the leftists to win back those 10 percentage points and get enough votes to form a government. In that sense, it has come down after...