The decision by the caretaker Greek government to postpone elections by two months was a move which was agreed upon by both major parties and was designed to bring stability to the embattled nation.

After having been knocked sideways by the, to put it mildly, creative accounting of the Karamanlis government and subsequent failure to implement badly needed reforms by the Papandreou government, Greece had no option but to install a caretaker technocrat government.

That government was supposed to bring stability to the country which had been wracked by strikes and protests. In part, it worked. Papandreou was never going to have it easy. The government coffers were in a mess and it is only now that we are beginning to realise just how bad Greek debt is, about €340bn. To pay for it, the EU rewrote the whole rulebook, not once, but twice and three times. Papandreou was backed into a corner in one of the EU summits and agreed to a raft of third wave reforms. Just days later, he announced that to have a mandate to do so, he needed a referendum. Well; no one was pleased with that and in the end, he had to go. The man never had a chance really. He came from a socialist party and enacted some of the harshest reforms ever seen and even that was not enough.

But, things seem to be relatively calm in Greece at the moment. And this is why the technocrat government sought the approval of the two parties to wait until late April to go to the polls. The danger in this is that the country might experience more strikes and disruption. But on the upside, it will not negate any progress being registered during this period of relative calm by disrupting it with an election campaign. Besides, it also costs money. What is interesting is that the caretaker government managed to get the backing of the main parties, both champing at the bit. Perhaps in a rare flash of Mediterranean rationality, rather than passion, both saw the need for Greece to concentrate on being stable.

A few of those lessons hold true for us. On the one hand, we have an opposition which seems to be in election mode already. On the other hand, we have a government which seems to have gone into siege mentality. We have stated many times, the government has done well in terms of finance, despite misgivings in a fair amount of other sectors. As we see it, 2012 will be an even more challenging year than 2011 and we need to maintain stability. Some are calling for an early election, even from factions within the ruling party. But this is not the way forward. This government needs to implement its plan for 2012 and we all need to work hard to ensure that we do not get sucked into the mire that has engulfed much of Southern Europe. The election will come soon enough and everyone will have a fair crack of the whip. We need to make sure that we do not lose that little bit of breathing space that we have manoeuvred for ourselves. And to do that, we need stability.