AS IF this week’s general election and a new Prime Minister were not enough for one year, the people of Athens must now steel themselves for the only competition in Greece 2004 in which anyone else in the world is interested. Their Olympic Games — long demanded, now almost dreaded — are getting closer with ghastly speed.

Imagine what it must be like this morning to be the new 47-year-old conservative Prime Minister, Costas Karamanlis, the youngest in his country’s history. After a lifetime of expectation, you get the keys to Maximou Mansion, the self-consciously suburban villa next door to the massive old royal palace. After almost all of the past 20 years in opposition, your party looks forward to the sweet smell of payback time, to summiteering in the EU, to doing down the Left and the Turks, to responsibility at last.

Instead your big worry is whether there is a roof yet on the national swimming pool, why mud is everywhere more in evidence than marble, and why no one is buying tickets for beach volleyball. There is a challenge by official prostitutes against cheating by foreign competitors, questions (from tour company lobbyists) about why the city is still full of stray wolfhounds, questions (from animal welfarists) about whether the wolfhounds are being sytematically liquidated and a question (Answer Needed This Day) about Awacs teams to outwit al-Qaeda. The synchronised swimming team, which posed with your opponent in a campaign photo-op, is now worried about its training facilities. Wild winds are more threatening to rowers on the new Marathon water complex than the ancient Persians ever were.

Worse, everything must be done in a spirit of unity with one’s political opponents. Otherwise the whole “national reawakening” could still end in catastrophe. During the campaign a top man in Karamanlis’s New Democracy party spoke of culling 10,000 socialist advisers from the bloated Greek bureaucracy. This was seen as a gaffe that would galvanise the Left against a rightist “pogrom of jobs”.

Like all the best gaffes, it betrayed what Karamanlis would like to do — but not yet.

Although modern Greece has been built (and in many places left unbuilt) by an antique system of exchanging votes for government salaries, only a few figures at the top of the Olympic organisations can be sent home straight away. Until the last ball is volleyed and the last swim is synchronised, enemies must keep their enmity under wraps.

The battle that Greek politicians most cared about ended on Sunday night with almost no one in the rest of the world taking any notice.

The Athenian political casino once had some of the best-watched tables in the West. Cold War Greece was the place for high-stakes gamblers on coups and dictatorships, good and bad kings, irredentist obsessives, bawling anti-Americanism and slush funds to keep everyone in their place.

The EU and the euro — supported by Blairite handbooks on how to win elections — have ended most of that. The two contenders to be the next Prime Minister spent the campaign like rival soap brands struggling for advantage in a carefully managed marketplace. Both men had big, established product names. Both knew that those names were a hindrance as well as a help, and that they must plaster “new” and “ changed” and “improved” over their products if their fellow Greeks were to go out and buy.

George Papandreou, the 51-year-old Pasok leader, boasted a father and grandfather who had held the job before him. Costas Karamanlis, though merely the nephew of a former Prime Minister, was a potent reminder of that uncle, Constantine Karamanlis, who led Greeks back to the ballot box in 1974 after the Colonels fell. Without brand loyalty neither man would have risen so far. Without promoting his preparedness to break with the past, each knew that he would lose.

This was not just the usual story of modern media politics. This was the sixth time the two names had been against each other. This was personal. This was family. This was Greek.

For George Papandreou the task was always the harder. His father, Andreas, was the founder of the Pasok party, the domineering anti-American who brought the Left to power in 1981 and, even during his dying days under the sway of a young former air hostess and her soothsayers, kept that power by mafioso means for which the party is still feared. In the past eight years, with Andreas Papandreou dead and the country under the control of the Germanic accountant Costas Simitis, there has been change within Pasok — but less even than Neil Kinnock brought to the British Labour Party. A would-be Blair became leader only a month ago.

Old Pasok, whose symbol of a dark-green jagged sun still dominated the final election rallies, did not much care for “young George” Papandreou. The “old man” had “spiritual sons” and old partners-in-graft who thought — and still think — they could do a better job.