An accident waiting to happen

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

London – The world’s most powerful financiers emerged last Sunday from a meeting in the cosy surroundings of the World Economic Forum at the plush Swiss resort of Davos after agreeing that maybe, just maybe, they would consider some reforms to the global banking system. The same morning, a small group of less influential people braved the cold to gather in a corner of Hyde Park, beneath London’s steely winter sunlight, to hear a man who thinks the banks’ irresponsibility has gone too far.

Speakers’ Corner is an enclave of free speech unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Here, in the northeast corner of one of the world’s largest metropolitan parks, anyone with a step ladder or a soapbox, a good set of lungs and a cause to defend can speak out. Naturally, this pulls in eccentrics and jokers but having been around since 1866, it has also attracted luminaries such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Both would have been fascinated, if not surprised, to see an English singer-songwriter addressing an audience of less than 200 people about the unfairness of bankers’ excessive bonuses and the folly of capitalism.

Billy Bragg, a 52-year-old London-born musician, is not a natural choice to pick up the socialist baton from the founding fathers of communism but his presence at Speakers’ Corner on Sunday perfectly reflected the failure of our political system to display a social sensitivity as well as a financial one. “I am standing here today because there don’t seem to be any politicians willing to take up this cause,” said Bragg who refused to pay his taxes on January 31 in a bid to draw attention to a campaign that has attracted more than 25,000 supporters online.

Bragg wants to pressure the British government to limit the annual bonuses the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) pays its employees this year to 25,000 pounds (26,600 euros) per person. The reasoning behind this request is simple: RBS was on the brink of collapse last year when it was bailed out by the UK government thanks to an injection of 25.5 billion pounds (29.2 billion euros), which was a bigger financial package than the one Greece put together to prop up all of its banks. This cash bought British taxpayers 84 percent of RBS’s shares. As part of the deal, the government negotiated a veto on RBS paying bonuses of more than 25,000 pounds to any of its bankers.

So, unsurprisingly, Bragg and many others were incensed when they heard the bank’s chief executive Stephen Hester say that – thanks to the profits RBS has made on the back of state intervention – it would be paying its employees a total of 1.5 billion pounds (1.71 billion euros) in bonuses this year. Presumably, this is the sort of amount US President Barack Obama had in mind when he labeled some of the bonuses being paid to American bankers “shameful” and “obscene.” Bragg argues that as the majority stakeholder in the bank, the British public should be able to have a say in whether these bonuses are paid.

“I understand that the Treasury had little choice but to use taxpayers’ money to safeguard our savings and stabilize and restore confidence in the financial system,” the singer told his audience. “I also understand that we will all benefit if and when RBS becomes solvent again. What I don’t understand is why the chief executive of our bank thinks that the best way to restore the company’s fortunes is to indulge in the irresponsible behavior that got us into this mess in the first place, by paying excessive bonuses at the first possible opportunity.”

This is where Bragg’s campaign strays beyond just convincing British Chancellor Alistair Darling to exercise the veto he retains on RBS bonuses and into much broader themes, such as the viability of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis. Hester’s response to critics of the bank’s planned payouts is that he is “a prisoner of the market.” In other words, if RBS does not offer these kinds of incentives, then it will not attract the best bankers and therefore won’t make the kind of profits that will allow it to pay back the public money that kept the bank afloat and in turn generate tax revenues.

It’s an argument that would deserve serious consideration were it not for the fact that the markets ceased to exist, in the form that we knew them at least, when they fouled things up so badly that governments around the world had to rescue them for fear of the whole financial system collapsing. Bankers may argue, with some justification, that practices which are now seen as reckless or greedy were once encouraged by governments looking for a tax windfall. But this does not change the essence of the situation facing us now: Market rules are being rewritten and the banking system, despite the procrastination of the financiers in Davos, is in need of urgent reform.

“Someone should explain to Mr Hester that when the government bailed out RBS they broke the biggest rule of the market – that when a business fails, it should cease to exist. Isn’t that how Adam Smith’s invisible hand works?” asked Bragg. “If the invisible hand of the market has to be replaced by the helping hand of the people in the form of taxpayers’ money, then the market system is broken and the whole free enterprise experiment of the past 30 years has failed.”

Perhaps this last statement from Bragg is too sweeping – although the invisible hand and helping hand have often pulled at each other, they have also worked together to make some things better during the last three decades. But he’s right to question whether we’ve learned anything from the mistakes made during years that led to the brink of financial meltdown. The lack of action on the political and financial front to ensure that the irresponsibility of the past serves as a lesson for the future illustrates that many governments and bankers are willing to play the waiting game when the game is already up. Obama’s plan to tax bankers’ bonuses in a bid to raise 90 billion dollars (64.2 billion euros) over the next 10 years and his call for them to invest their efforts in “meeting your responsibility” rather than fighting the measure was a small step toward setting up a new, fairer system.

In Davos, regulators and bankers failed to agree on how the amount of risk in the banking system could be reduced, so a global system of financial regulation is still out of reach. The closest the world’s top bankers got to making any concessions was discussing the establishment of a global financial insurance levy so the next bailout would be financed by the industry, not by taxpayers. But this is hardly a solution – it’s the equivalent of a chain smoker saving up money for the inevitable cancer operation rather than making an effort to kick the habit.

Although the archons of the financial system appear to be unrepentant, or at least unwilling to make the first move, Bragg plans to be on his step ladder at Speakers’ Corner again this Sunday to keep up the pressure on them. Perhaps, though, instead of delivering a speech, he might dedicate a few bars of one of his songs to those who face tremendous responsibilities but choose to shirk them: “Goodbye and good luck / To all the promises you’ve broken / Goodbye and good luck / To all the rubbish that you’ve spoken / Your life has lost its dignity / Its beauty and its passion / You’re an accident waiting to happen.”

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on February 5, 2010.

And justice for all

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

Two men convicted last week of being accessories in a brutal attack that killed a young Australian on Myconos were released from custody after appealing jail sentences totalling almost 16 years. On the same day, a Briton held, based on questionable testimonies and no apparent evidence, for seven months for alleged manslaughter on Zakynthos was denied a third bail request without any indication of when his trial will be held. If we needed confirmation of the disorder, the apathy, the warped logic, the injustice that pervades Greece’s justice system, we got it.

This country owes a lot to Oliver Zammit, the father of 20-year-old Doujon who was killed on Myconos in the summer of 2008. Oliver donated his son’s organs to Greeks. The least he deserved from us was justice.

He got this in some form last week when a court on Lesvos sentenced his son’s killer, Marios Antonopoulos, to 22.5 years in jail, though not for murder but on a lesser charge of inflicting fatal injury. The court also convicted two other bar workers, Dimitris Varonos and Giorgos Hadzioannou, for their part in the attack.

Releasing convicted criminals on appeal is a necessary part of the judicial system as it gives them an opportunity to better prepare their next defense and allows someone wrongly convicted to avoid the indignity of being locked up. However, the rights of the victim and his family, not just the convicts, must be taken into account. Varonos and Hadzioannou were not convicted of shoplifting but of taking part in an assault that was so vicious, it left its victim in a coma from which he could never recover. The decision to release them seems reckless and insulting.

It’s no wonder that Oliver Zammit, a mild-mannered man who has displayed nothing but appreciation for Greece and its people, felt the need to object to having to watch these two men walk free. “We believe in justice, we believe in law and we accept the sentences,” he said. “But we are disappointed [about the release of Varonos and Hadzioannou]. Doujon didn’t have justice the night they took his life; there was no court, no justice, no jury. We’ve been given a life sentence.”

While Zammit complained about a lack of justice in the northeastern Aegean, another apparent injustice was taking place in the Ionian, where judges decided to throw out an appeal by 21-year-old Andrew Symeou, who was asking to be bailed pending his trial for an alleged attack on fellow British tourist, 18-year-old Jonathon Hiles, in a Zakynthos nightclub in July 2007. Hiles was punched and then hit his head after falling off a dance stage. He died in the hospital two days later.

Symeou, who denies any involvement, has been in custody since last July. Before the end of the year, he was moved to the maximum security Korydallos Prison, where he is being held with convicted criminals. Symeou and his family have consistently challenged the charges against him and highlighted the weaknesses in the case: testimony that suggests someone fitting Symeou’s description could not have committed the crime has been ignored and accusations that some witnesses were coerced by the Zakynthos police have not been followed up.

In fact, the police investigation was completed in four days and a number of key suspects and witnesses, including Symeou, were not questioned. It’s symptomatic of a system that essentially encourages police to identify suspects as quickly as possible and then puts the onus on prosecutors to build a case against them. As far as the police’s statistics are concerned, the Hiles case is now closed, even though Symeou has yet to stand trial.

In the meantime, a university student with no criminal record languishes in a Greek jail unaware as to when he might be able to defend himself. “We have been told to trust the Greek judicial system and to believe that Andrew will receive a fair trial but how can we continue to believe that the system will treat Andrew fairly when so far he has been treated unfairly?” said Frank Symeou, Andrew’s father. “The court has a duty to uphold individuals’ fundamental rights, rights that are afforded to everyone. Andrew has the right to liberty, which includes being granted bail pending trial, unless there are strong reasons not to.”

This is a view shared by the London-based human rights group Fair Trials International, which has helped Symeou file an application with the European Court of Human Rights in the belief that Greece is violating European law by denying Symeou bail. The first two denials were based on the fact that he is not a Greek citizen, while the third rejection came after a council of judges decided he might re-offend.

“The arguments of the Greek judges defy logic,” said Sarah Ludford, a British Liberal Democrat MEP that has taken up Symeou’s cause. “Having denied Andrew bail twice on the discriminatory grounds that he is a foreigner, although he had a temporary family home address in Greece, they are justifying bail refusal by claiming he ‘may commit a crime,’ for which there is absolutely no basis.”

Ludford points out that part of the blame lies with the European Union, as it has failed to attach a list of defense rights to the European arrest warrant, under which Symeou was taken into custody. This may be the case but Greece must then accept the lion’s share of the blame for failing to dispense justice fairly.

You have to wonder, when the average detention time in Greece is 12 months – three times the EU average – how many other cases like this there are. Andrew Symeou can at least rely on a family and legal team that are working tirelessly to draw attention to his treatment and ensure he gets justice. How many others like him do not have a voice at all? We are heading toward having a judicial system where only those who employ big-name lawyers or have the connections to sway malleable judges are in with a chance of winning their case. This isn’t the kind of justice system befitting a developed country.

We should consider the words of a third father, Jonathon Hiles’s dad, Denzil. “My son is dead and I want the man who is accused of doing it to face trial for it,” he said. “If he didn’t do it then he will be found innocent but he’s got to go to court. We have to believe in the Greek justice system. This isn’t a Third World country, it is part of Europe.”

It’s time we did ourselves, as well as those that step onto Greek soil, justice.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 29, 2010.

Sovereign territory

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

“Sovereignty is rather like virginity: You either have it or you don’t,” a wise man told me some years ago. If this is the case, then, in an age when sexual morals are more lax, it seems fitting that there are only few, if any, states that can truly claim to be sovereign.

For the last few decades, a number of transnational factors — capital, migration, environmental degradation, communication, technology and even terrorism — have chipped away at states’ sovereignty. Rather than a case of “wham bam thank you ma’am,” it’s been a series of long, complicated dates that have led to the same, inevitable outcome.

Of course, there are still moments when sovereignty can be lost in a flash — for example, when Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive last Friday transferred operations at the airport in Port-au-Prince to the USA to speed up the earthquake relief effort. The scale of the disaster that hit the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation meant that Bellerive had little choice than to put his faith in the Americans. Nevertheless, handing control of your country’s airport and air space to another state is a landmark moment when one assesses the withering sovereignty of nations.

Greece is inextricably linked to Haiti, as the island state was the first to recognize the Hellenic Republic as an independent country in 1822. But over the past few days, the two countries have had something else in common: Greece also saw its sovereignty vanish, albeit under less horrific circumstances.

While preparing its Stability and Growth Program, which was officially presented to eurozone members on Monday, Greece essentially gave up control of its economy, and therefore its sovereignty. The measures that Athens intends to adopt as part of the four-year economic recovery plan were written here but they were dictated from other European capitals, even though the onus is on Greece to solve the problem on its own. “It would be wrong to presume or let Greece presume that the other countries could solve its problems,” said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of eurozone finance ministers or Eurogroup.

The death stare that Juncker fixed on Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou during Monday’s eurozone meeting was both humiliating and frightening. It was confirmation that Juncker, a career politician who has been at the heart of EU developments for many years, intends to watch the Greek government like a hawk. But he won’t be satisfied with just monitoring Athens’s movements. He’s already shown he’ll test the limits of Greek sovereignty. It was Juncker, rather than Papaconstantinou, who last week got in touch with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn to discuss whether Greece could use some financial help. “We think IMF assistance to Greece would not be opportune or welcome,” said Juncker after the chat.

“It’s nice of him to let us know,” the Greek minister might have thought. Well, he’d better get used to it because Juncker won a fresh 30-month mandate as the Eurogroup chief on Monday and the 55-year-old is the kind of technocrat who believes Europe’s strength lies in closer integration, a concept that allows little prospect for EU member states to make decisions independently. In a letter circulated to the eurozone finance ministers this week, the Luxembourger said he wants the Eurogroup “to pursue broader economic surveillance” of its 16 members. Greece’s recklessness and untrustworthiness means other countries could soon suffer the ignominy of outside interference in their economies.

Getting its figures right, cutting costs and generating revenues were never Greece’s strengths — but even so, relying on its European friends to prescribe a way out of this mess seems a high price to pay. It’s difficult to know what’s more galling: the fact that Greece’s ministers are being hauled before Juncker and similar EU officials like errant schoolboys or that it’s now been confirmed in black and white, in page after page of reports, that Greeks are truly incapable of exercising their sovereignty.

If we are to take anything positive from this sobering experience it’s the hope that our European partners have a better idea of what to do than we ever did but, more importantly, that we now have a chance to regain trust and rebuild confidence. Although there are many trials and tribulations that come with a loss of sovereignty or virginity, a loss of dignity will always be more painful. But, unlike virginity and possibly sovereignty, dignity can be restored.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 22, 2010.

The judgement of nations

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

If you’re looking for incisive commentary on contemporary developments, the Catholic Church is not the organization you usually turn to. So, when the Pope decides to dedicate part of his regular Sunday blessing to current affairs, there’s every reason to listen carefully.

Alarmed by clashes between immigrants and locals in the southern Italian town of Rosarno that led to more than 70 people being injured and over 1,000 Africans being evacuated, Pope Benedict XVI pleaded for calm and understanding.

“An immigrant is a human being, different only in where he comes from, his culture and his tradition,” he told worshippers. “We have to go to the heart of the problem, of the significance of the human being. The problem is a human one and I invite everyone to look in the face of those nearby and see their soul, their history and their life and say to themselves: This is a man and God loves him as he loves me.”

It was a universal theme for what at first appears to be a very local dispute. Immigrants began rioting after a gang of local youths opened fire on some of them with an air rifle. The UN Refugee Agency believes there has been a rise in the number of migrants looking for work as crop pickers in the underdeveloped region of Calabria because factory jobs in the north of Italy have evaporated due to the economic crisis. The possible involvement of the local mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, also gives the story a distinct Italian flavor.

However, events in Rosarno are actually part of a universal theme and are relevant to many countries, including Greece. Like immigrants elsewhere, those in Rosarno want to work their way to a better life. Like immigrants in so many countries, those in southern Italy live in squalid conditions, work for meagre wages (less than 30 euros a day, some of which has to be paid to middlemen) and are in constant fear of being deported.

You will find identical stories in many parts of Greece. Try Manolada in the Peloponnese for instance, where foreign laborers pick strawberries. Or visit the orange groves around Arta in northwestern Greece, where, as a report in Sunday Kathimerini’s “K” magazine highlighted this week, hundreds of Afghans and Pakistanis are picking fruit for sub-sustenance wages and living in shacks with no electricity or running water.

The disturbing events in Rosarno emphasize the fragility of the situation in Greece, where locals and immigrants in so many places have formed relationships of convenience that could fall apart at any time.

While Greece doodled, Italy drew a hard line on immigration under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government. Policy is in the hands of Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a leading member of the anti-immigration Northern League party. He revealed last week that Italy has forcibly repatriated 40,000 people in the last two years and that only 3,000 immigrants tried to reach Italy last year compared to 30,000 in 2008. A controversial agreement with Libya, which allows Italian authorities to push back boatloads of immigrants to the North African country, has been cited as one of the tools in achieving this drop in illegal immigration.

Greece has no such agreements and faces an influx of migrants that dwarfs Italy’s. For years, governments here did nothing and were complicit in tens of thousands of immigrants gravitating toward the dog-eared margins of Greek society. It’s a tactic – it certainly can’t be called a policy – that has led to immigrants becoming scapegoats for all kinds of problems such as crime, drugs, unemployment and disease.

This abdication of responsibility has made it legitimate for politicians and journalists to express reckless views – a prominent TV presenter recently claimed that one of Greece’s most serious economic problems is street traders not paying tax. Come back financial gurus, corrupt ministers, pencil-pushing bureaucrats, fat-cat bosses, insurance-dodging business owners, defaulting entrepreneurs, tax-fiddling freelancers and no receipt-issuing gas station owners! All is forgiven: You’re not to blame for the economic crisis, it’s those pesky migrants with their bed sheets and knockoff Gucci handbags who are undermining this great nation’s economy.

These absurd opinions become acceptable when a society chooses to leave people on the outside, where they can be easy targets. That’s why PASOK’s intention to grant citizenship to the children of immigrants living here legally is the first step toward putting right so many wrongs. By incorporating people who want to live in your country and contribute to it, you invest in them but you also give them a stake in a common future, which brings responsibilities — such as paying tax and abiding by the law. When people live on the fringes, you are only relying on their good will to conform to your society’s demands. When someone is exploited, mistreated or ignored, good will tends to be in short supply.

That’s why it’s worrying that New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras chose this week to make immigration one of his party’s key political battlegrounds. He wrote to Interior Minister Yiannis Ragousis on Monday to express concern about PASOK’s citizenship plans. According to Samaras, the new law would “make it easier for immigrants to enter Greece illegally so they can have children here and obtain citizenship.” The proposed law, though, only grants citizenship to the children of parents who have been living in Greece legally for five years – hardly a quick fix. Samaras, who studied in the USA in his youth, proposed that the children of immigrants born in Greece should only obtain citizenship when they become adults and after completing at least nine years of studies at Greek schools.

“Greeks are a people, not a population, and what transforms a geographical area into a united country and the local population into a people is its identity,” said Samaras in his letter. This begs the questions of how a country can truly be united when the people who make up more than a tenth of its population are left in limbo and whether Greeks really identify with a policy that sees children who are born here, who speak the language, who go to the country’s schools, who sit in its cafeterias, who work in its stores not being officially recognized until they’re 18.

In Italy, even the former fascist Gianfranco Fini, currently the speaker of parliament’s lower house, has rethought his ideas on immigration. He now proposes that migrants be allowed to vote in local elections, that immigrants’ children born in Italy be awarded citizenship and that the waiting time for adult citizenship be cut.

Samaras claims PASOK is afraid to talk about “Greekness” at a time when other European countries are trying to rediscover their identity. But Fini’s transformation emphasizes how far behind the curve Samaras is – developments in immigration have overtaken politicians such as the ND leader, making the rigid thinking of the past irrelevant. The sheer numbers of people moving between countries and the growing ways in which they’re being exploited means identity is no longer simply found in a passport. At a time when cultures and languages are no longer the defining factors, a country’s identity is derived from its ethos, its values and its principles. Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, once said: “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” Greece, like Italy, must prepare for that judgment.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 15, 2010.

And now, for my next trick…

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

To many people, the European Union is a fantasyland whose very existence and enduring success defy logic. It’s like an old magic trick that continues to captivate audiences, even though everyone’s seen it many times before. But the EU does what all good tricks do: It encourages onlookers to suspend their disbelief and look at the bigger picture rather than the details.

This unique quality was underlined on January 1, when Spain, a country whose economy is disintegrating, took over the presidency of the 27-nation bloc in the middle of a staggering financial crisis with the promise that it would lead the EU to recovery. The spell which the EU has cast over its audience was highlighted by the fact that hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the incongruousness of this situation.

A number of years ago, a Nigerian general whose army had just invaded another African nation appeared live on the BBC World Service to declare that his soldiers had “brought democracy” to the country in question. “That’s great, will you now bring it to Nigeria as well?” was the sharp response from the radio presenter.

Something similar comes to mind when reading the message posted on the official website of the Spanish EU presidency. The country’s prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says Spain’s main challenge will be to help Europe build an economy that is “more productive, innovative and sustainable.” But surely if the Spaniards knew how to do that, they would already be applying it to their own economy.

While we in Greece are caught up in our own economic crisis, it’s easy to overlook the dramas being played out in other EU countries, such as Spain. The country’s public deficit for 2009 exceeded 70 billion euros – five times as much as the previous year – to stand at 6.79 percent of gross domestic product. It’s still only about half of Greece’s but nevertheless up 1.2 percent on the 2008 figure.

And like Greece, Spain recently had its credit rating downgraded. Standard and Poor’s lowered the country’s rating from “stable” to “negative” and warned that it faced a prolonged period of sluggish economic growth. But Spain’s most dramatic problem, and an area where even Greece’s disaster of an economy cannot match it yet, is unemployment. The jobless rate stood at almost 20 percent at the end of last year, which is the second-highest in the EU after Latvia. Incredibly for Europe’s fifth-largest economy, unemployment among Spaniards aged 16-24 has reached 42 percent.

All this makes Spain’s task of providing leadership on economic recovery seem far beyond its capability, while its promises of guiding the EU onto the path of financial security ring hollow. Zapatero’s announcement on December 30 that he was introducing a package of measures to help ailing farmers in his own country will have been of interest to our prime minister, George Papandreou — who faces the threat of farmers blocking highways this month — but is unlikely to have convinced Europe’s economic giants that Spain has creative answers to the Union’s economic dilemmas.

In fact, Spain’s challenge is even more complex than it first appears. During its presidency, the Union needs to agree on a replacement for the bloc’s long-term growth strategy, known as the Lisbon Agenda. The plan was meant have made the EU the world’s most competitive economy by this year. It has patently failed and a new 10-year plan, known as the 2020 strategy, is likely to be adopted at an EU leaders’ summit in March.

Before then, on February 11, the EU will hold a special summit on the economy, when Greece’s crisis and the danger it poses to the euro will be at the forefront of discussions. It’s then that Zapatero and his government will truly be tested, since, beyond having to solve economic riddles at a time of extreme turbulence, Spain will have to deal with an institutional conundrum as well. Its presidency is the first since the Lisbon Treaty took effect last month, creating the posts of President of the European Council, which has gone to former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, and Foreign Policy Chief, which is being filled by British politician Catherine Ashton.

Normally, Zapatero, who is experiencing his toughest year since taking office in 2004, would be looking forward to taking over the EU presidency, as it gives him the opportunity to boost his plummeting popularity at home and cultivate his image of being Europe’s Barack Obama – a title several of his EU colleagues, including Papandreou, have staked a claim to. But the fact that he and his foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, now have to tread a fine line between asserting Spain’s will on the EU and conceding ground to Van Rompuy and Ashton, means the Iberians could lose more than they will gain over the next six months.

Moratinos has pledged that Spain will fulfil its role with “modesty and discretion” but it already appears that Madrid is determined to shape events over the next six months according to its aims and needs. For instance, the Zapatero government has already organized seven summits between the EU and international partners, most of which have a clear relevance to Spanish interests: North Africa (Morocco on March 7-8 and Egypt on June 5), Central and South America (Mexico on May 15-16 and Latin American and Caribbean countries May 18-19) and with Mediterranean countries on June 7.

By using its unique position in the world to bridge the gap between Europe and other regions, Spain is in a sense augmenting the rotating presidency and underlining the value of having different member states set the EU agenda. However, the new institutional setup means Madrid may have set itself on a collision course with the EU’s supremos.

Although Van Rompuy is meant to represent the EU in international meetings at head-of-state or government level, all the summits mentioned earlier will be held in Spain, so Zapatero will undoubtedly want to play a significant role. Likewise, Moratinos has organized an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Cordoba on March 5-6 even though foreign policy is now Ashton’s responsibility.

Furthermore, despite the introduction of an EU president and foreign policy chief, the country holding the rotating presidency still retains significant influence: It continues to chair the weekly meetings of EU ambassadors, when the groundwork for many policies is carried out, and it presides over many committees that prepare Union initiatives in a range of fields.

If the EU magic trick is to continue wowing audiences and not to be exposed as a cheap stunt, Zapatero will need to display immense skill to ensure that Spain’s role dovetails with those of Van Rompuy and Ashton. Managing this while also reviving his country’s economy and getting 27 member states to agree on a common strategy for future growth requires a sleight of hand that seems too incredible even for the fantastic world of the European Union.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 8, 2010.

Touched by greatness

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Former Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis does not fall into any of the categories described by Malvolio, a character from William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. Greatness eluded Karamanlis during the five-and-a-half years he spent managing the country but just two months after voters shunted him aside, his seemingly suicidal decision to call elections on October 4 is now beginning to look like it was inspired.

“Twelfth Night” was designed to be performed at the end of the Christmas season and as this year draws to a close, looking back on the events that played out on Greece’s small but always entertaining stage, one can see similarities between Karamanlis and Malvolio. The Shakespearian steward initially displays a puritanical bent, just as Karamanlis vowed to tackle corruption and implored his deputies to be “meek and humble,” but actually spends his free time fantasizing about lounging in a velvet gown — Karamanlis was accused of lacking gumption.

However, there was no velvet draped around Karamanlis’s shoulders last week when he took his seat on the New Democracy backbenches to hear his successor, Antonis Samaras, address conservative MPs for the first time as leader. In fact, the look on Karamanlis’s face was not one of forlornness for missed opportunities but one of contempt for those who undermined him and pity for those who’ve inherited the problems he could never tackle.

Even a cursory glance at the messy situations Samaras and Prime Minister George Papandreou have to deal with suggest Karamanlis was not the fool many took him for. Instead, it seems he’s handed over the reigns of two rickety wagons – Greece and New Democracy – just in time to avoid being the one responsible for riding them off the cliff.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that hindsight is useful for historians but is “sadly denied to practicing politicians.” Foresight, however, is not — it’s a quality that only the politicians with true greatness are able to call upon. With each passing day, it seems that Karamanlis, albeit momentarily, was blessed with it.

Samaras is still beaming after beating the odds and taking control of ND but, in reality, he has taken over a party that’s just an empty shell. The way that the conservatives imploded after they were pulverized at the polls proved how split the center-right party is. A loose thread holds together a collection of traditional right-wingers, nationalists, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, free marketers, Christian democrats, capitalists with friendly faces, populists and confused leftists who’ve wandered into the wrong political pen.

Karamanlis recognized this when he took over the party. Rather than rely on a pompous, impenetrable ideology to rally ND, he simply set out one condition: “We’re going to be more honest than the other guys.” It was a wafer-thin platform on which to position a whole party but, for a while, it worked. It stopped working when it became clear that ND governments were just as weak in the face of corruption as the ones that had gone before and when the absence of real policies was exposed. The luster of power faded, unity was lost and the conservatives began to fall apart.

Samaras has put his faith in ideology, believing that a party which leans more to the right and which espouses conservative values can be cohesive. The fact that almost 40 percent of some 800,000 ND supporters who voted in the leadership election backed his bitter rival Dora Bakoyannis and that there’s a stigma attached to right-wing ideas among the broader electorate means that Samaras faces a huge task in turning ND around.

His challenge, however, pales into insignificance compared to the difficulty of the mission Papandreou must undertake. Here, again, it seems Karamanlis has stepped out of the firing line at the right time. The logic behind his decision to call snap general elections on October 4 had appeared fuzzy — ND was sinking lower in the opinion polls, had just suffered a defeat in the Euroelections and didn’t have a coherent policy to present to the Greek people.

What Karamanlis knew then, and we know now, was that even though it didn’t seem possible, things were about to get worse, much worse. Rather than hang around and have to manage an economic crisis of mind-boggling proportions, Karamanlis decided that beating a disorderly retreat would be the better option.

Looking back on it now, the election debates between Karamanlis and Papandreou were reminiscent of a parent trying to warn his child about the dangers of driving a temperamental car. Karamanlis’s questions to the PASOK leader about how he would find the money to fix the economy and what tough measures he was prepared to take were not just enquiries meant to score points, they were warnings. He was advising the would-be prime minister to start thinking up some solutions quickly.

Karamanlis knew he didn’t have the answers, just as he was aware the country’s deficit was large enough to sail an aircraft carrier through and Greece was running up a debt faster than a gambler with a stolen credit card. Although nobody was willing to publicly admit the extent of the problem at the time, it has since become clear that Papandreou was also, to a great extent, aware of its terrifying scale. He chose to look away and keep his fingers crossed.

The outgoing prime minister knew the public would not countenance any belt-tightening from his failed government. He also knew he would be setting PASOK up for a fall by allowing it back into power just as it was becoming necessary to adopt emergency measures, such as wage cuts and tax rises that go against every socialist sinew in the party. Predictably, the socialist government has displayed a split personality over the last two months, as it promises tough measures in Brussels but then waters them down in Athens, where the old-school apparatchiks still wield influence.

All this is now someone else’s problem, not Karamanlis’s. He can now sink into the comfortable obscurity of Parliament’s backbenches, from where, like Malvolio at the end of “Twelfth Night,” he might be tempted to turn to his critics and tormentors and cry out: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” It would be his greatest moment.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on December 24, 2009.

Heads up!

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

Perhaps the only surprise when a statuette of a cathedral struck Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on the side of the face on Sunday was that the man who launched it into the crisp Milan air had a history of mental problems and was not one of the millions of perfectly sane Italians who detest their premier.

Few democratic leaders have bred such strong contempt in a large section of their population as Berlusconi has in Italy. A banner at a protest against the Iraq War in Rome in 2003 was indicative of the hatred that has burned for the media-mogul-turned-politician throughout this decade: “Iraq, we’ll have Saddam if you take Berlusconi,” it read.

The physical attack on the 73-year-old prime minister resulted in a few scars that a bit more plastic surgery can fix but it also symbolized the dead-end to which this incessant rage against him has led. Despite opportunities to provide a credible alternative to his governments, the country’s center-left has failed to find the answers to Italy’s problems, many of which are similar to those of Greece, such as the need for widespread structural reforms. Despite the poor state of the economy, his embroilment with more women of questionable repute than Hugh Hefner and accusations of numerous corruption scandals, Berlusconi’s popularity rating remains just above 50 percent and many experts are predicting that sympathy after Sunday’s attack will help it to rise.

Although Italy is no stranger to violence being inflicted on its politicians, it has worked hard to eradicate this element from the country’s political life – the last assassination of a senior politician was in 1978. Berlusconi’s opponents are now caught between a rock and a hard alabaster souvenir as they have to continue chipping away at his surgically enhanced facade without letting their efforts be driven just by hate.

“This clearly shows the degradation of the political clash in Italy,” said Ezio Mauro, editor-in-chief of Rome’s La Repubblica, of Sunday’s attack on Berlusconi. The daily newspaper has been one of the few media outlets critical of the prime minister’s tenure in office. And herein lies the problem for Berlusconi’s opponents: His iron grip on the media hardly allows them the chance to get a word in.

The premier owns the largest Italian publishing house, Mondadori, and three private Mediaset TV channels. He also exercises influence over state TV Rai as most of the broadcaster’s executives are political appointees – the 73-year-old has actually said that it is “unacceptable” for Rai to criticize the government. All this has resulted in the independent watchdog Freedom House ranking Italy 73^rd for press freedom along with Tonga (Greece is ranked 63^rd) out of 195 countries worldwide.

Although Berlusconi’s colorful antics sometimes make him appear like the villain in an Austin Powers movie (Dr Feelgood perhaps), his supremacy is very real in Italy and absolutely relevant beyond the country’s borders.

A mere glance around the world confirms that the dividing lines between the media and politics are becoming increasingly blurred. While Berlusconi was getting whacked in the face, center-right candidate Sebastian Pinera was winning the first round of Chile’s presidential election. Pinera is a successful businessman who owns Chile’s fourth most popular TV channel, Chilevision, which serves up a visual diet of mostly gossip shows, soap operas and news. In Britain, the Conservative Party has come under attack for an alleged secret agreement it has struck with The Sun newspaper, the UK’s most-read daily. In return for the paper’s support in the runup to next year’s general election, the Conservatives have allegedly agreed to reduce state funding for the BBC and slash regulation of private broadcasters.

In Greece, the bonds between the media and the people who run the country are there for all to see – literally – as they have often resulted in the awarding of public works contracts. Now, Prime Minister George Papandreou says he wants the two sides to stand further apart and for there to be more transparency in their dealings.

During his time in opposition as PASOK leader, he often resisted pressure from the media until opinion polls began to swing in his favor and those that had wanted to hand the reins of the party over to someone else wasted no time in jumping on the Papandreou bandwagon. But showing the same fortitude in government will be a different story, especially when events take a turn for the worse and the last thing he’ll need is extra pressure from newspapers and TV channels.

As such, it was interesting to note that the issue of media influence was not among the topics discussed at a groundbreaking meeting on corruption and transparency between parliamentary party leaders on Tuesday. Perhaps it was just an oversight – for Greece’s sake, we should hope so because, as Berlusconi has shown in Italy, when the media and the political system fuse into one, it results in something more painful for the country than just a bloody nose.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on December 18, 2009.

Reading the signs

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

If there’s anything to be gained from being stuck in an interminable Athens traffic jam, it’s that we get an opportunity to pose ourselves existential questions like “Why do I do this to myself?” and “Why do we do this to each other?” The more immediate and practical answer becomes apparent when the amber lights on the matrix display above the street gleam, one after another, like cigarette lighters being thrust into the air at a soft-rock concert, spelling out: “Rally. Center closed.”

These are three words every Athenian is familiar with. They’ve been seared onto our retinas. In fact, they could be the perfect motto for Athens, the city where unrest never rests and where disquiet is never quiet.

“Rally. Center closed” flashed up more often than usual over the past few days, as several thousand people took to the streets to commemorate the anniversary of the killing of teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos. The upheaval that followed his shooting last December was the crystallization of the turmoil that plays out on Athens’s streets with predictable regularity. It was, however, more direct, more potent and more devastating than the usual protests.

A year on though, as a Public Issue poll for last Sunday’s Kathimerini indicated, we are still struggling to understand what happened and what it means for this country’s future. We examine last December’s events hoping that by sifting through the protests, the riots, the vandalism and the general outpouring of anger and frustration, we can find the answers to some of the existential questions that trouble us.

But perhaps the answers lie not so much in what actually happened but in how we’ve interpreted what happened. Among the poll’s most significant findings are that 52 percent of those questioned believe last December’s events were a “social uprising” – but 45 percent disagree; 51 percent think only a minority was involved, whereas 45 percent believe it was a mass movement; 51 percent think the protesters were not being incited but 42 percent think they were.

In assessing last December’s events, we are in perfect disagreement, which is a dominant feature of our society. It’s a form of disharmony that means the right cannot agree on much and those on the left turn their backs on each other; that civil servants work against rather than for the citizens who pay their salaries; that students can protest about the same thing at the same time in the same city center but in groups that are not in contact with each other; that Greens cannot watch a soccer match in the same stadium as Reds; and which prompts each minority to pursue its niche demands at the expense of the rest of the population.

The Public Issue survey underlines that Greece is a society at odds with itself, where a common view is always beyond reach, where one group is pitted against another and where consensus is torn apart like a chew toy thrown to a pack of Dobermans. So, maybe it’s time for us to look at this pervasive division as the key factor behind last December’s events rather than trying to work out whether it was a “social uprising” or a “mass movement.”

It’s very tempting, as some have done, to look back on the unrest of 12 months ago as being the lovechild of France’s May of 1968 but such comparisons are rooted in nostalgia. The December 2008 protests had no common purpose, whereas in 1968 a key aim was to bring down the existing government, shift the political system to the left and create a new morality. Yes, New Democracy lost power after 10 months – but at its own hand rather than anyone else’s. In fact, the riots did not even force the resignation of then Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos, which would have been a given in most other European countries.

While the intensity and persistence of the protests last year were impressive, they did not have the broad appeal or participation that some would like to believe. In France, 11 million workers went on strike for two weeks in 1968, bringing the country – not just a city center – to its knees. Also, French workers and students united in their opposition to the government of Charles de Gaulle. Here, this solidarity was fleeting and it was not long before each group was protesting on its own. On the political front, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) isolated itself by adopting an equivocal stance on where the protests ended and vandalism began, PASOK and the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) exploited the situation as much as they could, while the Communist Party fulfilled the role of the sage elder of the tribe, urging for a more mature form of opposition.

That this movement, albeit not a mass one, should blossom out of nowhere last December and then split into various disparate branches was absolute confirmation that the country’s youth cannot help but be sucked into Greek society’s vicious circle. In simply raging against the system, they registered their presence on the landscape but did little to change it. By taking to the streets to vent their frustrations, they thought they were making a bold statement on behalf of a new generation but in fact they were speaking their parents’ language of selfishness and bloody-mindedness.

In a society as divided as Greece’s, the only way people know how to communicate is through conflict, by butting their heads against each other – we see it when we are in our cars, on our TV screens, at public service offices, in banks and at sports grounds. The philosophy of “I rage, therefore I am” is best manifested in our public protests, where either one man and his dog or tens of thousands of people voice their cause in the central Athens and demand that the rest of us listen.

There’s an average of more than two protests a day in Athens, as each group, no matter how small or large, attempts to take what it believes it’s entitled to by force, foregoing any opportunity of uniting with other aggrieved workers, establishing common positions, putting forward proposals. The fragmented nature of this opposition and the frequency of the rallies dilute their impact and undermine the moral basis they may have. The only thing they succeed in doing is to antagonize the majority that suffers from the constant protests and so, in turn, more grist is fed to the mill of discontent.

There is no doubt that last December was a landmark – not because it marked the dawn of a new era but because it saw a new generation fall into the whirlpool of self-destructiveness that is dragging Greece down. The only hope is that this generation will be quicker to understand its mistakes and to find different ways of communicating than those that went before it. If not, the country’s future is already written – we only have to look up and see it in bright lights right in front of us: “Rally. Center closed.”

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on December 11, 2009.

Lost

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

This weekend marks one year since Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old schoolboy, was shot dead by a policeman in central Athens. People will commemorate his passing in different ways: some peaceful, some, inevitably, violent. But the truth is that beyond the teenager’s family and friends, no Greek has the right stake a claim to this boy’s memory. As a country, we’ve failed to mourn his death by acknowledging the questions it posed. As a society, we’ve failed to honor his life by making things better.

Wherever we had the chance to learn and improve since last December, we spurned it: the trial of the policeman who shot Grigoropoulos has yet to take place, the secondary education system that Alexis was part of remains a mess, the tertiary sector that he may have graduated to is at war with itself, we continue to show inexplicable tolerance to those who hijack and abuse democracy while the state and its citizens, particularly the younger ones, still stand opposite each other rather than side by side.

The first thing that needed to happen after the shooting was for Epaminondas Korkoneas the special guard who fired the gun, and Vassilis Saraliotis, the other officer on duty with him, to face trial as swiftly as possible. This would have, to some extent, assuaged suspicions that Korkoneas and Saraliotis will not face the full force of the law. Also, it would have cleared up exactly what happened on the night of December 6, 2008, in Exarchia. The doubt, the theories and counter-theories only inflame a volatile situation.

The trial has now been put off from December 15 to January 20, more than 13 months after the original incident. This is a catastrophic failure by authorities who should understand that justice must be swift and blind when someone entrusted to enforce or uphold the law is suspected of breaking it. It’s further confirmation of the disintegration of the Greek justice system, where few people now have hope of finding anything resembling justice due to the crumbling facilities and a huge backlog of cases.

A year on from Grigoropulos’s death, Greece’s youth – from high school to university – is still ensnared in an education system where the only thing that’s permanent is that everything is temporary. This was summed up by the recent fiasco over franchise colleges. Days before being ousted from power, New Democracy granted operating licenses to 33 institutions only for the new PASOK government to take them back a few weeks later. Both parties are guilty of toying with the education system, which should have always been excluded from their political games.

In the meantime, parents continue to spend money – roughly 750 million euros a year – on private tuition schools and home tutoring in the hope of securing an education for their children that state schools, where more appears to be written on the walls than in children’s books, seem increasingly unable to provide. Teachers complain, justifiably, about a lack of investment but money alone will not revive public education. As long as teachers and students use it for their own political ends by calling strikes and sit-ins, the sector is destined to wilt in the shadow of apathy cast by the very people supposed to nurture it.

At university level, many lecturers and students opt to live in the comfort zone rather than accept that the failure to assess themselves, to improve standards and to take on the challenge of independent or private colleges is starving their institutions of the academic oxygen they need to survive. Sensing this lack of courage, the minority has taken over. Last week, vandals ransacked Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University and a group of non-students physically assaulted a professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Academics at Athens Law School claim they were threatened to keep the campus open this weekend despite fears it would be used rioters. Small groups of people, hiding behind the shield of university asylum – which nobody has the guts to review – are now holding Greek universities hostage.

Faced with this deteriorating situation, those with authority choose the path of least resistance. University rectors, often fearing for their physical well being, turn a blind eye or shift the blame onto the government, which, fearing a populist backlash, also dodges its responsibility. This was highlighted last Thursday when Deputy Education Minister Yiannis Panaretos said PASOK has no intention of intervening over the failure of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) to prevent its computer terminals being used to update the Athens branch of the anti-capitalist news network Indymedia. “We live in a free society,” was his response.

This is the coward’s way out. It underlines how little faith we have in our democracy and how weak-willed we are when it comes to upholding its values. Indymedia, which brands itself as a source of independent news, has a right to exist as much as any mainstream media site but the fact that this website is run from computers paid for by taxpayers and installed for educational purposes is beyond comprehension. It’s the equivalent of an Athens bus driver using his vehicle to take his family on holiday.

As a society, we’ve allowed the few to dictate the terms by which our institutions, and our lives, are run. We’ve been too afraid to argue that rights also come with responsibilities. We’ve been too timid to champion a free society but at the same time prevent a free-for-all. Nowhere is this more evident than in Exarchia, where a relatively small group of anarchists and hooligans sets the tone. Not knowing how to deal with them, the state responds with brute force, prompting residents this week to threaten legal action against police because of what they see as heavy handed measures.

Greeks, particularly the younger ones, see this and form the impression that they live in an oppressive state, disregarding that in their country rules are not there to be enforced but to single out the fools that actually follow them. And while they rage against a non-existent authority, nobody takes the time to realize that it’s the absence of the state, the lack of enforceable rules and the dearth of respect for each other that’s the actual source of oppression. This is the reason why justice is compromised, our schools are sources of stagnation, our universities are turning in on themselves and our streets have become battlegrounds.

All of us had 12 months to put at least some of this right and we’ve done nothing. That’s why the last year has turned out to be just like Alexis Grigoropoulos’s life: lost.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on December 4, 2009.

Samaras – never say never

By Manos Symeonakis

From outsider to leader in less than two months and from party outcast to party president in over a decade, Antonis Samaras’s unlikely rise to the top of New Democracy is proof that you can never say never in politics.

Contrary to what many people thought, the ND leadership contest will not go to a second round, as Samaras edged past the 50-percent mark on Sunday to dash the longstanding hopes that Dora Bakoyannis had of leading the conservative party.

So why did Samaras win?

Until the start of this year, it seemed the unlikeliest of stories. After falling out with Bakoyannis’s father, Constantine Mitsotakis in 1992, Samaras went on to form his own party the following year. His decision to cross the prime minister by adopting an approach on the Macedonia issue that was too strident, proved ill-fated as Samaras’s party, Poltical Spring, burnt brightly and then fizzled out during the course of the Nineties, never managing to gather more than 5 percent of the vote.

Samaras was brought back into the fold by Costas Karamanlis for the 2004 Euroelections and then stood for Parliament as an ND candidate in the 2007 general election. It was Karamanlis’s decision to make Samaras culture minister in his cabinet reshuffle in this January’s cabinet that gave the former finance and foreign minister the springboard to launch a bid for the party leadership.

Back in the cabinet, Samaras had regained the luster of power but being in charge of the culture portfolio meant that he could hardly be blamed for the conservative governments major mistakes. In fact, fate was on Samaras’s side as his time in office coincided with the opening of the new Acropolis Museum – putting him at the center of a story that had only positive aspects and was a great opportunity to raise his profile at home and abroad.

From this platform, Samaras used his campaign to appeal to New Democracy’s hardcore support: the older generation of right-wingers who were not interested in appeals to middle ground voters; the conservatives, of which there are many in Greece, who were totally dejected and angered by the capitulation of Costas Karamanlis’s government; the ND faithful who felt that Karamanlis decision to compromise the party’s ideology so it could return to power had not been a trade-off worth making.

Samaras tapped into this sense of frustration much better than Bakoyannis during the campaign. The latter’s call for ND to be a much broader church fell on many deaf ears. After the 10 percent defeat to PASOK in the October general election, too many conservatives saw this as more of the same.

Also Samaras’s appeal to conservative values, particularly their nationalist strain, rang true following 5.5 years in which many ND supporters felt that their party had conceded too much ground in foreign policy, on immigration, crime and so on.

However, the decision of Dimitris Avramopoulos to drop out of the race and back Samaras gave the latter’s campaign the real boost it needed going into the final stretch. For, although Samaras was convincing those on the right, by teaming up with the more moderate, populist Avramopoulos, he was sending a message to the more centrist ND voters that he would not close his door or mind to other interpretations of the conservative ideology.

Of course, a part of Samaras’s victory had nothing to do with anything he did. There was a section of the ND support that simply did not want Bakoyannis, under any circumstances, to be the party’s leader. This stemmed back to her father’s time in office but also to a section of the conservative electorate that, having seen the nephew of a former ND leader fail, did not want to continue the nepotism within the party.

So, from a position when the party leadership seemed a distant dream, Samaras now has his hands firmly on the party’s reins thanks to Sunday’s clear victory. What next? A tilt at the premiership? Never say never.

Nick Malkoutzis