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

New Democracy showdown

Illustration/stats by Manos Symeonakis

New Democracy members around the country will vote on Sunday, November 29, for a new party leader in a hotly contested race that has caused a significant rift within the opposition party.

Ex-Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis and former Culture Minister Antonis Samaras will fight it out for the ND presidency but the third candidate, Thessaloniki Prefect Panayiotis Psomiadis, could end up playing a vital role if the election goes to a second round.

Ever since outgoing party leader and former Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis announced on the night of the October 4 general elections that he would be stepping down following a crushing 10-percent defeat by PASOK, Bakoyannis and Samaras have been the most likely candidates to take over.

Early in the campaign, former Health Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos also declared his candidacy but eventually stepped aside and declared in favor of Samaras.

Avramopoulos’s move into the Samaras camp underlined just how much the contest has split the conservatives. Bakoyannis and Samaras are old adversaries and in many ways both are divisive figures within the party. There has been bad blood between the two since Samaras left the conservative government of Constantine Mitsotakis, Bakoyannis’s father, in the early 1990s. This led to its downfall and apart from Bakoyannis there are many others within the party who are not willing to forgive Samaras.

However, there is also a grouping within ND that was upset with Mitsotakis’s style of governing and does not want to see his daughter in charge, preferring a break with the past. Samaras has played on this theme during his campaign, often referring to “mechanisms” within the party favoring his rival.

Bakoyannis has hit back at Samaras over his decision to quit ND. “All my political life has been spent in New Democracy, I had no breaks or pauses,” said Bakoyannis.

During an extraordinary party congress on November 7 and 8, Samaras and Bakoyannis also set out different visions for the party. Samaras said it needs to be grounded in its right-wing beliefs but Bakoyannis suggested it must have a broader appeal in order to attract the middle-ground voters who usually decide election results.

She accused Samaras of sticking to an ideology that would marginalize the party.

“I am not promoting isolation,” he responded. “I am trying to extend our influence everywhere. We will not let ND be shifted or genetically modified.”

The supporters of the two camps have been involved in increasingly hostile exchanges, which have caused many conservatives to fear for the party’s unity following the election of a new leader.

The process by which the new ND president will be elected also proved to be a source of disagreement. After much arguing, it was agreed that all party members, including those that sign up on the actual voting day, would be able to cast a ballot.

As a result, it has been difficult for pollsters to predict the outcome of Sunday’s vote. Since Avramopoulos joined the Samaras campaign, the ex-Culture Minister has taken the lead in opinion polls. A survey of more than 1,000 people by Public Issue for Sunday’s Kathimerini suggested that Samaras would win the first round but would not gain the 50 percent needed to prevent a second round. In the likely case of a second round, Psomiadis would drop out and Samaras would run off against Bakoyannis. Psomiadis insists he will not tell his supporters who to vote for.

Public Issue’s poll shows Samaras winning this contest as well. However, pollsters point out that only about a third of respondents are ND supporters and of those not all will vote. Also, there may be many new members who sign up at the last minute, making it very difficult to predict the outcome.

Nick Malkoutzis

Train in vain

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

There’s a bookshop in my neighborhood that’s always a treat to visit, for in its basement exists a magical world of model trains. The owner has put out a large railway set where a network of tracks winds through an Alpine setting. You can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of it all: the shiny trains that dart about like wild salmon, the tracks that switch with metronomic precision, the dainty stations and the painted smiles on the plastic figures that wave as the carriages whiz by. It’s idyllic.

Above ground, you come crashing back to reality. These days, a ride on the ISAP electric railway that runs from Kifissia to Piraeus will confirm that your childhood dreams of speeding trains, spotless stations, clockwork punctuality and happy passengers were just that: dreams.

This week represented a new low in the long history of ISAP, as thousands of customers were shocked to discover there was no service between Neo Faliro and Tavros for the next three weeks. ISAP, which is used by some 580,000 passengers a day, had announced the closure but in the manner that embarrassed parents reveal their child has been left behind a year at school. So, few commuters knew they had to use a replacement bus service that added at least half an hour to their journey.

Predictably, chaos ensued. After swarming out of Tavros station like refugees fleeing a ransacked village, passengers squeezed onto a bus that smelled like it had been marinated in aviation fuel and which chugged its way through congested streets. Ironically, part of the reason the 110-million-euro upgrade of the ISAP track is taking place is to increase safety as well as reduce travelling time. But should the driver of one of these packed replacement buses have to slam on the breaks, then osteoporosis-ravaged grannies will snap like twigs and pot-bellied men will fly through the air like human cannonballs.

During the half-hour journey, not many people spoke but you could hear their thoughts. The overriding one was that public transport was not worth the hassle any more. Repeated attempts to convince more than four in 10 Athenians to use the public transport network were being undone by ISAP’s apathy. It’s a basic rule of public transport that commuters will put up with delays or deviations as long as they are kept adequately informed.

However, even the basics are beyond ISAP’s grasp at the moment. Air conditioning, for instance, has not been fitted in all the carriages – a project supposed to have been finished for the 2004 Olympics. So, in the summer they soak up the sun and passengers swelter like Steve McQueen confined to a tin hut as punishment in the “The Great Escape.”

This year, the line from Kifissia to Piraeus has been more of a construction site rather than a railway, as engineers undertake the interminable task of replacing the track. The railway began running in 1869, so the upgrade may well be a necessary project. But the way it’s being managed has completely disrupted a very simple, basic form of public transport that used to work pretty well, albeit with some issues such as cleanliness and security, which have never been adequately tackled. If planning and respect for the customer were a priority, this project would be carried out only at non-peak hours and with engineers working double-time.

Apparently, those at ISAP fail to realize that when people pay to use a service, you have to give them one that’s worth paying for. If they need any confirmation they are selling passengers short, they only have to consider that it costs exactly the same (1 euro) to travel on ISAP as it does to use the metro. Clearly, the two services do not compare and one wonders whether the way they are structured has anything to do with it. ISAP is a public company, an extension of the frappe-swilling, chain-smoking, civil service, whereas the metro is operated by AMEL, which is run as a private company – albeit under the auspices of the Transport Ministry, now part of the Infrastructure Ministry.

However, privatizing ISAP may not necessarily be the answer. There is a school of thought that public transport, the piston that drives the engine of the national economy by getting people to where they need to be every day, is too strategic a sector to end up in private hands. Germany, for instance, has been trying to part-privatize its state-owned railway Deutsche Bahn, the equivalent of the Hellenic Railways Organization (OSE) in Greece, for several years but the scheme has foundered on political and union opposition. CEO Hartmut Mehdorn was forced to resign earlier this year after failing to get the project rolling.

The privatization of British Rail also serves as an example of the pitfalls of selling off the railways. The franchising in Britain, which began in 1994, led to higher prices, increased delays, reduced safety and more disgruntled customers – there are some 500,000 passenger complaints every year.

As unpalatable as these cases make rail privatization sound, Greece will not be able to ignore the idea because the European Parliament and Council have agreed that international passenger services will be liberalized as of January 1 next year. The European Commission has also committed to examining over the next two years whether domestic services should be liberalized as well.

Of course, this affects OSE, which has debts of some 8 billion euros, more immediately than the Kifissia-Piraeus railway. But given the economic necessity of reducing the public sector, the government cannot put off a decision about the future of ISAP for too long, especially when the quality of its service has become so poor.

Perhaps PASOK will look to the Athens metro model, where private sector rules apply to the line’s operations but the government can still exercise influence when it needs to. While politicians sort that one out, all passengers can do is dream of the model railway of their childhoods and cry out to the person in charge: Please sir, can you fix my train set?

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on November 27, 2009.

A matter of life and death

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much more important than that.” When one of soccer’s most successful coaches, Bill Shankly of Liverpool, uttered these words decades ago he wouldn’t have expected them to eventually carry a much more sinister meaning than he intended.

Since Shankly’s heyday in the 1960s, the world’s most popular sport has been transformed into a cutthroat business, manna for the media, a political plaything and war by other means. The Scotsman’s dry humor doesn’t seem so amusing when in the background what was once just a game is pulled and stretched beyond recognition. All this tugging is causing the unravelling of soccer’s fabric.

This self-destructiveness was in evidence last Saturday when Greece coach Otto Rehhagel faced journalists following his side’s 0-0 draw with Ukraine in Athens in the first leg of the 2010 World Cup playoff between the two teams.

The result put a dent — a fixable one as it turned out — in the national team’s hopes of making it to South Africa. Despite the disappointment in the air, Rehhagel had little to be apologetic about. Even if his eight-year tenure in the job was about to end on a low, his place in the history books was already assured. He had steered Greece, a team with a history of catastrophic failure sparingly peppered with mild success, to unprecedented glory.

However, typical of soccer’s growing trend for chewing up and spitting out the people that keep the game alive, Rehhagel received shabby treatment from the Greek press on Saturday, as he has done for the last few months – treatment that does not befit a man who guided Greece to the Euro 2004 trophy when the odds of him doing so were greater than those for discovering Elvis alive and rebuilding Graceland on the moon so he could rent it out to Martians on vacation.

Arriving a few minutes late for the press conference, Rehhagel was on the end of a tirade from an experienced Greek broadcaster unhappy at being kept waiting. A man who had spent more than 50 years in the game as player and coach was being treated like a worthless rookie by a peer who should have known much better. Fortunately for the German, his lack of familiarity with the Greek language meant he could ignore the verbal volley.

But he could not dismiss the repeated questions about his defensive formation. Everybody wanted to know why Greece could not posses the attacking flair of Brazil, while conveniently ignoring the fact that Rehhagel picks most of his players from a substandard league – corrupt since it was conceived and continuously abused by the clubs that dominate it.

In what was potentially his last post-match news conference in Greece, Rehhagel was treated with disdain — journalists walked away muttering various epithets for the 71-year-old German. A man who was feted as a god five years ago was now being dismissed as persona non grata.

How ironic it was that Rehhagel’s shabby treatment came just a few hours before the German Football Federation (DFB) President Theo Zwanziger uttered words, which, if soccer is to save itself, should become as memorable as Shankly’s. “Soccer is not everything,” he said. “It must not be everything in life. Think not only of glory. Think about what is in a person, about doubts and weaknesses.”

Zwanziger was speaking at the memorial service for the German national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, who earlier in the week had committed suicide by walking in front of a train near Hanover as his latest bout of depression became too much for him to bear.

Although a tragedy, Enke’s suicide is a reminder of why soccer, or any sport, is worth people’s time. Dirk Enke, Robert’s father, a psychologist who tried to help the goalkeeper through his dark moments, intimated as much when he explained why his son feared being admitted to a psychiatric clinic. “He was always very close to taking this step but then he would say: ‘If I went into a psychiatric clinic, then that would be the end of football for me. That is the only thing I am good at and enjoy doing.’”

Enjoyment is a word that is disappearing from the vocabulary of fans, players, coaches, officials and journalists. We speculate, analyze and criticize but few people really enjoy a game of soccer any more. If the result is good, then the style of play is not satisfactory. If the team performs with panache but doesn’t win, then it might as well not have taken to the field. We are no longer allowed to dwell on the ethereal qualities of the game: mesmerizing skill, spellbinding teamwork, unadulterated passion and honest endeavor. Instead, we are buried under a landslide of tangibles: league points, transfer fees, lengths of contracts, annual wages and financial debt.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Robert Enke’s words should remind us what soccer is about. The Hanover 96 goalkeeper’s 2-year-old daughter died of a rare heart ailment in 2006 and in an interview after her death, he explained what sport meant for him while his child went through regular treatment. “Soccer was a wonderful distraction,” he said.

One of the keys to Rehhagel’s success in Greece is that he has never taken himself, or anyone else, too seriously. For all the frenzied reactions to his team’s poor performances, he maintains the zen-like calm of a man who knows that he’s just part of a wonderful distraction. Now at the age of 71, he feels no compulsion to pander to the fantasies of many fans and journalists who choose to ignore the limited resources the country has to offer.

Rehhagel confounded his detractors again by securing qualification to the World Cup with a 1-0 win in Ukraine on Wednesday. He will be lauded and welcomed back into Greece’s bosom, until the next poor performance, when the doubts and insults resume.

But those responsible would do well to realize that soccer is not more important than life or death. In fact, it is life, and as we were reminded in recent days, it is death as well — and through their actions, day by day, little by little, they are killing the beautiful game.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on November 20, 2009.

Bringing down the walls

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

It’s one of life’s great ironies that the people who would derive most satisfaction from anniversary celebrations are rarely around to enjoy them. So, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel took ex-Polish President Lech Walesa and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev by the hand for a walk through a unified Berlin on Monday to mark 20 years since the fall of the Wall, several key figures were absent.

Late US President John F. Kennedy, who made it clear that America would stand by West Berlin with his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 is an obvious absentee. But perhaps the person that would have enjoyed Monday’s proceedings most was a man who shared the platform with Kennedy on that June afternoon: the late mayor of West Berlin and subsequent Chancellor of Germany Willy Brandt.

Brandt was one of the architects behind the wall’s collapse. As mayor he ensured his city was a beacon of freedom, as chancellor he used this freedom to unite people. Upon being elected West German leader in 1969, he embarked on a policy of “Ostpolitik,” which sought closer relations with East Germany, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries. While some of his compatriots and many in the West saw this as appeasement of totalitarian regimes, Brandt realized that bringing people closer together would help obliterate the barriers, the walls, between them.

One of Brandt’s defining moments came in 1970 when he spontaneously knelt at a memorial to victims of the Second World War’s Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The gesture didn’t go down well with some Germans but won him many friends in Poland. “His courage was his biggest political asset, his greatest personal characteristic, and was based on deep moral and political convictions,” says Jens Bastian, senior economic research fellow for southeast Europe at ELIAMEP (Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European Policy). “Such politicians don’t grow on trees, neither in Germany, nor in Greece.”

Brandt’s gesture in Warsaw sent a clear message: we must embrace our past but not let it hold us back. “The future will not be mastered by those who dwell on the past,” he said. His comment came to mind this week when switching attention from events in Berlin to those in Greece, where politicians like Brandt certainly don’t grow on trees. Anyone looking at Greece would gain the impression of a country condemned to live in the past rather than looking to the future.

The dispute at the port of Piraeus, for example, had on the one side the dockworkers behaving like extras in the Marlon Brando classic “On the Waterfront,” while on the other a government treading on eggshells for fear of triggering a popular revolution – scenes of industrial relations from a bygone era.

At least in the case of the police, Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis was honest enough to admit that the force is “stuck in the 1950s” as he announced a raft of changes. These came as officers made plans for policing the November 17 protest march that marks the 1973 student uprising against the junta. The event epitomizes how Greeks are so obsessed with the past that they want to keep recreating it: each generation of students feels they have to prove themselves like those of 1973 and even teenagers will talk about an oppressive state when they live in what is possibly the most anarchic country in the European Union.

But even if they want to escape the past, they can’t. The media fuel this obsession with history. They say journalism is the first draft of history but in Greece the media serve as history’s photocopying machine, constantly rehashing, regurgitating and reheating the events of the past through features, supplements and DVDs.

At the center of this historical vortex is the country’s political scene. As the New Democracy leadership contest between Dora Bakoyannis and Antonis Samaras becomes closer, what divides them is not the direction in which they will take the country but what happened in the past – namely, Samaras’s decision to quit the ND government in the early 1990s when Bakoyannis’s father was prime minister.

It’s ironic that Greece’s hopes for breaking the chains of history currently rest with George Papandreou, who wouldn’t even be in this position were it not for the legacy of his father and grandfather. Papandreou is no Willy Brandt but following in the German’s footsteps might prevent Greece from slipping further into history’s quicksand. “Brandt’s idea of democratic renewal after he took office in 1969 was to “dare democracy”, in other words to make West German society more tolerant, open, accountable and democratic,” says Bastian.

George Papandreou’s domestic agenda also reflects a desire for more openness. There are similarities in foreign policy as well. “Papandreou’s openings toward Turkey and Skopje are a reflection of his intention to exit from the past, to understand the past, but not be tied by it,” said Bastian. “In other words, Papandreou’s version of Ostpolitik is his foreign policy courage in Greece’s immediate neighborhood – the Balkans, Cyprus and Turkey.”

Papandreou’s efforts to achieve transparency may be arriving a quarter of a century after Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” and his attempts at rapprochement may be a pale imitation of Brandt’s risky diplomacy but they give the impression of the first, tentative steps toward changing the course of history.

Looking back on the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years later, it might appear that it had been inevitable, but that’s just a trick that time plays on us. The Wall’s collapse was more revolution than evolution. As German daily Die Welt wrote on Monday: “The Wall didn’t fall, it was brought down.”

The walls that hold Greece back won’t fall on their own, they too must be brought down. Papandreou has the task of toppling them. We can only hope he has Brandt’s strength of conviction and that he will finally be the one to master the future rather than dwell on the past.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on November 13, 2009.

The ditch Blair project

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

Tony Blair must be getting used to rejection by now. He left office in 2007 unloved and unwanted after 10 years as British prime minister. His attempt to win back some respectability as an international statesman by becoming a Middle East envoy has been a damp squib. And now his voyage to become the Europe’s first president appears to have foundered on the EU’s perennial rock of uncertainty.

In hushed tones and behind closed doors, European leaders last week seemed to reject the idea of Blair being appointed president of the European Council, a position created by the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all 27 EU member states.

Blair has some characteristics that would make him a suitable candidate for the role (charisma, valuable political experience, good communication skills, the ability to lead and diplomatic presence) but for many these are outweighed by the baggage he would bring with him (the Iraq War, his close ties to George W. Bush, his unpopularity in his own country, a pending investigation into whether he lied to his people and parliament and a fraught relationship with the EU in the past).

The fallout from the Iraq War is the biggest elephant in the room blocking Blair’s path to the presidency. The decision to hitch his wagon to George W. Bush’s lone star is something Europeans cannot overlook easily. But given the chance, Blair would probably explain that as the British prime minister, he had to make a decision – a very wrong one as it turned out – about whether to take part in a war. Had he been the prime minister of Belgium or Luxembourg, for example, perhaps his toughest foreign policy choice would have been what color bunting to get out when dignitaries visit from abroad.

Blair might even argue that having been through such a maelstrom and suffered the political consequences of his choices, he has the ideal experience to now be a unifying rather than a divisive figure. But even this does not dispel the dark cloud of mendacity that hangs over him. The Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s participation in the Iraq War will hopefully establish beyond doubt what Blair knew and what he told MPs and the public before committing troops to that conflict. The fact he’s due to face such an investigation appears to undermine his bid to become EU president. To risk having the first person in such a high-profile role publicly exposed as a liar would damage the Union. Of course, there would be more than a hint of hypocrisy in the air if he is rejected on this basis alone: Few of the 27 leaders who decide who fills the role are paragons of virtue themselves – any group that has Silvio Berlusconi as one of its most prominent decision-makers can hardly claim the moral high ground.

Perhaps that’s why some of them decided to suddenly create new criteria for any presidential candidate: his country would have to be a member of the eurozone and part of the Schengen Agreement – Britain is neither. If the EU’s aim is to appoint the best person for the job, then this shifting of the goalposts is preposterous. Theoretically, the EU president should be someone that’s transnational, not national, federal, not feudal. If he or she subscribes to the European project, then their homeland’s policy should be irrelevant.

Of course, Blair’s critics would argue that he’s always been at loggerheads with the Union, typified by his stance in 2003 in the buildup to the Iraq War, which was widely interpreted as an effort to split the bloc. However, Blair has engaged with the EU in more constructive ways as well. One of his first acts after being voted into power in 1997 was to abolish Britain’s opt-out of the Maastricht Treaty’s Social Protocol. He was also one of the proponents in 1998 of giving the EU a role in defense policy and was a champion of the bloc’s enlargement. He was the first British prime minister to put the UK’s budget rebate up for discussion in 2005, when he urged member states to reform the Common Agricultural Policy and cut the extensive waste and laziness that it leads to, as we are well aware of in Greece.

In June of that year, Blair stood before the members of the European Parliament and set out a vision for a less bureaucratic, more liberal and modern Europe. “The people of Europe are speaking to us,” he said of citizens’ waning interest in the EU. “They are posing the questions. They want our leadership. It is time we gave it to them.” More than four years on, that leadership is still absent and, as the turnout in June’s European Parliament elections indicated, interest in the EU is flimsy. These are issues that, theoretically, a European president could address.

The role has been created so that someone can preside over the European Council – the regular summits between the 27 heads of government – and coordinate its work. According to the Lisbon Treaty, the president should also “ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy.”

Yet, what we have seen over the last couple of weeks is a climb down from this position. The message from Brussels last week was that it would be preferable for the president to come from one of the smaller member states, that he or she should be able to strengthen Europe from within, not necessarily give it a presence on the world stage, and be willing to play second fiddle to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the 27 leaders.

“There is an argument that a political star as a president of the EU would lead to trouble with the president of the Commission and other leaders,” Robert Goebbels, the Luxembourg MEP who has launched a petition to stop Blair from being considered for the job, told Athens Plus.

It would be one of the EU’s more quixotic moments should it create an opening for a figurehead who could use diplomatic and communication skills to promote the Union to an increasingly apathetic public and give it a greater presence on the global stage only to then shackle him or her for fear of upsetting internal balances.

As the Dutch daily De Volkskrant put it in a recent headline: “Europe chooses: chief or messenger boy.” Given some of the names that have been mentioned as alternatives to Blair – Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, former Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Tapio Lipponen, former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga – it seems the EU has decided there are too many indians to have a chief.

Presumably some of these politicians, if not all, are who The Economist had in mind when it referred to “the usual Europygmies.” Maybe, it’s a harsh assessment of men and women who are capable politicians in their domains, although hardly singular figures, but it underlines the challenge the EU now faces in trying to select someone to fulfill a role whose purpose remains unclear and undefined.

At least something is much clearer now: rejecting Blair was the easy part, too easy perhaps.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on November 6, 2009.