Last month a leading hospital in Athens reported 220 cases of salmonella. Other hospitals have been similarly affected by food poisoning. These matters are being investigated by the Ministry of Justice.
By coincidence the leader of the opposition at the same time announced that the whole country was “sick”. Though he was referring to the political world, these hospital incidents perhaps provide an example. The government is suffering from an epidemic of scandals, and like the outbreak of salmonella – identified first as Type C but later spreading into five different forms – they have been difficult to isolate.
It would be tiresome to identify every acronym of every govern-ment agency allegedly involved. There is PYRKAL, the powder and cartridge affiliate of DEH; ODDY, the public equipment organization; PROMEI, the state supply connected with the EOM-MEX company; KYDEP, which manages domestic products, etc., etc. – all of which have been accused of unchecked credits or bad subsidies or careless auditing or overborrowing. Billions are said to have been scattered to the winds or spent on phantom enterprises – or, possibly, to have just vanished into a variety of pockets.
Embezzlement, it’s said, has become the norm, and the opposition, right and left, accuses the government leaders of condoning it. Not so, the leaders retort, claiming to be as clean as hounds’ teeth: all irregularities are being investigated (like salmonella) by that overworked agency the Ministry of Justice, and adding in classical PASOKese: “Degenerate social phenomena have their roots in the concept of social values established decades ago.” In this way, the government gingerly flung mud over its shoulder at the past and went on to say that to “safeguard the honor of political personalities” it would investigate the source of wealth of all heads of public sector organizations back to 1974. (Before that, data appears to get too skimpy – luckily, as Greece has a very long and checkered past).
With these accusations of plunder, pork-barrel politics and autocratic behavior in hand, the opposition would seem to be having a merry time of it. Not for a minute. At this moment a backbencher, naively suggesting that Mr Karamanlis be brought out of pasture to lead a conservative coalition, was expelled from New Democracy. A few days later former Prime Minister George Rallis resigned from the party saying he had been personally maligned. He, too, mentioned the magic word “Karamanlis”. He had been reassured that if the present government took advantage of the conservatives’ present disarray, the former president would drop his plough on the slopes of Mount Pendeli and re-enter the political arena. Whether or not this statement of Mr Rallis’ should be construed as a threat, it seemed that the ruling party’s not taking advantage of an opposition whose disarray is entirely of its own making – expecially in these morally feeble times – would be something more than Utopian. That an elder statesman, too, would be appealing to a yet more elderly one at this late date is, to say the least, incongruous.
On the surface, it seemed to be one of those outbreaks of political jitters that the country periodically goes through. What was original is that the public was, for once, indifferent. In all the talk of crisis, it remained apathetic. Now Greeks, as everyone knows, are politically passionate. Therefore, if the public was irresponsive, indeed there was something drastically wrong with the political world. No wonder its rhetoric-loving leaders were upset, for there is nothing more disconcerting to actors than that phenomenon known as “losing your audience”.
It is possible the public suspects that all the present political parties are at least a generation out of date; that if PASOK is still fighting the junta, the communists are still deep in the civil war and that some conservatives are even further removed. So immersed have parties become in their own political games that few have had time to notice the profound social changes that have swept over the country in recent years. During this time allaghi has been solely in the people’s hands, which would be quite capable were they not hamstrung by all the administrations which have interfered with them.
There is a belief, mostly mythical, that politics can provide the answers to everything, whereas it can effectively only encourage, restrain or, in moments of good fortune, lead. A succession of windy, do-little governments – which accompany every scrap of legislation , every underpass that is opened or highway completed or playground opened with such outbursts of self-congratulations that they would seem to be the Wonders of the World – have perhaps lost the confidence of the people. So leaders are right in saying that the country is sick – sick of political poisoning, self-aggrandizement and incompetence.
