Not the least reason for this is that the combined opposition, which represented well over half the electorate in the 1985 vote, has been clamoring for immediate elections. A pre-election period so raises the emotional temperature in this country that the tension is almost palpable. This is understandable in a society whose political sensitivity borders on obsession, though it has been noticed that this inclination is not matched by any particular talent for statecraft.
In the last few weeks the pitch of excitement over the prime minister’s personal life has showed signs of strain. The cartoon cover of a West German weekly – fortunately cashiered for another image at the last minute, but still widely reproduced – showing Mr Papandreou and his inamorata naked (but for being swaddled in the Greek flag) caused understandable offense. Then the prime minister and his wife calling each other liars in the press did not raise the level of what might be called “the national debate”. But as far as alleged scandals are concerned there has been no lack of newly presented evidence and no sign of flagging interest among Athenians. Rumors involving the prime minister’s personal involvement with middlemen trafficking in arms between Western manufacturers and Middle Eastern governments strained the limits of credulity. That Mr Papandreou should have any dealings with this sort of thing totally contradicts the premier’s most exalted aims. His efforts among ‘The Six’ for global nuclear d sarmament have greatly enhanced his international prestige (at least according to local TV accounts) and caused his candidacy to be proposed for the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Another accusation made against the prime minister’s closest circle involves huge commissions said to have been pocketed in the purchase of 40 Mirage 2000 fighter planes for the airforce, called for its huge cost ‘the rip-off of the century’. It is claimed that similar aircraft sold to Switzerland at roughly the same time for $12 million per aircraft were bought by Greece for $26 million. The government labelled the accusations a gross distortion of the truth and a deliberate slur on the honor of the prime minister. The matter then got mired in accusations of misquotation, fluctuating inflation figures and unrecorded offset benefits. Yet someone calculated that if all the embezzlement charges made against Mr Papandreou were true, he would be richer than the Sultan of Brunei and Mrs Papandreou would have every right to claim at least half the Peloponnese in alimony.
But despite these tremendous charges and the hyperbole in which they were expressed, Athenians are not as volatile as they are reputed to be, for informal opinion polls show that their 2:1 favorite scandal is still that involving George Koskotas. No matter how heady the Mirage figures, a $200 million embezzlement charge is not to be sneezed at. Furthermore, among scandals it has always offered a more colorful cast of characters to keep the storyline spinning. The latest episode to galvanize the public was the testimony presented by Koskotas’ former body-guards, Mamaneas and Skordoulis.
On cross-examination, Vassilis Mamaneas revealed that he had accompanied his boss on a little jaunt up to Kifissia last summer which ended in a secluded street near the home of Menios Koutsoyiorgas, then Minister of Justice and present Minister to the Prime Minister. From this spot Koskotas went on alone with a sac voyage (as the Greek has it) and returned empty-handed a half an hour later mumbling out loud, “How long do I have to pay these people off?”
But what really fired the imagination of the country was another alleged delivery, this time to a close associate of the prime minister, businessman George Louvaris. This was shortly before he started out to London on a friendly visit to the ailing leader. On this jaunt Mamaneas was carrying a giant economy-sized carton of “Pampers”. Although Mamaneas admitted he had never seen what the sac voyage contained, in this case the box of “Pampers” was so heavy that the handles spread as he lifted it into the porte-bagages and he could not help seeing closely stowed packets of 5000 drachma notes.
Great was the amazement in court at these revelations and in the country as a whole when the news spread. No doubt the happiest people in all Greece were the manufacturers of “Pampers” due to the tremendous amount of free publicity; the unhappiest being the makers of “Babylino” who are their great and implacable rivals. And so overwhelming was the eruption of scatalogical jokes that the whole country was in danger of being inundated, as the world in Genesis, by a flood which a prim, right-wing newspaper called with admirable precision “in very bad taste”.
Of course the denials of everybody implicated in the Mamaneas testimony were categorical, but these were drowned out by ridicule and laughter and no one could stop wondering, in speculation about the missing “Pampers”, whether there might not be serious incontinence in very high places. Some latter-day Aristotle in pursuit of the scientific truth even went to the trouble of calculating that it was possible to stuff 230 billion drachmas’ worth of 5000 drachma notes into a box of “Ultra Pampers”. Hasty moralists have rushed to judgement, saying that this subject epitomizes the low level of national dialogue generally.
Others, more mindful of the past, have found it consoling that Koskotas for so many months languished in jail in Salem, Massachusetts, where the old witch trials took place. As members of the parliamentary investigating committee set out for the New World to question Koskotas about the scandal which has ‘possessed’ so many and won’t go away, it may be well to remember that it could still become Greece’s crucible.
