Commentary
Political culture and corruption in Greece: A synergistic relationship
By Chronis Polychroniou
Online Journal Guest Writer


Feb 4, 2008, 01:55

Financial scandals hover over political life ever more perniciously in today’s world and even nations with long established democratic institutions and distinctively refined civic cultures are not immune to them. The United States is a particularly striking case of endless problems rearing their ugly heads as a result of the marriage between financial interests and politics, especially during the era of the presidency of George W. Bush, while the Blair financial scandals in the UK will stand in the annals of embarrassment.

It is not surprising then that nations such as Greece, latecomers into the modern culture of constitutional democratic dispositions, civic knowledge and civic education, are routinely faced with vast financial and political scandals which threaten to tear completely apart the society’s ethical fabric by rendering obsolete the social contract and making a mockery of truth and of the very notion of democratic politics. As a brutal form of market capitalism has taken over social life, public institutions, public trust, non-commodified values have all taken sharp blows and governments have completely surrendered to large corporate interests. Democracy and its definition of public service as the spirit of the common good has been stripped of any substantive meaning while the mass media, owned mostly by plutocrats, are largely feeding government propaganda, with celebrity narratives and entertaining, feel good stories.

While graft and corruption have always been an integral part of Greece’s political culture, thanks to the existence of a paternalistic state where “kickbacks” constitute routine practice for the provision of public services, the country has been rocked in the last several years by a series of big time political finance scandals under both socialist (Pasok) and conservative (New Democracy) rule.

Looting of public wealth under two decades of socialist rule (Pasok ruled Greece for most of the 1980s and 1990s and lost office at the March 7, 2004 national elections to the conservative party of New Democracy) had become an art form and covering up corruption a science. The Greek stock market surge in the late 1990s and then its abrupt collapse in 2000 ruined thousands of small investors and saw the largest transfer of wealth from the many to the few in recent Greek history, in what is widely regarded to have been a political scam of the first kind. The resulting trauma from the stock market scandal is one that Greek progressive voters are still unwilling to forget. So, Pasok continues to be perceived as the political party under whose rule corruption in Greece reached new, unprecedented heights and the socialists are unable to close the gap against the conservatives even when the ruling party of New Democracy is equally bedeviled by corruption.

Bond trading scandals in which state pension funds overpaid millions of euros for state bonds, a sleazy sweep up of the Vodafone case (Vodafone was embroiled in phone tapping scandals involving leading business and political members of the Greek establishment), dubious business dealings by a host of ministers and deputies which led in the end to their downfall, last summer’s forest fires catastrophe and the subsequent parceling out of burned forest land to private interests have pretty much characterized the political style of New Democracy during its tenure in power. All this while its leader, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, made transparency and the fight against corruption, crowned by a zero tolerance policy, his party’s dominant themes in both the 2004 and 2007 electoral campaigns.

To the avalanche of recent corruption scandals, the case of the suicide attempt of the former and all powerful general secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Christos Zachopoulos, a close associate of the prime minister himself, is potentially the most devastating scandal of all for the conservative party in Greece and one that touches the very core of the contemporary Greek political system.

The story unfolds when just a few days before Christmas, Mr Zachopoulos attempted to take his own life by jumping from the fourth floor window of his apartment complex. From the very start, the government sought to portray the incident as a mere sex scandal because of Mr Zachopoulos’ extramarital affair with a female associate of his who threatened to expose him for failing to secure her a permanent job in the ministry. A DVD containing explicit sexual scenes and taped by the woman without Mr Zachopopoulos’ knowledge, and which the woman threatened to go public with, was allegedly what drove the general secretary to attempt suicide.

Photos of the two in very compromising positions were printed a couple of weeks following the general secretary’s suicide attempt on the pages of the Sunday newspaper Proto Thema. The woman behind the extortion plan, and now behind prison bars waiting for a trial, cried that the newspaper photos had been illegally copied from the DVD, claiming that she never left a copy of it with one of newspaper’s owners with whom she had met to discuss the case of Mr Zachopoulos.

The government’s interpretation of the suicide attempt as nothing more than a sex scandal was rejected altogether from every aspect of Greek society. The public correctly sensed that a political scandal of grand proportions lay behind the case, details of which were in all likelihood recorded on the DVD and which extended probably all the way to the top levels of the government. Reports that the general secretary was single-handedly responsible for managing and allocating billions of euros added extra weight to the conjectures that a massive political scandal was brewing. For as everyone in Greece knows, where there are public funds and services provided, “kickbacks” naturally follow, as that’s what makes the system run.

The public’s suspicion that this is not a sex scandal (anyway, no one in Greece believes that a man would seek to take his own life because of fear for or shame of being exposed for having an extramarital sexual relationship) is quite natural for a political culture fully immersed in corrupt practices. As one survey conducted a few years ago revealed, over 90 percent of the people interviewed admitted to having given kickbacks for services attained in the public and private sector. To be sure, the scenario of a massive political scandal began to look ever more convincing when the press leaked that the director of the prime minister’s office had been handed, in the lobby of a major hotel in Athens, a copy of the celebrated DVD. Unable to do otherwise, the government did not deny the report, but refused to release the identity of the person who had delivered the DVD, citing media confidentiality rights; however, in doing so, the government was making even more dark its credibility image and was in fact showing deep ineptitude in handling political crises.

The secrecy with which the conservative government sought to handle the case of the “delivery of the DVD” baffled even its own ministers and deputies. A number of them began publicly expressing their frustration at the government, while a few of them went so far as to hint that some within the prime minister’s close power circle were after a cover up.

To add insult to the injury, the government was caught with its pants down when new developments surfaced revealing that the person who delivered infamous DVD to the government is seemingly none other than the co-owner of the Sunday newspaper Proto Thema -- the newspaper that stooped so low as to print sex photos of the general secretary and his female associate. Furthermore, the co-owner of the newspaper also happens, interesting enough, to be under investigation by the Financial Crime Squad for possible money laundering as an unaccounted for 5.5 million euros had been recently deposited in his personal bank account and reported by the bank to the proper government authorities.

With public outrage now reaching its peak, the prime minister was forced to address the Greek parliament and did so on Friday, January 18 -- on a day that may be remembered as the day when Greek politics was finally converted into pure, humdrum theatrics. “This government does not extort and will not be extorted,” announced the prime minister, cockily, in an effort to calm down the attacks of the opposition.

Does it take a rocket scientist to put everything together? While the prime mister cries out about the moral strength and the moral virtues of his government, every citizen in Greece understands that an exchange has taken place between the given newspaper co-owner in possession of the DVD and the upright conservative government of Mr Karamanlis. The deal is simple: the newspaper's co-owner would not go public with the full content of the DVD (which obviously has much more on it than just juicy sex acts) if the government got the Financial Crimes Squad off his back.

As if this were not enough to add proof to the popular saying “where there is smoke there is fire,” a further development comes along which reveals even further the profuse nature of the corruption web engulfing contemporary Greek society and culture. The business partner of the journalist suspected of having delivered the DVD to the government for an exchange over his unaccountable 5.5 million euros deposit, the second major co-owner of the same newspaper, and a well known and well connected journalist himself, goes on the air to announce that he had been approached by a Greek member of the parliament, on behalf of the man in charge of the Financial Crimes Squad, to go easy with the story of the suicide attempt of the former general secretary of the Ministry of Culture and that, in exchange, the government would cut his newspaper business partner some slack over the 5.5 million euros bank deposit.

The meeting between the second newspaper co-owner and the Greek member of the parliament has now been verified and the latter is now under investigation as is the head of the Financial Crimes Squad.

Why did the general secretary of the Ministry of Culture attempt to kill himself? Why did the government refuse to look into the incident as a potential extortion case? Why did the sleazy newspaper co-owner print sex photos on the pages of his newspaper and then deliver the DVD to the government? Why did the government refuse to release the identity of the journalist who delivered the DVD? Where did the 5.5 million euros come from? Where have they now gone as they were recently withdrawn? What is the actual role of the head of the Financial Crimes Squad, another close associate of the prime minister, in this ugly political scandal? How really aware was the prime minister of the dealings going on between the government and segments of the mass media?

Unfortunately, there is no one in Greece who believes that this case will ever see the light of truth and feel the hand of justice. It will end up like all other scandals -- under the rug. For this is the natural outcome in a ruthless capitalist political culture where government and vested economic interests have long entered into a marriage of convenience -- at the expense of the common good.