The resignation of a junior minister in Alexis Tsipras’ government just hours after his appointment has exposed the Greek prime minister to fierce criticism and highlights the immense difficulties he faces in forming a coalition with the Independent Greeks (ANEL) party.

Within hours of being invited into the cabinet, deputy infrastructure and transport minister ANEL’s Dimitris Kammenos was asked to resign over offensive and racist comments he is alleged to have made online.

Why Tsipras and his advisors were seemingly unaware of Mr Kammenos colourful posts (his twitter account @portaporta was notorious for incendiary racist remarks), until alerted to them after his appointment is a mystery. His account was deactivated just before he was sworn into office.

Fond of social media, in 2013 a tweet from Kammenos’ account suggested that Israel was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, alleging that Jewish employees were warned to avoid at the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. When challenged over the claim, a follow-up tweet from Mr Kammenos’ account replied “F*** your Talmud”.

In June, his Facebook page showing a doctored archive photograph of the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp caused outrage.

The photo showed the original German wording concocted by the Nazis in WWII, ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (Work makes you free) replaced with (in Greek) ‘We’re staying in Europe’, the popular slogan used at pro-eurozone rallies across Greece earlier this year.

While his party distanced itself from the post, Kammenos apologised, claiming there had been a “misunderstanding”.

“Maybe the comparison was unfortunate but my country is experiencing an economic holocaust,” he said at the time.

Kammenos says that “most” of the controversial Twitter posts that resurfaced this week were “manipulated by known forgers”, and that his social media accounts were hacked.

“I wish to state that I am totally opposed to certain posts which were seen or were offensive to certain groups of our fellow citizens,” he said, before adding that he apologised to those “annoyed by them”.

How an individual came to be elevated to ministerial status under Tsipras’ watch, shows the deep fault-lines running through the Syriza leader’s past and present administration.

 

*The 2013 tweet from Dimitris Kammenos’ infamous @portaporta account claiming that 2,500 Jews employed in New York’s World Trade Centre ‘skipped work’ on September 11, 2001.

Beyond a monumental misjudgment, the appointment came as a result of Tsipras’ need to prop up his coalition government by inviting the Independent Greek party (which won 10 seats from 3.69 per cent of the vote last Sunday) to once again supply the Syriza-led majority in parliament.

Negotiating a deal with centrist and left of centre parties has been put in the ‘too hard’ basket.

Syriza won 35.5 per cent of the vote last Sunday ensuring 145 seats in the 300-seat parliament, followed by the conservative New Democracy with 28.1 per cent. Golden Dawn won 7 per cent, up from 6.3 per cent in January, making it the third largest party with 18 seats.

As in the previous mandate Tsipras decided immediately to form a coalition with ANEL giving the Syriza-Independent Greeks government an unassailable 155 seats. Horse trading for ministerial positions followed, with ANEL’s leader Panos Kammenos (no relation to Dimitris) renewed as Minister of Defence.

With a record of xenophobic utterances, ANEL, like Golden Dawn, has ridden on a wave of frustration over austerity measures applied by Greece’s international lenders since the party’s creation in 2012.

ANEL has called for the revoking of memorandums and loan agreements with creditors and made the most of the popular resentment of Germany, which is says has used Greece’s public debt as a means of control. Having vowed to create a “patriotic democratic front” to save Greece from what it calls “the neo-liberal avalanche”, ANEL’s rhetoric is alarmingly close to its neo-facist fellow travellers.

Stripped of ministerial responsibility Dimitris Kammenos holds the record for the shortest service in a Greek ministerial cabinet in history. Meanwhile the uneasy bedfellows of the Tsipras government remain, caught in a clumsy and unedifying embrace.

Sources: Reuters. Irish Times. Kathimerini

Reactions to Greek ‘Twittergate’

“Dimitris Kammenos is the ultimate opportunist, a person without moral fibre or any political commitment. The only thing that mattered for him was media exposure. His appointment to a ministerial position shows the inability of Tsipras to evaluate the people who can serve the people and the rather cut-and-paste manner in which this government was put together.”

Vrasidas Karalis,
Professor of Modern Greek,
University of Sydney