Theodoros Pangalos is by all means the ultimate epitome of a modern Greek politician; talkative, remorseless and with fickle principles. He started his political career as a Maoist in Paris, during the dictatorship, but soon allied himself to the leadership of the PAK and then PASOK; he was used by Andreas Papandreou as a guarantee for the Left that his party was an ideological platform for all left ideologists.
On the basis of such political game, the offspring of one of the richest families in the country became a prominent politician as he served the purpose of fending off all ‘attacks’ from the left. I had a personal indirect experience of the man; in 1986-87 I taught at a school in Eleusis, his electorate. Pangalos was then the minister for Industry. The inhabitants of the most industrialised city of Greece were demonstrating against the expansion of the Latsis Oil Refineries which would destroy the rest of their beautiful and polluted coastline, plus would have to demolish some ruins from antiquity. In a very strange way, Pangalos, the minister who signed the expansion, participated in the demonstration.
After its end, Pangalos jumped onto his limousine which was following us and went back to his office. The incident has been indicative of the man: he has become everything to everyone in order to maintain of position of power under any circumstances. During the last fifteen years of course he has exceeded himself. With the Ocalan affair, with the unscrupulous statements about other European countries, and with his overall behaviour as a politician. Who has forgotten his famous answer to a journalist who after having greeted him in the morning as he was entering the parliament, Pangalos responded by saying “Get f…”! It is not a matter of being prudish; it is about how politicians construct the dominant language amongst their own people, by imposing specific patterns of communication. However recently he has gone even further. In order to exculpate himself and his party he stated that “we all squandered the money together!” in his usually style of culinary metaphors (we ate everything together” to be precise). Well we didn’t; this is one of the most spectacular lies that the ruling establishment uses in order to blackmail Greeks and bring them back to a fold of obedience and silence.
Pangalos never told us where the money was coming from and for whom; if he was talking about the European Union funding packages, then it is certain that the legal recipients were the Greek people. However how much money was really given to the people, or was spent for the reasons it was designated? The government receives the funds and distributes them according to needs and demands. Yet what happened in the Greek case? Money went mainly to the clientele of the ruling party to the spectacular exclusion of all others.
Only your affiliation to the ruling party secured you funds; if you belonged to another party, or you didn’t belong to any party whatsoever, you had to borrow yourself from private banks, at your own peril. Pangalos knows of these realities because the only people who wasted the money together were his party members, and of course of the New Democracy party, because no accountability, transparency or meritocracy exists in the birthplace of democracy. The two ruling parties are not modern political formations but ideological clans, remnants of the Ottoman pashas, who govern on the basis of favouritism, partiality and nepotism. Whenever they appeal to national sovereignty they mean their own ability to steal without fear of prosecution! Unfortunately, my generation has a lot of responsibility for what happened.
They gave card blanche to people like Pangalos to impose a culture of cynicism, bigotry and irresponsibility. It all started when Andreas Papandreou divested the president of the Republic from its authority to hold the government accountable for its actions. We were all very happy back in 1986 when this happened because we thought that the conservative Karamanlis was losing the game. But the story continued, by imposing immunity on the ministers, by raising an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy to all attempts to prosecute officials and finally by constitutionally imposing protection to all members of government. So without checks and balances and without any control, politicians continued their clever game of gaining popularity at the moment they were reverting to criminality. By cleverly manipulating the old traumas of history, they succeeded in deceiving everybody about their actions and policies. If an ordinary Greek citizen owed one thousand euros, they were sent to prison; if a politician usurped one hundred thousand euros, they became untouchable and considered successful. Meanwhile, through their media sponsors both political parties were skilfully blackmailing the Greek electorate.
Either with national issues, or by creating crisis situations-at the last minute, something happened and nobody was ever brought to justice. No; Mr Pangalos: we didn’t squander the money together; we were never in the position of distributing funds: you were. We were never in the position of legitimising theft: you were. We were never in the position of changing the law: you were. Let’s see if the culture of cynicism you have personally introduced will be accepted by the Greek people in the coming elections-unless of course something unexpected happens; Turkey for example creates a crisis in the Aegean, in Cyprus or in Corfu… which will force the people to forget their anger towards you and turn against our diabolical neighbours.
Dr Vrasidas Karalis is Professor of Modern Greek Sudies at the University of Sydney.