Watching the excellent documentary by Eleni Varvitsioti and Viktoria Dendrinou on the Greek debt crisis, “To the Millimeter,” there is one character who stayed with me because they may have played a central role in keeping Greece on its feet in 2015, yet 99.9% of Greeks were unaware of their existence. Stavroula Miliakou was a civil servant, the general director for the budget, who was responsible for the State General Accounting Office in the period between 2014 and 2018. I listened to her describe her experience as the country flirted with the abyss. She did not speak like a politician. She was straightforward and brutally honest – and she was compelling. This was not some technocrat with an MBA from a top-flight university and background in a consultancy firm speaking in terms that are incomprehensible to most people. This was a public servant with in-depth knowledge of her field, safeguarding the public interest – and she and others like her are the backbone of the Greek state. We made the mistake in the past of lumping all public servants together with the stereotypical laggard, so it is our duty now to hold up people like Ms Miliakou as the role models that they should be.
The Greek state can stand on its feet thanks to the efforts of that 10%, 20% or 30% – I have no idea how much – of civil servants who keep it propped up. You find them in every service – in the police, the courts, the armed forces, the ministries – keeping track of every file and of its implementation, knowing the numbers they need to know, giving coherent answers to every question concerning their area of responsibility, while so many politicians spend their time arranging favors for their cronies or doing their own thing.
