As we move toward elections, the political parties vying for second place are already trying to outbid each other in offering favors to voters, while the government is called on to deal with scandals allegedly involving some of its members, and which – if nothing else – show that it does not control the public administration adequately. The smaller parties don’t offer much either, aside from persisting with the traditional tactic of slamming each other as the cause of the country’s woes while presenting themselves as the singular hope for national salvation.
Our politicians appear not to have learned much from the long years of crisis and difficult recovery, from the major collective effort that was needed for society to endure the shocks of the crisis, the pandemic, and then the wars in Europe and the Middle East. As elections approach, as the world becomes more dangerous, our parties will show even more how they have forgotten the dangers of waste and corruption. They will continue to invest in vote-buying, they will not take the tough decisions that would achieve a (slightly) more just society.
One doesn’t need to invent the wheel of good governance. From the beginning of the crisis, useful measures were taken. In 2010, aside from shouldering the burden of signing the first MOU with the troika of creditors, the PASOK government of George Papandreou undertook to clean out the stables of conflicting and complicated laws that encouraged corruption. It also instituted the Diavgeia program, with which the public can keep an eye on administration decisions. The later troubles of that government, of Papandreou himself, and of the country, should not detract from the importance of those initiatives. We should note that we all knew about the mismanagement and confusion, but the extent of this was confirmed by the task force of foreign and Greek experts, which was set up to help modernize the public administration. Also, there have always been laws against corruption – it’s just that they were never applied in a way that would have put an end to the problem. With the crisis and the first MOU (who would have expected that others would follow?), some of us hoped that the political system would understand (albeit belatedly) that vote-buying, the self-serving neglect of supervisory mechanisms, and the irresponsibility of officials did not just shunt the problem to coming generations but had dramatic consequences in the “here and now,” too. And yet, perhaps the successful intervention of creditors kept many of us from understanding that past mistakes should not be repeated, precisely because (despite the many sacrifices paid by today’s generations), the greatest cost of our failure was shifted to future ones, as always.
