We Are Not Alone

Jeff––Saturday

Recently, I decided to take a break from closely following US political developments.  As a mystery writer, it’s discouraging to labor so hard concocting thrilling yet believable fictional twists and turns to our storylines only to see happenings and scenarios once thought unimaginable emerge as the true-to-life lead news of the day.

 

Of course, some exposure to current news is unavoidable. For example, I still (attempt to) listen courteously when my better-half rages about news I don’t want to hear, and I regularly keep up with the news coming out of Greece.

 

It’s the latter experience that prompted me to write this post. Paschos Mandravelis is a journalist writing a daily column on politics, society, and economics for Kathimerini, Greece’s newspaper of record. His column yesterday (Friday) was captioned, “When you don’t take your own advice.” It appeared to be a relatively innocent piece expressing the reporter’s views on the person chosen by Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to serve in the largely ceremonial role of President of the Republic.

 

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (left) President Konstantinos Tasoulis (right)

But as I read on, I realized that in addressing Greece’s current challenges he was hitting upon matters that featured prominently in the strategies employed in the recent US election. Specifically, (a) distracting the voters’ attention from the nation’s “big problems--inflation, poor public infrastructure, etc.” by getting them to haggle among themselves over emotion-driven issues, (b) quarreling over “woke culture,” (c) pent up concern over “pension reform” and  “overhauling public education and universities,” and (d) a serious threat to the country’s health care system posed by the “explosion” in “pharmaceutical spending.”

 

Sound familiar?  What follows is the entire article.  As for me, I’m off to binge watch a bit of my friend’s new series on Prime Video, On Call.  For me, it’s the perfect fast-paced escapism remedy for all the reality that may ail ye these days.

 

Paschos Mandravelis

After the constitutional revision of 1985, the selection of candidates for the Presidency of the Greek Republic serves two purposes: One is for people to have something to talk about and bet on in cafes, so that we can forget a little about our big problems – inflation, poor public infrastructure etc.

 

The second has to do with symbolism. Beyond the petty party aspirations, the selection of the candidate for the highest and mostly symbolic office in the country aims at revealing the spirit of those who recommend him or her. Symbolism has long-term political effects. Sometimes these effects are immediate. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis fashioned a reformist profile for himself by voting against Prokopis Pavlopoulos (a former interior minister with the conservatives) for president in 2015, when he was recommended by the then coalition government of SYRIZA and ANEL.

 

The recent choices of candidates for president and parliament speaker have obvious symbolism. The unjustified (for the time being, at least) rejection of Katerina Sakellaropoulou for a second term as president by the prime minister has to do with New Democracy’s inner quarrels over the nonexistent – according to Mitsotakis – issue of “woke culture.”

 

There are also less obvious symbolisms. For example, the choice of Tasos Giannitsis from PASOK, is essentially the party’s self-criticism for the furious reaction to the former labor minister’s proposed and forward-thinking pension reform in 2001; correspondingly, PASOK’s emblematic Diamantopoulou Law overhauling public education and universities was the self-criticism for the well-intentioned Law 1268/1982, which generated many ills in public universities.

 

A key cause of Greece’s bankruptcy was pharmaceutical spending. From 2.4 billion euros in 2004, it exploded to 5.28 billion euros in 2009. The reason for this rally was the abolition of the list of prescribed medicines available to state-insured patients and its replacement by a more “flexible” system in 2004 by the then conservative minister of health, Nikitas Kaklamanis. Thus, the great paradox arises: Mitsotakis voted against Pavlopoulos because “he did not resist the sirens of clientelism” by appointing thousands of contract workers (as he himself stated on February 18, 2015), yet he now recommends Kaklamanis for house speaker, the third highest office in the country, despite the fact that he more than doubled the annual pharmaceutical spending during his term.

 

We should note here that, in November 2013, the late manager of the now-defunct Social Security Foundation (IKA), Yiannis Vartholomaios, had shown the then conservative prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, two boxes of medicines and told him: “These are two identical medicines and have exactly the same therapeutic effect. The only difference is in their price. One is 10 times more expensive than the other. After the abolition of the list of prescribed medicines by your government, strangely all doctors prescribe the expensive and not the cheap one. And because of this, which has an obvious explanation, I believe that it is only a matter of time before IKA collapses.”

 

––Jeff