There are hiccups and hiccups
“With this heat, maybe I should ask my friends in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for some camels,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quipped in an interview with Skai TV on Wednesday night, commenting on a proposal for a mounted police force. “We don’t need it. It’s an interesting idea, but we don’t need it right now,” he added.
Citizen Protection Minister Notis Mitarakis was probably completely unaware a few hours earlier what kind of a media and social media storm he was unleashing when he said that he was planning to introduce a mounted police force in downtown Athens, noting that it would be used as a tourist attraction and for ceremonial purposes.
Wanting to fix the things that are broken in the badly built Greek state is one issue; trying to paper over the cracks and damp stains on the walls is quite another
It would be easy to dismiss this incident and consign it to the drawer of political folly, but a closer look at how it played out reveals a remarkable combination of factors. First and foremost, the state administration’s chaotic and ambiguous mechanisms. This, of course, is the case with every ministry in the country, but in his first foray into the thorny landscape of law enforcement, the former migration minister ought to have been more cautious about the proposals he gets behind. And that brings us to the second factor, a veritable blight in political communications, which is jumping the gun or speaking without knowledge. There are consequences, sometimes painful ones.
Which, in turn, brings us to the government’s communication torrent. It has been the subject of much comment – both positive and negative – but its intensity needs to be stemmed. Wanting to fix the things that are broken in the badly built Greek state is one issue; trying to paper over the cracks and damp stains on the walls is quite another. Moreover, inconsistencies (over the university campus police force, for example) become even more evident when someone tries to deny them or muddy the waters.
Hiccups are natural and every government will get them sometimes. The prime minister himself admitted as much, stating that his key priority is to get the government moving on the reforms and measures that it vowed to implement. The danger of moving too fast, however, is already becoming evident. And this is especially so with a Parliament where the government enjoys an outright majority, where it has no real opposition – with SYRIZA distracted by its leadership race and PASOK yet to find its voice – and where it is, basically, pitted only against itself. It is, in fact, the surest way to become cut off from reality and do itself harm.
