OPINION

The incurable disease

There is one PASOK, which rules in real time and in a real place, causing more problems than it solves with its dilatory, slapdash approach. There is also another PASOK, which is prettied up in the advertisements employed by the government – at public expense – to promote the most tremendous hocus-pocus, while boosting useful relations with certain elements in the media. The latter – the arrogant PASOK – presents itself as the inventive, virtuous and pro-people builder of a «new, powerful Greece,» and whose virtue is not appreciated by the naysayers. There is even a third PASOK, the «PASOK of the future,» as its officials proclaim in the interviews that have supplanted political discourse and action. This PASOK smugly declares that it acknowledges its problems, its failures, its ideological impoverishment, its transformation into a state mechanism whose primary concern is the pleasurable exercise of power and, moreover, that it knows which medicine it needs to take so as to be reborn or restructured. It seems that one of those magical drugs is called anti-arrogance – if we are to judge by statements made by PASOK officials. The day before yesterday, in Kathimerini, Press Minister Christos Protopappas declared that his party «must shed its arrogant mask,» while yesterday, in Ta Nea, Development Minister Akis Tsochadzopoulos agreed that his party «must rid itself of arrogance.» One could add endlessly to this «must-ology.» But in the case of PASOK, it is nothing other than demagogic piety. The arrogance of its officials is no longer a simple mask, something external that is easily discarded, but a deeply rooted mentality that is visible in their public and private lives. The disease is incurable, because the sufferers enjoy it.

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