Tapping affair’s risky repercussions
For over a week now, political life has been focused on the massive phone-tapping scandal which, it is only too clear, will have many dangerous repercussions. And the most serious of these is the shattering of citizens’ faith in state institutions, faced with the fact that the telephone conversations of the prime minister, several Cabinet members and other state functionaries were prey to the whims of foreign powers, or possibly domestic business interests, for at least 11 months. It is now obvious that there are responsibilities to be attributed in the phone-tapping scandal; the blame may lie, in part, with the previous government during whose term – ahead of the 2004 Olympics – the spy network was set up. The current government is also partially to blame as it informed only the judiciary, and not the Data Protection Authority, when it learned of the affair. And Vodafone Greece is anything but blameless. Exactly who is to blame for what will be clarified when the time is right. But the priority now is the disclosure of this affair which is burdening our political life. But there is little sign of progress in this area so far. Within the government’s ranks, there seems to be a lot of backstabbing – not about what happened but about whether the ministers involved handled the scandal well on a public relations level. Meanwhile, the opposition is calling for the resignation of ministers who were not even aware of the scandal. One thing is certain – if there is no change in approach, the public’s shaky faith in the state will be dealt a further blow.
