Protect the competent
We are caught up in a vicious cycle that we will not break out of easily. Serious, competent people – the best and the brightest – will no longer be willing to get involved in politics or take a public seat. They have witnessed, for example, what Panagis Vourloumis, the chairman of the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE), has had to endure. They have thought about how many hours he will spend in investigating prosecutors’ offices in the next few years and they ask themselves whether it’s worth their while to become involved. Because one might claim that the price that OTE subsidiary Cosmote paid for the Germanos company was outrageously high, but I don’t know anyone who would dare to claim that the OTE chairman, who is crazy about ethics, knew that the purchase entailed hidden aspects. There are a number of other examples that are similar to Vourloumis’s, from the Harvard graduate who dared to become deputy governor of the Social Security Foundation (IKA) and was dragged before the courts by IKA unionists, to the young ministry general-secretary who chanced upon a den of corruption and ended up fearing for his life. This is just one side of the story. The other is that no one can govern this country without using half-crooks, in the best case, or complete crooks, in the worst. The system just doesn’t work otherwise. Anyone who goes by the book and brings in technocrat advisers to take on the tangle of unionists, middlemen, party hacks, mud-raking journalists who sell their trade, et cetera, is certain to hit a brick wall. It’s like going to visit the don of dons in Sicily with Archbishop Ieronymos or someone from the animal welfare agency serving as your council. That’s where things go awry. Because when you open the door to the predators, you have to see what they take from you and whether you, too, have changed as a person – because, as we have seen in politics, this, too, occurs: The brilliant professor becomes a wretched little politician who forgets his academic knowledge and begins dispensing favors; the successful businessman becomes the protector of vested interests, enamored with state intervention, and so on. Today the country needs a sense of duty and responsibility born in the breasts of those who want to go into politics or state positions. We must escape the current model, which says that we want to become ministers so that we can get rich, have a good time and meet many businessmen. For this to happen, we must protect the serious people who truly try to serve the public, and we must also inspire others to take this risk. And we have a duty to point out – and name – the sources of corruption and waste in the public sector who nourish these disgusting little conmen, the unionists, the political middlemen, the crooks. If we do not achieve this, we will sink even deeper into the swamp of corruption and incompetence.
