OPINION

The lonely citizen

We are facing a difficult winter, with citizens feeling the pressure from all sides. The problems are getting worse in every sector and there are no proposals for solutions. Indicative of this is the fact that Greeks have become the most pessimistic people in Europe. According to Eurostat, in August Greeks’ consumer confidence dropped to minus 46, about six units lower than the next most pessimistic nation and way below the EU average of minus 19.1 units. The reasons are many. For the first time since World War II, Greece is not the only country in the region that enjoys the advantage of being both a member of NATO and the European Union. Today the world is much more competitive and Greece has to fight with its own resources in order to keep up and prepare for the future. But when we see that direct foreign investment plummeted by 64 percent last year (to a paltry 1.9 billion euros), we can conclude that we are losing the battle. We fell from 119th position globally in 2006 to 126th last year. This is an unmistakable vote of no confidence in our country’s potential. The chief reasons, we hear repeatedly from international organizations, are the frequent changes in taxation, the bureaucracy and corruption. These are the same problems that plague the residents of this country, who cannot opt out as easily as capital can. When the citizens seek support against these problems, what do they see? The government, like its predecessors, is mired in scandals (real or imagined, big and small), endless internal squabbling, its officials’ incompetence and the eternal fear of the «political cost» of getting anything done. The state, instead of making life easier for citizens, often functions as if its only objective is to harass people and exploit them. We see this everywhere, from ministries and tax offices to hospitals and town-planning departments: Citizens enter their doors like supplicants entering the temples of bad-tempered and unpredictable gods. That is why they are so ready to offer bribes in an effort to buy the employees’ good will. The wilier members of the public manage to bend this system to their own interest, while the rest can only hope and pray that they will not suffer injustice, knowing that this would never be righted. The problem is especially bad in the countryside, where small and not-so-small interests connive with local government officials and destroy all sense of what is just. The accession of neighboring countries into the European Union and our totally open borders will give development a boost through trade and tourism, but it will change Greece in other ways as well. Capital is moving out of Greece (and we saw how little is flowing in) at the rate of 5.3 billion euros last year, for investment in the Balkans. Jobs are being lost here. But another danger is that the highly organized crime rackets in the Balkans might find fertile ground here. All this increases the citizen’s sense of insecurity. In the fields of energy, the environment and waste management, we see very little effort being made to promote recycling and renewable sources of power. Greece could have been a leader in all these spheres, but instead, we sink in garbage, in profligacy, in apathy. But the saddest thing in Greece today is the lack of ideas. Neither the politicians nor our intellectuals have anything to propose that might put new breath into the public dialogue. Everyone focuses on the same issues and says the same things, over and over, even though this leads nowhere. The phenomenon is not just Greek, but we expect more from a nation that, if anything, knew how to think. Loneliness can be the product of the political climate. It is not just the consequence of emotional isolation and dead-ends. The citizen looks for ideas, for support, for consolation. When confidence is gone, the sense of loneliness is unbearable.

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