Politics is not a soap opera
It should come as no surprise that when you promote popular actors and stars from other fields to important positions in government, you will inevitably see them hamming it up on the political stage one day. But, there needs to be some sort of line drawn regarding how much of a scene they should be allowed to create. The recent events involving Apostolos Gletsos, the mayor of Stylida in central Greece and once a hugely popular soap opera actor, prove that those who leave the stage or screen for a career in politics had best acquire a clear understanding of the responsibilities that their position entails first. On stage, acts of heroism may draw applause from the audience, but when the mayor drove a municipal bulldozer through barriers on the Athens-Thessaloniki national highway in order to help protesting motorists bypass tollbooths, he was committing an act of pseudo-bravado that broke numerous laws. As a result, there should be consequences of the kind that any self-respecting democracy would impose.
