Empowering democracy
With the dismantling of November 17 dominating the news, it was absolutely natural that messages about the 28th anniversary of the reinstatement of democracy in Greece would praise the success of the counterterrorism investigation in expunging the heaviest post-dictatorship stigma, as Prime Minister Costas Simitis described it. Terrorist activity was the prime negation of democracy’s legitimacy, not only because it questioned the rules and legality of the parliamentary regime, but also because, as Public Order Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis said, it incriminated critical discourse, the source of power and renewal for democracy. From this point of view, it is not by chance that, just as Simitis a few days ago rejected the tendency to tar entire political sectors due to the suspects’ ideological roots, so yesterday Chrysochoidis made a point of stressing that the measure of today’s success is not that the crimes were detected but that this was done in full observance of individual and political rights. These two parameters, the free expression of opinion and thought and the consolidation of the right of every citizen to be politically active within the framework of the law, are those which establish democracy’s primacy over all other known political systems. In Greece, a country which has, since the war, undergone dozens of difficult «democracies» and seven years of dictatorship, it is vital that this primacy has not been harmed by the counterterrorism struggle. The republic can boast that it has desisted from abrogating the freedoms of its citizens while, by contrast, its murky opponents, who condemn it for lack of freedom, have not only resorted to an arbitrary definition of good and evil on behalf of, but without the leave of, the citizens, but also to common crime. The anniversary of democracy’s restoration has confirmed it as the only system that respects the citizen. The challenge now is to enhance this respect so as to remedy those defects that supplied terrorist proclamations with a ready readership…
