GREECE MAKES A CHOICE

Greece has been rather out of the European public eye in recent weeks. After many a weary conference, the second bailout of €130bn was signed up on 21 February and the luckless private bond-holders later took a 70% haircut.  The uneasy coalition government of technocrat (i.e. bank stooge) Lucas Papadimos has fulfilled its mandate. The Athens street turmoil has calmed, anxiety has switched to the much more significant economies of Spain and Italy and the balm of billions of euros pumped into the eurozone by the ECB has given the crisis a temporary respite.

Stop-gap Papadimos was obliged to call elections and they are scheduled for 6 May. All the signs are that the old guard, those who have misruled Greece for a generation, will poll badly but no coherent alternative government is discernable. The existing PASOK/ New Democracy coalition had about 220 seats in the 300-seat parliament. Opinion polls suggest that those likely to vote (20% are undecided) will choose as follows:

Supporters of Bailout and Eurozone

Party                           Politics            Leader                   % vote        Seats
PASOK                           Left              Venizelos                     17.8        48
New Democracy             Right             Samaras                       22.3        110*
Democratic Coalition    Centre             Bakoyannis                    3.0           8
                                                                                             43.1        166
Opponents of Bailout but pro-Europe

Independent Greeks          Right           Kammenos                     9.9      26
Syriza                               Far Left      Chipras                           9.8      26
LAOS                               Far Right     Karatzoferis                   3.9        10
Democratic Left                 Left             Kouvelis                        8.6        23
Greens                               Left              A Committee               3.1        8
Various Independents            -                                                   6.2        0
                                                                                               41.5      93
Anti-European

KKE                               Communist    Papariga                       9.7        26
Golden Dawn                   Neo-Nazi       Michaloliakos                5.7        15
                                                                                              15.4       41

*Under the Greek system the highest polling party gets a bonus of 50 seats.

On the face of it, the existing PASOK/ New Democracy coalition should have a comfortable majority but Samaras has vowed not to renew his alliance with PASOK.  The support for both parties is inexorably melting away. As parties need to poll at least 3% to be represented, the pro-bailout Democratic Coalition may not make it, nor may the Greens or even LAOS. Some kind of coalition will eventually emerge but its complexion is uncertain and may well be influenced Left-wards by the French elections, especially if Sarkozy falls. The established parties are reaping the whirlwind of unpopularity as they implement austerity under EU/IMF instructions but there are local issues too, especially the immigration flood and crime-wave, with LAOS and Golden Dawn advocating wholesale forced repatriation.

Samaras (New Democracy) and Venizelos (PASOK)

In a sense all this election fever is the trivia of Lilliput as Greece is not master of its own house. After two huge bail-outs it is wholly dependent financially on subsidies from the Eurozone. Its fate will be decided in Brussels and Berlin. If Greece leaves the Eurozone (which surely it must), it can only do so under the auspices and direction of the European powers, unless revolution breaks out, which seems unlikely. There is a distant echo in Greece of the 19th century Capitulations which so oppressed the Ottoman Empire. The Capitulations granted Europeans legal and fiscal privileges in that country and although they were not very intrusive they naturally offended Ottoman ideas of national sovereignty. EU, normally German, officials dictating policy and staffing ministries in Greece are much resented and recent remarks by Poul Thomsen, IMF’s man in Athens, advocating speedier bank repossessions caused a particular furore. It took Kemal Ataturk’s revolution to rid Turkey of the Capitulations but Greece is currently an embryonic Capitulatory State.

There is certainly a respectable intellectual case for Greece to be taken under European tutelage. Greece’s own politicians have totally failed to manage the economy, after 5 years of steep recession, or implement the reductions in public spending and organise the privatisations required in the EU memoranda. The Greeks are charmingly eloquent and will formally pass the necessary legislation but action seldom follows as they lack political will and the civil service is incompetent, often staffed by useless placemen after years of clientism.

Three notable scandals, illustrating the dire state of public probity, have moved forward recently. The German entity Siemens, heavily involved in telecommunications equipment, traffic lights, the Athens Metro and the Greek Railways among others was discovered by the German courts to be running a slush fund paying large bribes (allegedly €100m) to Greek officials and politicians including the then Minister of Transport. To end civil action, Siemens has just agreed to pay €270m in compensation to the Greek state but criminal actions are still possible, if unlikely.

The good reputation of the Orthodox Church in Greece has been damaged by the long-running Vatopedi scandal. The abbot of Vatopedi, Brother Ephraim, heads the largest and richest monastery on Mount Athos (known as The Holy Mountain in Greek). Brother Ephraim was incarcerated at Christmas on charges of fraud and embezzlement but was released on bail at Easter, in part thanks to pressure from Vladimir Putin, suddenly wanting to ingratiate himself with Russian Orthodoxy.

Brother Ephraim of Vatopedi

 The scandal revolves around land-swaps between the New Democracy government of Costas Karamanlis and Vatopedi from 2008 said to have disadvantaged the Greek state to the tune of €100m. As usual this is a very murky “Byzantine” affair.

Much worse have been the revelations regarding the activities of a former senior PASOK politician, Akis Tsohadzopoulos. A former bus driver, Akis rose through the ranks of PASOK from 1981 to 2007, holding important portfolios including Transport, Defence and Development. He retired in 2007, was expelled from PASOK in 2011 and arrested and charged with money laundering in April 2012. A 104-page report on his activities from the prosecutor’s office has been leaked. Allegedly he took bribes from various sources, notably the German supplier of submarines to the Greek navy and the Russian supplier of missile systems, and bought about €35m worth of property  mostly now in the names of his wife and daughter, via a network of offshore companies. Tsohadzopoulos currently languishes in prison.

It is not surprising in the light of the above that the contempt the Greek people have felt for their political class has deepened. A totally new broom is called for to reform a system wholly rotten from corruption, though it is not clear whether it will be a European or Greek broom. In this context the question of who wins the coming election is somewhat superfluous. Dr Johnson, speaking of another contest between midgets, declared “There is no settling the point of precedency between a Louse and a Flea”.

Akis Tsohadzopoulos

SMD
20.04.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

TASTES CHANGE

We know already that Women are fickle (La Donna e mobile), but the truth is that all Mankind is fickle and the treasures of yesterday are soon discarded while new favourites flourish. I recall my eye being greatly offended by my first sight of Keble College, Oxford, the St Pancras Station Hotel and the old Prudential building in High Holborn, London. I thought all three were hideous red-brick excrescences, but Betjeman has since educated us to think differently and these buildings are now much cherished Victoriana. Our tastes have been changed.

The Great Hall, Keble College, Oxford

      
The female form, a rather basic element in our lives, has also gone through many a metamorphosis. Did our ancestors really find seductive Rubens’ enormous and sturdy nudes (those thighs!) or presentable the somewhat louche ladies of Boucher?  I guess so, as even in recent times we admired the over-upholstered figures of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. The inevitable reaction was extreme as it brought on the almost anorexic figures of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Twiggy though now the pendulum has swung back to the fleshier pleasures of Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lopez and Cate Blanchett.

At a more intellectual level, opinions and thought-processes change. The oracles of yester-year, like Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin were derided, whatever their considerable merits, and new arbiters of taste emerged, for example Walter Pater, Bernard Shaw or Lytton Strachey, to be deposed in their turn. Forming or leading opinion is a thankless task, as people move on like bees supping on the next flower’s nectar. I wonder if anyone still reads that fine writer and historian, “the Sage of Ecclefechan” Thomas Carlyle, with his declamatory style, hero-worshipping and profusion of capital letters! The baton of popular cultural leadership has been passed on to the likes of Kenneth Clark, Gore Vidal and Alan Bennett until, inevitably, they too are pronounced old hat.

Thomas Carlyle, the Sage of Ecclefechan

Simply growing older is part of the explanation. As usual Dr Johnson expresses this phenomenon most pithily: “Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore”. I was bowled over as a teenager by Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye but I was left cold when I re-read it more recently. It had caught wonderfully well a young man’s attitude to life in the 1950s but the moment and the magic have long passed. Many seminal books will share this fate; not least Sir Walter Scott’s, once the wonder of Europe, but whose over-descriptive style and slow plots are not to modern tastes.

Political oratory is an area where tastes change radically. Churchill’s matchless prose reads magnificently but audiences no longer want grandiloquent speechifying. Churchill was also very partisan and had much difficulty winning elections; his rival Stanley Baldwin was polished too but spoke simply of national unity and the end of class conflict. This rang a popular chord and his style was mirrored by the famous radio “fireside chats” that so enhanced FDR’s place in American hearts. Politicians strive now to be “just folks” – something which Margaret Thatcher could not easily master but John Major and George W. Bush got right.

Changing tastes are most evident in the arts. Comedy often does not wear well. Our great-grandparents fell about laughing at Charlie Chaplin. I doubt if many people find him funny now. Even Shakespeare lets us down occasionally – the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth is desperately unamusing. The brittle comedies of Noel Coward have lost their vogue but that much neglected but workmanlike playwright Terence Rattigan has enjoyed a series of well-deserved revivals in London. Pre-Raphaelite painters have fluctuated too in the public’s affection and are now a bull market while the manic saleroom stars like Pablo Picasso (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust went for $106m) or Gustav Klimt (his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer fetched $136m) ignore the laws of gravity. Now must be the time to sell your Klimts and Picassos and buy up neglected High Victorians like Lord Leighton, G.F.Watts and William Dyce!

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Yes, our tastes greatly alter. As a Scotsman I love my country and I hugely enjoyed visiting Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. The 18th century explorer Joseph Banks described it as superior to the Louvre Palace, St Peter’s in Rome, Palmyra and anywhere in Classical Greece. Others call it the 8th Wonder of the World. All this is totally disproportionate hyperbole in my view – or must I change my tastes?


SMD
17.04.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012