The Full Catastrophe (14 page)

On May 25, 2014, Syriza won the European Parliament elections in Greece, beating out New Democracy by a few percentage points. Syriza supporters considered the victory historic, the first time a far-left party won a nationwide election. Before long, they rightly believed, Syriza would be governing Greece. Indeed, only seven months later, the party took power after winning a snap general election. In the first of these triumphs, Glezos received 450,000 votes, far more than any other domestic candidate for the European Parliament. It was a clear mandate to take his fight for reparations to Europe. Glezos could not fly due to a heart condition, which made commuting back and forth from Brussels or Strasbourg, the places where European parliamentarians meet,
problematic. He would travel north by car and find a place to live in one of those cities.

On a hot, humid night before his departure, Glezos had a going-away party of sorts at a café in the center of Athens. The gathering was for a newly released book of transcribed conversations with Glezos, compiled by one of his Syriza colleagues, Rena Dourou, who had just been elected governor of Attica. At the event, Glezos sat next to Dourou and Tsipras, both of whom spoke to the crowd, praising Glezos’s tirelessness and fighting spirit. Glezos spoke last and, unlike the others, stood up from his chair as if commanded by a drill sergeant. He wore an untucked button-down shirt with short sleeves that exposed his long, skinny arms. The outfit and his excitement over the chance to speak to the crowd made him seem boyish. First he thanked members of the audience, in particular two diplomats in attendance: the head of the Palestinian mission to Greece, who received a round of applause; and the Vietnamese ambassador, whose people, as Glezos put it, had struggled and overcome the technology of war because of their desire to obtain independence. He thanked the loyal people from his Naxos village who had come to see him off that night and then began speaking of the importance of Syriza’s victory for old fighters like him, those who had been struggling a lifetime to see a leftist government in Greece. “We are on the road to vindication. That is a fact,” he told the crowd, his voice cracking and rising. “Very many fellow fighters, fighters never subdued, inconspicuous fighters you don’t know, they call me, and they cry from joy. We cry from joy. Why? Because the road has opened, Alexi,” he said, glancing at Tsipras, the man who would lead the way. Afterward, the woman emceeing the event presented Glezos with a small bundle of dirt from the shooting range where his brother was executed. “I wanted you to take it with you,” she said, nearly crying. Then she addressed the audience: “He’s going one more time to climb a rock, a hostile rock,” she said. “And he has a lot of flags to take down.”

It wasn’t clear what enemy flags Glezos would manage to take down in the European Parliament, an institution that remained a rather impotent fragment of the European Union’s sprawling bureaucracy. Glezos had served briefly in the same parliament in the 1980s, before resigning in frustration and moving to Naxos in order to institute a direct-democracy model of governance in his village. The European Parliament had since obtained more powers, but things still had not changed all that much, Glezos would find. He was one of 751 parliamentarians speaking a score of different languages, in debates during which each one of them was afforded only a couple of minutes to comment. The elections that year had ushered in a wave of far-right parliamentarians, with victories for the French National Front and the U.K. Independence Party—two nationalist parties whose ideologies were largely based on antagonism toward European institutions such as the one they had been elected to serve in. Included among the parliamentarians was one from Germany’s neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, and three more kindred spirits from Greece’s Golden Dawn. Arguably, the European Parliament was kind of a madhouse. Glezos would likely not be able to effectively use the venue to confront Germany on reparations. Nor, judging by the composition of the parliament, had Syriza’s rise in Greece yet sparked a socialist revolution across Europe, as he’d hoped.

After the book event was over, Glezos went out onto the terrace and was mobbed by a group of admirers. One large old man, who looked like he must have been formidable in his younger years, walked gingerly past the scene and noticed the undercover police officer standing guard next to Glezos. “Ha!” said the old man, a communist since the days when communists had to be on the lookout for undercover police. “They used to chase us, and now they’re kowtowing to you!” A small group of musicians fiddled and strummed their instruments, and people started singing. By this point, I realized that for some people from his village in
Naxos, composing songs about Glezos was an art form. “Courage, indomitable soul, and a will of steel, and with the same strength, you’ll fight again. With heart, soul, and strength, like in those years.” A few older ladies started improvising on the spot: “You’ll be like a bright page of history…Because we have Manoli, we’re all proud…Hero of the Acropolis!” At one point, I leaned into Glezos’s ear and asked him if he’d miss Greece. “No,” he said. “I’m taking Greece with me.”

4
Murder in the Civil Service

And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens.

—Pericles

O
n the night of December 27, 2009, two employees of the municipal treasury of Pangaio, a verdant, mountainous area of northern Greece, lured the mayor, Triantafyllos Koukoudis, to a remote coastal road with the intent of resolving a pressing monetary difficulty. Over the previous three years, the treasurers, acting jointly with the mayor, had repeatedly taken municipal money for their personal use, public prosecutors later alleged. That month, as auditors arrived for a routine check of the books, the resulting gap in municipal finances had reached beyond 700,000 euros, a circumstance that was apparently causing the three men a great deal of stress.

That night, the deputy treasurer, Ioakeim Monos, a dark-eyed, middle-aged man, called the mayor and told him he wanted to hand over titles to his property, which could be used as collateral for an emergency loan to plug the financial gap. “Come and I’ll give them to you,” Monos said he told the mayor, though the treasurers would later acknowledge that the handing over of titles was
not the true purpose of the meeting. Monos’s apparent involvement in such wayward activities came as a surprise to many locals, who described him as taciturn. He was married with four sons, and had worked as a municipal clerk for two decades before the mayor appointed him to work for the treasury a few years earlier. A colleague at the town hall called him a “good person.”

The mayor, a tall former gym teacher with a lush crown of silver hair, a low forehead, and a well-groomed beard, was by all accounts a garrulous, friendly man, though some locals say his successful mayoral bid a few years earlier had changed him, giving him an air of import and a politician’s manner of speaking. He was divorced, and when he received the call from Monos, the mayor was with a younger woman he’d been dating for a few months. He told her he had to leave for a “professional rendezvous,” she later recalled. The mayor then got into his blue Audi and sped off.

The rendezvous point was a parking area off a highway that runs along the sandy Aegean coastline, a stretch of road little trafficked during the winter months. Monos and the municipality’s head treasurer, Savvas Saltouridis, drove together. Saltouridis was a stout man in his late forties, and his thin-framed glasses seemed fitting for a keeper of municipal books. Locals said he was outgoing and had lots of friends. He was a former tax collector, and had been appointed treasurer by the mayor at the beginning of the term three years earlier. Saltouridis seemed to have a good reputation among his peers. He was an “impeccable employee,” a coworker in the town hall said of him. He was also a musician and played the
lyra,
a fiddle-like instrument common in the jig-like traditional music of the Pontic Greeks, who descend from the region around the Black Sea. He had married a Ukrainian woman, and together with a daughter from her first marriage, they had two boys, both of them still very young at the time of this December night.

The treasurers had brought an Uzi submachine gun along with them for the rendezvous. When they arrived at the parking area, Saltouridis took the gun and hid near a shuttered roadside snack bar, according to a later court decision regarding the night’s events. The mayor arrived shortly after 9:00 p.m., and got out of his car. Saltouridis then sprang from his hiding spot, the court determined, pointed the gun in the direction of the mayor’s head, and opened fire, hitting him with two bullets in the face at close range. The mayor fell to the pavement, and Saltouridis unloaded five more bullets into his body. The municipal treasurers then stuffed the mayor’s body into the trunk of his car, where it was discovered three days afterward.

Three and a half years later, when I first found out about the killing, people in Greece were still talking about it. That was because the two convicted treasurers remained on the municipal payroll—receiving a portion of their salaries—even as they sat in prison for killing the mayor. The case had come to represent in blatant terms the thicket of public-worker job protections that safeguarded even convicts from losing their government jobs. (“They Murdered the Mayor but Still Get Paid!” ran a Greek newspaper headline.) At the time, Greece’s Troika of official creditors was pushing hard for the nation to reform its public bureaucracy, and demanded the government fire public workers deemed unsuitable. The case of the slain mayor showed how challenging that was likely to be.

The perpetuity of a government job in Greece has been considered as incontrovertible as the earth’s solar orbit since it was consecrated in the country’s constitution a century ago. “Civil servants holding posts provided by law shall be permanent so long as these posts exist,” the document says. The constitution technically
allows for employees to be fired for acts like murder and embezzlement, but not “without a decision of a service council consisting of at least two-thirds of permanent civil servants.” These job protections were initially enacted to keep political parties from a then common post-election practice; new governments would fire civil servants en masse and appoint political adherents in their place. Yet, while the law prevented the mass firings, it did nothing to dampen the hiring aspect of the custom. Politicians therefore continued to allot jobs to their supporters or kin as if distributing breadcrumbs to pigeons, simply adding them to the ranks already on the public payroll. In 2009, about one out of five Greeks in the labor force had a public job, whether directly as part of the government, or for a state-owned entity. That ratio, although higher than in Germany, was still smaller than European nations such as France, and especially Scandinavian countries like oil-rich Norway. The problem with Greece’s public sector, however, was not as much size as composition. The public workforce swelled with unskilled clerks and midlevel managers hired without much if any regard for their qualifications, and put into positions created for the benefit of the workers rather than that of the citizens they technically served. Once appointed, no matter your performance, losing your job was virtually impossible, as you could be fired only by a majority decision of colleagues inclined to protect you. This career tenure arguably contributed to a sense of impunity among those public servants who tended to arrive to work late, not to arrive at all, or, once they arrived, to conceive illicit ways to make their positions more lucrative. Those public servants wishing to do an honest, good job were often discouraged by a system seemingly designed to reward the opposite behavior.

The Greek government, under duress from the Troika, was forced to undertake efforts to evaluate workers’ performance. A good starting point seemed to be to check whether employees were showing up, and if so, whether they were working full days. The
initial findings were not particularly good. In one department of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, for instance, the electronic system for monitoring working hours—which was installed in 1998—became operational only in 2012, and even then it was not fully functioning, inspectors found. Some 70 percent of the employees sampled there in the fall of 2012 flouted their full working hours. The same was found to be true of three quarters of the workers sampled at an auxiliary social security fund. A second inspection there four months later showed a marginal improvement of seven percentage points. The inspectors’ report noted that managers at the fund failed to discipline the staff or dock their pay as was formally required, but instead granted unwarranted overtime.

Once the government was forced by its creditors to account for the true self it had for decades kept behind the curtain, a pageant of unpleasant revelations appeared. The highest-profile cases centered around the few politicians caught laundering or embezzling tens of millions of euros. But many smaller-scale corruption cases emerged among civil servants also wishing to partake. For instance, six women working for the nation’s largest social security organization were accused of assigning some 11 million euros in fraudulent benefits; they were charged with money laundering and other crimes. Sixty-five urban planning department employees in and around Athens were charged with felonies for systematically and arbitrarily reducing or waiving fines for building code violations (presumably, the disappearing fines did not benefit only the building owners). At the end of 2013, Greece’s finance minister wrote a letter to Greek banks asking them to provide account information on hundreds of tax auditors suspected of having undeclared income and assets of apocryphal origins, the Greek newspaper
Ethnos
reported. Investigators found large bank transfers amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros that did not appear to be justified by the employees’ salaries. The following year, the
government reported that it was investigating more than five thousand civil servants who collectively transferred some 1.5 billion euros to foreign banks over the previous four years. About half of them were teachers, who often have private, cash-only side jobs tutoring students in what they don’t learn at school: to pass the difficult exams needed to get into a Greek university. Public doctors and defense ministry employees were also heavily represented.

Not surprisingly, nearly all Greeks think poorly of their public administration. In a 2012 EU survey, 96 percent of polled Greeks characterized it as “bad”—the worst result in the EU. The sentiment is so pervasive that one can assume most of the public administrators share it. The poll result was similar in the years preceding the financial crisis, and therefore cannot be attributed to subsequent cuts in services. Despite Greeks’ dissatisfaction with the way their government works, public employees in the decade leading up to the crisis received very large pay raises. During that time, public sector wages per employee grew by over 100 percent, near the highest increase in the eurozone, according to a report published by the European Central Bank. By contrast, in Germany, where people were satisfied with the way the state bureaucracy functioned, public wages grew around 13 percent. (That low rate, when one factors in inflation, essentially meant a pay cut.) Greek civil servants also received an array of benefits that sweetened their jobs. Until 2013, when the Greek government put an end to it, those working in front of computers—a condition considered a hardship—received an extra six days off a year in order to provide them some relief.

In the summer of 2013, a young New Democracy politician named Kyriakos Mitsotakis was appointed head of the Greek ministry overseeing administrative reforms, replacing the previous minister from a small leftist party whom conservatives accused of obstructing rather than fulfilling the Troika’s reform demands. Mitsotakis, a high achiever with two Harvard degrees and another
from Stanford, belonged to one of Greece’s most prominent political families. His father, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, governed Greece for three and a half years as prime minister at the start of the 1990s. The father didn’t keep that position for long in large part because he tried to carry out some of the unpopular reforms the Troika later demanded of Greece: to cut government spending and privatize bloated state-owned companies. He, however, also developed a reputation for liberally distributing government posts to his political allies. The younger Mitsotakis was now given the unenviable job of reforming the public administration and implementing another unpopular measure: firing thousands of public workers, something no Greek politician had done in a very long time. The ministry he took over—officially called the Ministry of Administrative Reform and e-Governance—had been created a few years earlier with the purpose of modernizing Greece’s public administration, though it was still unclear whether it was doing much to improve government or was simply adding to its girth.

After taking over, Mitsotakis declared he would move quickly to turn the civil service into an efficiently run meritocracy. One good place to start, he said, would be to fire convicted criminals on the public payroll. In a radio interview, he brought up the treasurers in Pangaio, and said stories like it did not “foster honor in our country.” He announced that a decision had finally been reached for their permanent removal, and portrayed this as a sign that the government boards reviewing disciplinary cases had begun to function. Such efforts to dismantle an “overgrown client state that is the source of evil” should have been made far earlier, he said. After hearing the minister’s interview, I was under the impression the treasurers had been fired, and in subsequent phone calls to the ministry, Mitsotakis’s spokesman confirmed that this was the case. Yet, when I contacted the Pangaio town hall, an aide to the mayor told me no one there had heard anything about firings, and in fact the convicted killers still remained on the payroll. At that point, I decided to visit Pangaio to find out why that was the case.

Pangaio Municipality is a collection of villages in northeastern Greece near the mountain range from which it takes its name and where, locals say, Alexander the Great once mined for gold in order to finance his conquests. About seventy miles to the north is Bulgaria, and just to the south stretches a northern shore of the Aegean. When the mayor was killed, the Pangaio town hall was located in his hometown, a place called Nikisiani, a village of red-tiled roofs on a slope of the Pangaion Hills, covered with fir, beech, and chestnut trees. The town hall was later moved to a larger, neighboring city as part of a nationwide overhaul to reduce the number of municipalities by merging them, though when I arrived in Nikisiani early one evening, a large town hall sign still hung from the former mayor’s office. Next door, a group of retirees idled outside a small
kafenio,
sitting in a semicircle under the shade of a chestnut tree. I took a seat with them and ordered a coffee. The retirees looked at me like I had descended to their location in a spaceship.
“Kalispera”
(“Good evening”), I announced. They returned the greeting politely, and then there was silence. Across the road was a small plaza featuring a row of flagpoles without flags. Beside it was another café occupied by retirees. Opposite them was a third café with a few more retirees.