The Full Catastrophe (16 page)

One morning in Kavala, a nearby Aegean port city dotted with Ottoman-era buildings, I visited the office of a lawyer for Saltouridis, a man named Vasileios Kagkaidis. The lawyer worked in a dingy office building near the city’s harbor, and seemed to have a good business going. When I arrived, I sat down next to a few seemingly down-and-out clients in a small, windowless waiting room filled with their cigarette smoke. In his office, Kagkaidis loudly maintained simultaneous conversations with a client, an office phone, a mobile phone, and a young woman working for him. When he hung up one of the phones, it inevitably rang again within a few seconds. “Those are magic tricks!” he yelled into one phone, smacking the desk with his palm. “Whatever they say, the truth is I opened their eyes!” he yelled into the other phone. Eventually, he yelled to me: “Come inside, big guy.” Kagkaidis was a short man with graying hair and large brown eyes. The back of his swivel chair reached above his head. Above him on a bookshelf was a plaque inscribed with an Ancient Greek aphorism: “There is no surer enemy than an ungrateful beneficiary.” Two older men, both clients wearing shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, sat at the desk opposite the lawyer. Kagkaidis asked me why I was interested in Saltouridis’s case. I told him it was because Saltouridis was still on the public payroll even as Greece’s creditors were demanding the country fire civil servants. “So now that the Troika, Europe, are asking us to lay off loads of civil servants, now it becomes an issue,” he said. “Otherwise, they would have kept getting paid.” He banged his hand on his desk in a way that made it seem he was angry about this, though I soon realized this was his default way
of talking. “And they keep searching for civil servants to fire so we can get the next dose.” “Dose” had become the common Greek way of describing the bailout loan installments, which came in trickles, like methadone for an addict, based on the fulfillment of the creditors’ rehabilitation program.

I asked Kagkaidis if it was right that his client still remained on the public payroll. “Behind it all is a woman and three children,” he said, in a plaintive, lowered voice. “The law wisely foresaw, that if he kills someone, what are his kids going to do?” His voice resumed its normal, elevated volume. “Wise is the law that says you’ll take half because there’s a wife and three children.” It seemed important to Kagkaidis that his imprisoned-for-life client be grateful, if not for a less severe sentence, then for the fact that he was still getting a paycheck. Kagkaidis, after all, was the one who had sued Tsiakiris, the acting mayor after the shooting, for having refused to pay his client; and it was his idea to appeal the local government disciplinary board decision, which forced the municipality to keep paying the men, pending the outcome.

“All those babies were paid from me,” Kagkaidis said, in reference to his client’s three children.

“What was your justification for the appeal?” I asked him.

“What justification?” he said, shrugging, looking side to side and scrunching his face to indicate this was a preposterous, legally irrelevant question. “There is no justification. You took a weapon and killed the mayor? What justification?” The reason for the appeal, he said, was to “draw it out.”

Indeed, the disciplinary review process had been drawn out. During the summer of my visit to Pangaio—three years after the appeal—a second-degree review board in Athens decided that Saltouridis and Monos should be dismissed, as Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, had pointed out on the radio. When I contacted the ministry to find out why it had taken that long, the answer wasn’t particularly illuminating. “It took really long
to start functioning properly,” a ministry spokesman said. That spokesman also maintained that the two employees had been fired as a result of the appeal decision. I asked him if he was sure about that. Yes, he told me. He was very sure. In Pangaio, however, municipal officials told me that only they could technically fire the employees, and legally, they could not do so quite yet. According to Greek law at the time, the employees had a right to appeal again, this time to the country’s supreme administrative court. The treasurers would automatically be given up to three months to decide whether they would file such an appeal. This three-month period could not, according to the law, begin over the summer, due to its being a period of leisure. That meant the convicts would remain on the payroll at least until late autumn, and potentially much longer if they did decide to appeal again. I eventually informed the reform ministry that it had been premature in declaring the treasurers fired, and its spokesman later acknowledged the error.

Kagkaidis, seemingly bored with discussing the case any further, began to talk to me about politics. He said he’d had a poster of John F. Kennedy in his room as a child. Kennedy, Obama, they were human beings, he said. Bush? “He fucked up the whole world.” Kagkaidis was a passionate advocate of PASOK, which made him a bit unique for the time, as the party was politically eviscerated, and scorned by most Greeks for its part in the country’s downfall. “Tell America that Greece exists,” Kagkaidis told me. “That there’s freedom in Greece, and that we speak freely.” He then proceeded to speak his mind some more. German chancellor Angela Merkel, he said, was like Bush, and she was the one who wanted Greece to fire civil servants. “For me it’s a mistake to fire them,” he said. “They have families, etc. But the European right is pushing us. Bush, in other words. Bush!” He then paused, and changed tack, like a lawyer able to argue any side of an issue. “But they’ve got the money,” he said, shedding the indignant tone of his previous statements. Kagkaidis then pointed to the two gray-haired
clients on either side of him, who’d been listening in reverential silence. “You see these two deadbeats?” Kagkaidis said, pointing in their directions but not bothering to look at them. “Greece has three million pensioners like them. Deadbeats. And illegal pensions, too. Thankfully, Germany pays, and they get their money. If their pensions are cut, they’ll start killing each other.” The two men remained silent, and one nodded slightly in agreement.

One evening shortly before I traveled to Pangaio, the Greek government spokesman at the time, a politician named Simos Kedikoglou, stood before a television camera in a red tie and announced the first large-scale public worker firings in a very long time. “At a time when the Greek people endure sacrifices, there is no time for delay or hesitation,” Kedikoglou said, his dark eyebrows seesawing in the unnatural and exaggerated manner of someone attempting to come off as deeply serious. The state broadcaster, known as ERT, was an overstaffed bastion of plush benefits and incredible waste that could no longer be tolerated; it was necessary to “finish with the deficits and get out of the crisis.” ERT had six accounting departments that did not communicate with one another, employed tens of technicians to do the work of two or three, and paid massive, unjustified overtime, added Kedikoglou by way of giving a few examples. The broadcaster represented the quintessence of waste, and the government had the “bold and radical” will to do something about it. It had decided to close ERT through a joint ministerial decision, and would replace it with a more streamlined, high-quality broadcaster. ERT’s transmission would be cut off that night, he said. ERT’s main television news channel covered the speech live; its news anchors and commentators, though vainly trying to keep a modicum of journalistic objectivity, looked like prisoners awaiting their executions. Soon,
as newscasters reported that riot police were on the way to disable their hilltop transmitters, the broadcast went blank. Outside ERT’s headquarters in a northern outskirt of Athens, thousands of protesters, to whom the government’s action seemed dictatorial, gathered and, through their shrieks of protest, suggested that Greece’s military junta—which fell in 1974—was still governing.

Though the levels of waste and nepotism at ERT were probably comparable to those in other parts of the public sector, the government made the broadcaster out to be the most errant embodiment of those ills, in order to justify its closure. ERT was so bad, in other words, a new broadcaster had to be started from scratch. The closure also had the effect of immediately reducing Greece’s public workforce by 2,660 workers, thereby going a long way toward fulfilling the wishes of the Troika, which was demanding prompt layoffs—specifically, 4,000 of them by the year’s end. The government had to begin those layoffs somewhere, but shutting down the state broadcaster was a very heavy-handed, clumsy way of doing it. In the words of a statement signed by the head of every major European public broadcaster, the move was “undemocratic and unprofessional.” While the government assured the public it would quickly create a new broadcaster modeled on the BBC or those in Germany, few believed in its preparedness to do so. Indeed, several months after the closure, an interim public television station aired black-and-white films, cooking shows, and innocuous documentaries. The prime minister had shut down a deeply flawed but nevertheless significant public news source with no clear capacity to replace it. This left Greeks to get their news from the major private television stations, largely owned by oligarchs seeking to influence the public discussion in ways amenable to their interests.

The government was acting under pressure from its creditors to show it was willing to break the taboo of firing government workers. Indeed, International Monetary Fund experts later commended the closure as a sign the government had at last begun to
undertake the public sector reforms they had long been demanding. Yet, it wasn’t clear the action would help the government’s financial situation. ERT’s budget, as is the case with other European broadcasters, came from a separate levy taken directly from Greeks’ electric bills. ERT employees were also eventually granted generous severance pay, canceling out any initial savings that would come from a more efficiently run replacement. The day after the closure, Prime Minister Samaras gave a speech at a business awards event and presented the move as part of the government’s drive to break the sclerotic, Soviet-like insularity of the public administration. An incredible bureaucracy had blocked every effort to improve productivity due to its “grid of petrified ideological obsessions that have died everywhere else and survive only in Greece,” he said. The Greek state’s “opacity and waste don’t exist anywhere in the world today, at least not in Europe.” For too long, Samaras added, Greeks had been living with a “sinful ERT.”

In response, incensed Greek public sector labor unions announced a general strike. This is what they have done with regularity for decades in order to protect and improve public worker pay and benefits, particularly in the 1980s, when there were nearly 4,500 strikes in Greece; that is more than a strike a day. Greece is by far the most strike-prone nation in the European Union, and after the bailout agreement was struck, strikes became so common that some entrepreneurial Greeks created a website named after the Greek word for strike,
www.apergia.gr
, which daily informed commuters about which public transportation services had been shut down. On the day of the general strike, I traveled to a large demonstration that was to take place outside ERT’s headquarters. Despite sporadic transportation service that day, the metro line closest to the ERT building was running smoothly in order to convey trainloads of protesters. On my train car, a middle-aged man handed out flyers taken from his red backpack. “Do you know this government supports pederasts?” he said as he handed them out.
The flyers were copies of a health ministry document listing the various psychological disturbances, including sexual perversions, for which one could get a disability benefit. Diagnosed pedophiles were deemed between 20 and 30 percent disabled, according to the document. “Do you know why the government supports pederasts?” the man asked me after handing me a flyer. “Because they’re all pederasts.”

“This government is worse than the junta!” cried a woman from further down the train car.

“And us?” said the man with the flyers. “We know our future. They’ll throw us out onto the street.”

When the train reached the station nearest to ERT, the protesters spilled out onto a suburban boulevard lined with furniture and electronics stores. Outside the broadcaster’s headquarters were assembled a dizzying array of far-left parties and organizations, divided by internecine squabbles yet united in their opposition to the plutocratic government. They all gathered, amid the many banners depicting the hammer and sickle, to chant slogans of support for ERT’s
ergazomenoi
(“the workers”), a word that has sacred connotation for the Greek left. The workers, in the left’s dualist worldview, were always on the righteous side in the class struggle against the bosses. While Greece indeed had an oligarchical class of crony capitalists that inflicted a lot of harm on the country, the left seemed to possess a lover’s blindness when it came to the inadequacies of the
ergazomenoi
that constituted Greece’s public administration. The communist party–affiliated trade union was particularly visible in its efforts to protect public jobs, at one point hanging a massive hammer-and-sickle banner from the Acropolis that read:
PEOPLES OF EUROPE RISE UP
. Outside ERT, I tried to keep track of the number of leftist groups: 1) the Internationalist Workers’ Left, a revolutionary Marxist group; 2) the Committee for a Workers’ International—a Trotskyist group; 3) the Red Network at the Coalition of the Radical Left, one of the “fronts” within Syriza; 4) the Communist Organization of Greece, a revolutionary
Marxist and Maoist party; 5) the All-Workers Militant Front, the trade union of the main communist party of Greece; 6) the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Greece, a Maoist splinter faction from the main communist party. There were many more, but I decided to stop counting and made my way to the gate of the ERT complex, where enterprising souvlaki makers had set up stands and were conducting a brisk business.

From the bland five-story ERT building, depressed employee faces peered out through rows of windows and exhaled cigarette smoke. These were the first unfortunates in the public sector to be laid off, and they made it clear they would not go down easily. The workers had occupied the building and refused to relinquish control of it to the Greek state. “We are still alive and we are open,” a well-coiffed news anchorwoman standing in front of the building yelled into a microphone. I tried to imagine the workers of National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States taking similar action. It was hard to conjure the image of Renée Montagne or Charlie Rose doing this kind of thing—though it was also hard to fathom the U.S. government sending riot police to shut them down.