“VAT rates are being reduced to 11% and 22% from 13% and 24% as they are today.” This “today” is not April 2026. It was May 2019, in a pre-election speech by the Prime Minister. It was a “today” that would fade away like a remnant of another era as early as the day after those elections. A “yesterday” already, because very soon we would have left it definitively behind us. And what else would we forget? The “competitions of handouts,” the “benefits distributed without a plan and without perspective, except for pre-election purposes,” and an economy that would be set free through the “reduction of taxation.”
Seven years of strain and rising prices later, that “today” is still here. So too is its mechanism, which Kyriakos Mitsotakis had then denounced as one of the root causes of the crisis. What would we call it today? A “chronic pathology.” Something that sounds rather scholarly for what it actually conceals: “We are not the only ones doing it; the others did the same.”
The same practices in clientelism, in staffing the state apparatus and its organizations, in favors for friends. The same attempts to control institutions and the “levers of power,” the same intolerance toward criticism from the media. The same approach to public television and to benefits. The same—and even more so—if one assumes that now the pathology is executed more surgically compared to the “today” that was to become “yesterday” in May 2019.
But at the same time, the same—and worse. As those who understand the mechanics of the system say about benefits, “VAT remained where it was so that part of the revenue from rising prices could be channeled as a support measure.” The economy continues to be fueled by consumption, rather than by the promise made seven years ago of growth that would come from “tax reductions and investments.” Will the alarm sound again only after the next bubble has burst? Once again so late?
That “today” proved so strong that the cycle of the government’s second term is closing much as the first began. Like a “pathology” dressed in a suit and painted blue, yet just as anti-modernizing and anti-reformist as those of the past, and just as anti-European when its sacred cows are touched: long-standing pathologies, government figures recoil from European oversight as “Ceaușescu-style justice,” while for the country of OPEKEPE and our Balkan offshoot, what is needed is a “Montesquieu-style justice.” Not greaseproof paper and clarinets, but porcelain tableware and violins in the background.
In “Montesquieu-style justice,” however, prime ministers have been prosecuted and former presidents walk around with electronic bracelets after having served prison time. Others, aspiring figures like Fillon, saw their political careers destroyed because they appointed their spouse to their office, or are dragged through the courts like Le Pen. No prosecutor was described as an executioner at the guillotine; for no one was it said that they would “end up in Naxos watching the ships.”
In the country of diminutives and our Balkan offshoot, Fillon’s “Penelopegate” would have been merely a “little appointment.” Why do these Montesquieus make such a fuss over something so familial and so insignificant? Does it matter so much whether Penelope was cooking at home in her apron instead of going to the office with her briefcase? Didn’t the others do the same?
In the country of offsetting comparisons and our Balkan offshoot, the one who would most likely end up in Naxos watching the ships would be Montesquieu himself. From there he would watch the next package of benefits and see the “today” of 2019 perpetuated, sprinkled with the narrative of “stability.”
But here is our Balkan offshoot. A person may appear before elections as a guarantor of stability and, after elections, evolve into a protagonist of instability. This has happened in various pathological offshoots. It happens where individuals (self-)identify with institutions.
