What kind of President do we actually want?
It depends.

Do we want someone confined within the ceremonial silence of the office—someone who spends their days listening to music, leafing through books, gazing at Athens’ National Garden, and occasionally “honoring with their presence” some harmless event or “sending a message of unity” on national holidays?

No, that would feel far too decorative.
We want a President who speaks—so long as they say exactly what we want to hear.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t all want to hear the same thing. And so the public acceptance of each presidential “intervention” is measured not by constitutional standards but by where each of us stands on our ideological axis.

Former President Katerina Sakellaropoulou captured this constitutional paradox during her term.
“For those on the right,” she said, “I’m too left-wing. And for those on the left, I’m too right-wing.”

Too right-wing, for example, because she did not “intervene” in the wiretapping scandal or the Tempi train tragedy.
And too left-wing because she defended marriage as an individual right from which no one should be excluded—referring to same-sex marriage, a subject still fiercely debated in Greece.

Even her effort to “open the presidency to society”—a program of outreach meant to make the office feel more accessible—was dismissed as “too apolitical” by Greece’s hyper-politicized public sphere.
If such outreach was neither left nor right, then what on earth was it?
A dud. A failure to be categorized.

And now, the same fate appears to be meeting President Kostas Tasoulas.

In a country that cannot reach consensus even on the role of a President stripped of real executive power, Tasoulas voiced what he called his concern about a “post-election deadlock, instability, and ungovernability.”

He expressed an entirely obvious worry.
But the political reaction had nothing to do with the substance of that obviousness.
It sprang instead from the same inability—and the same awkwardness—that always follows a presidential remark not easily classified as “right-leaning” or “left-leaning.”

“The President,” political commentators murmured, “put everyone on the opposite side.”

Whom exactly?
Those in government who interpreted his warning as a “message of defeatism” concerning their goal of securing an outright parliamentary majority.
But also those in the opposition who labeled his concern a “constitutional misstep.”

Why?
Was the presidential comment truly so “unusual” or “unprecedented,” as some claimed?
No.

It was because—from political parties to pundits—everyone tailors a special presidential suit for the office. And it is not the one used at the swearing-in ceremony.

Even worse, this suit is sewn without acknowledging the President’s right, as an elected official, to choose how to fulfill the duties of the role. As if the President must remain impersonal—a kind of AI figure: always polite, friendly, and colorless, speaking according to the narrowest possible interpretation of Article 50 of the Constitution.

A President pluribus—one who says “we,” as in Vince Gilligan’s TV series “We Are Our Own Worst Enemy”—because some strange ideological virus has implanted all of us into his head.
A curious and supposedly unconstitutional virus, even though, as constitutional law professors have explained in this very column, the President violated no institutional boundary whatsoever.

“Imagine if the President of the Republic were not allowed to speak,” they noted.
“And what exactly did he say that could be considered unconstitutional?”

At least until that extraterrestrial virus finally lands, the President will speak as a President—and in the first person. There is no other way.

But the perception of the institution has already changed.
There is no longer a President shielded from criticism.
Depending on the moment, presidential silence is condemned as “decorative,” while a presidency with flesh and blood is branded “unconstitutional,” “not up to the circumstances,” “unnecessary,” or whatever else someone believes while stitching their own President pluribus suit—confusing their personal “we” with the entire country.

Now the real contagion may begin: the constitutional-law virus.
Should we revisit the President’s powers in the next constitutional revision?

Welcome to the Hellenic Republic.