In July 2022, the European Parliament’s technical service uncovered an attempt to infect the cellphone of Nikos Androulakis — then a member of the European Parliament and a candidate for the leadership of PASOK, Greece’s center-left party — with Predator, a spyware system that was relatively unknown at the time but is now notorious. An investigation by ADAE, the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy, subsequently revealed that Androulakis’ phone had also been placed under surveillance by Greece’s National Intelligence Service, EYP, “legally,” at the same time as the failed attempt to infect it with the illegal spyware. “It was legal, but it was wrong,” the prime minister said at the time. But not long afterward, we learned that the “mistake” had been repeated several dozen times, targeting government ministers, generals, politicians and journalists.
Four full years have passed since the first revelations in the case. Yet we still do not know — nor do those directly involved — the official justification for the surveillance. We can only assume, with greater grounds for doing so after what was heard during the trial at the Athens Single-Member Misdemeanor Court last February, that the overlap between EYP surveillance and attempts to infect phones with the illegal spyware was no coincidence. Only Greece’s Supreme Court was persuaded otherwise — three times, in fact, through three separate rulings by three different prosecutors. According to them, it was merely a coincidence.
For four years now, the case has repeatedly faded from view, only to flare up and return to the forefront, as it has now with the new Supreme Court prosecutor’s decision to keep the case archived and refuse, “for the time being,” any further investigation. And as long as the matter remains unresolved, it comes at a cost. There is an institutional cost — from parliamentary improprieties and questions over the independence of the judiciary to the mistreatment of independent authorities. And there is a political cost, even if that is harder to quantify.
The government hopes the theory will be proven right that citizens are preoccupied with their survival or prosperity and indifferent to “institutional” issues. They care about the price of coffee, not democracy, to paraphrase a once-famous Turkish saying. They are waiting to hear about government handouts announced from the podium of the Thessaloniki International Fair, not revelations about wiretapping.
Fortunately, however, that is not how things work. Scandals rarely bring down governments — though it is not entirely unheard of. What they do is erode them, consume political capital and undermine credibility.
But even if the immediate political cost were zero, the government would still be the first to pay the “institutional” cost, reflected in the rapid erosion of public trust in everything associated with public life: politics itself, Parliament, the government, the media and every institution. In relevant international surveys, Greece ranks last in the entire world in citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and among the lowest in trust in institutions generally and the justice system in particular.
And now, another coincidence. Two days before the Supreme Court prosecutor published his decision, a major study on the quality of democracy around the world was released. The Berggruen Governance Index, compiled for the past 25 years by the Berggruen Institute in cooperation with two universities — one in California and one in Berlin — is perhaps the most systematic and comprehensive study of its kind in the world.
It ranks countries according to three separate criteria. The first is the quality of governance, including the economic and other performance of the state. The second is the quality of democratic accountability. The third is the quality and accessibility of public goods, such as education and health care.
In the first category, Greece has remained stable, with a relatively low score of 62%, from 2000 to the present. Neither improvement nor deterioration. In the third category, access to public goods, it improved from 80% to 85%.
But in the second and most critical category — the quality of democratic accountability — Greece experienced a sudden plunge, from 90% to 80%. More specifically, in the institutional accountability indicator, which measures the quality of institutions, the decline was dramatic. From 78% in 2000, where it remained steady throughout the years of the debt crisis, it suddenly fell to 58%.
The report’s authors argue that progress in the economy and the effectiveness of the state, or in the quality and accessibility of public goods, is incomplete, fragile and easily reversible unless it is accompanied by corresponding progress in democratic performance.
That warning urgently needs to be translated into Greek.
