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A couple of months ago, around the time Greece passed new austerity measures to ward off economic catastrophe, Nicholas Papandreou, the very tall brother of Greece's Prime Minister, George Papandreou, was riding the Metro in Athens. The Papandreous, now in the third generation of a Socialist political dynasty, live in rented houses, drive Priuses, and, apparently, take the subway, even during times of extraordinary anger toward the government.
"Nick! Why did your brother bring in the IMF?" one passenger called out.
"No choice. It was either that or no one gets paid come July 1st," Papandreou, an economist and novelist, replied.
"Well, I am glad to see you taking public transport," the passenger said, prompting another rider to pipe in, "I always see Nick on the Metro!"
"Excuse me, but what do you do for a living?" Papandreou asked the first man.
"I'm a doctor."
"Did you ever take side money from your patients?"
Everybody was listening. "Yes."
"Are you still taking money on the side?"
"Not anymore."
"Why?"
"Because now, the way things are, I'd be lynched."
"See?" Papandreou said. "That's one good thing George has done so far."
Papandreou tells this story while sitting at a long table at the Andreas G. Papandreou Foundation, a beautiful old house in a slightly run-down part of Athens. A terrace off the back overlooks the city's ancient graveyard. Family photos hang on one wall; Nicholas' books and pamphlets about his father, Andreas, line the other. Papandreou, who grew up in Canada and the U.S., sounds American. He portrays his efforts to help out during the crisis as something any member of a family business would do. Indeed, the past few months have seemed like an all-hands-on-deck situation: Nick the Novelist Brother is not only placating doctors on the Metro but was taking off to Qatar to try to secure foreign investment for his country.
That the intimidation of medical professionals counts as a positive development might indicate just how dysfunctional Greek society has become. It also shows that the Papandreou government's attempts to reform Greece will require nothing less than a societal revolution, affecting everyone from cab drivers who don't give receipts, to tax collectors who bribe lawyers, to college kids who dream of nothing more than a good, solid pension. Greece's "shadow economy," estimated at 20 percent to 30 percent of the country's gross domestic product, depends on the wonderfully named fakelaki,â??also known as "little envelopes" or "bribes." (In general, reliable economic data for Greece can be difficult to find.) It's part of a state of affairs that includes a bloated public sector and a stunted private one, both legacies of a political system prone to patronage and corruption. The cruel result amounts to 300 billion euros in debtâ??115 percent of the country's GDP or about $27,000 per Greek citizen. The 110-billion-euro bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund includes strict austerity measures intended to shrink the budget deficit from 13.6 percent of GDP to 3 percent in three years. The prospect of that has thrown Greece into chaos.
The Greek people are angry. While young anarchists wielding Molotov cocktails are getting most of the attention, there are far greater numbers of Greeks stewing in their tiny apartments, furious with their leader for capitulating to the markets and the IMF and for saddling the Greek people with a life-changing burden. Experts and average Greeks alike told me that Prime Minister Papandreou and Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou must do things to rescue their country's finances that would normally be tantamount to political suicide.
"They're already dead," says the former Finance Minister, onetime member of the opposition New Democracy Party, and free-market crusader Stefanos Manos, speaking of the government's austerity measures. "They can't die twice. Why not do the right thing?"
When I first arrived in Athens in May, expecting to see rampaging youths attacking policemen, I marveled at the apparent prosperity and pleasantness of everyday life. The Metro even has one of those fare systems based on trustâ??like Switzerland! It wasn't long before darker sentiments became palpable. The Greek capital these days exists in a state of shock, suspicion, and bewilderment, not unlike the way New York felt in the fall of 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsedâ??a sense that strange forces had created financial scenarios no one could yet understand. Something has gone terribly wrong with the system. For the little nations on the edges of the so-called first world, market-happy modernity can be harder to keep up with and easier to turn against during difficult times. In Greece, the past few months have been a brutal conclusion to what had been a glorious party of admission to Western consumer capitalism.
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