Jon Henley is travelling through Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece to hear the human stories behind the European debt crisis. Here Leonidas Pitsoulis describes Greek corruption
Europe on the breadline: live tour ? interactive
Leonidas Pitsoulis, 43, returned to Thessaloniki seven years ago after leaving at 18 to study and then teach in America and at the LSE in London. Coming back as an adult after leaving as a teenager was an eye-opener, he said.
“I really hadn’t been aware of the scale of everyday corruption here,” he said. “You just don’t pick up on that, as a kid. But coming back, and when you’re used to another way of doing things, it really, really strikes you.”
Corruption pervades every corner of day to day life in Greece, Pitsoulis said. “From the doctor who takes his consultation fee without declaring it, to the bar-owner who buys his stock cash, no questions asked,” he said. “It’s just unthinking; the way it is.”
Nobody gets a job because they’re the candidate best qualified and suited for it, he said: “You get a job because you’re the son or nephew or cousin or old schoolfriend of someone who knows someone who might want a little service.
“I saw it in my military service ?there I was, coming back from the US with a PhD, you might think they’d try and make sensible use of me somehow. But I was sent to an island to kick my heels, while the 19-year-old sons of people who knew people got to do quite serious jobs in Athens.
“It’s one of the reasons why the state administration is so ineffective ? you have people handling big sums of money, public money, who have no specialist education or training for that kind of job. Amazing, really.”
Like all his colleagues at Thessaloniki university, where he teaches maths, his salary has been cut almost in half ? from around ?40,000 to ?24,000, he said ? and he’s been hit by an array of new and higher taxes.
A saving grace for many Greeks, he says, is the extremely low level of personal debt, by western standards, of most households. Most middle-class Greeks own their homes outright; there’s a “cultural aversion” to debt that leaves many in a better position than, say, debt-laden Britons or Americans would be if their governments tried the same draconian austerity measures.
But what alarms him more is that he can’t see a political way out of the current crisis.
“Economically, we have two choices: leave the euro and revert to the drachma,” he said, “which is probably possible because I think now the EU banks will be protected if we default. But that would have a huge downside: all those wealthy Greeks who have euros stashed away abroad would become much, much wealthier in drachma. That doesn’t bear thinking about.
“Or, and I think this is what the government is doing, we can devalue indirectly, by drastically lowering the standard of living. We can’t devalue the currency, because it’s the euro. But they can do it indirectly, by squeezing us till the pips squeak.”
Understandably, this is not a popular strategy. “That’s the issue,” Pitsoulis says. Politically, I can’t see the way out of this. In the past this kind of situation might have led to a coup d’état. Now, I don’t know. Something needs to be done to change this system, and it won’t be possible while it’s still in place. It’s like a machine with too many viruses; we need to reboot, wipe the hard disk, start again. But how?”
Greece’s economy could be placed under some kind of international supervision, he suggested; although that would never be politically acceptable. He remains, though, cautiously optimistic: “There’s a lot of talent here, a hell of a lot,” he said. It’s just stifled by the corruption, the inefficiencies, the system. We need to reset, start afresh. That’s an enticing idea, at least.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/oct/20/europe-breadline-corrution-pervades-corner
The Richard Reynolds Blog 