A Difficult Legacy

A top Greek government official recently confided that when he first arrived to take up his new post at the ministry, he found lying on his desk a list of journalists who were being paid from a secret fund.

Such payments, the official said, are normal practise in Greece and politicians from both the ruling party Pasok (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement) and the conservative opposition New Democracy party have accused the other side of making them.

Patronage, corruption, pork barrel politics - call it what you will - is the engine oil of Greek government. No major contract can be concluded without it. No one is immune from the temptation of making things happen just that bit faster.

Hence the common refrain that nothing is what it seems, that "dark forces" lie behind the unobjectionable rationality of the front men.

Even in a country which now lies successfully in the eurozone and has long since shaken off its image as a poor, marginalised nation on the periphery of Europe, the conviction that everyone is on the take is hard to shake off.

With the Greeks due to go to the polls for a general election on March 7, it is looking likely that Pasok will pay for such suspicions.

"Pasok has a lot of dirty laundry, only some of which has been aired today," said Dimitris Kerides, professor of politics at the University of Macedonia in northern Greece.

"Every election has its own logic. The logic of this one is: Pasok has been in power for so long, let's give New Democracy a chance. It will not be bad for Pasok to stay in opposition."

The evidence from the polls is clear. With a month to go, New Democracy has recovered a lead of five percentage points over Pasok, according to the latest opinion poll published in conservative newspaper Kathimerini.

If, however, the election becomes a presidential race - a contest between two party leaders, rather than two parties - then Pasok's newly crowned leader George Papandreou has a chance.

The son and grandson of former Greek prime ministers, it is argued that only he has the name and the stature to confront the barons of his own party and the vested interests of Greece's corporatist system.

"The three Papandreous represent three phases of Greek politics: the grandfather George, the anglophile Venizelan [aligned with Eleftherios Venizelos, father of modern republican Greece] liberal reformer, who fought the communists during the civil war; the father, Andreas, a great demagogue who inflamed Greece but mobilised it and created its welfare state , and now George, the European social democrat who is consensus oriented rather than polarised, who is solution oriented, rather than confrontational, very pragmatic, non-charismatic and soft spoken, because we agree we need that now," Professor Kerides said.

The latter Mr Papandreou has sought to strengthen his position as Pasok leader by garnering support from as many people outside the party as he can.

Pasok has 146,000 members, and has always elected its leaders in a party congress. After this vote, however, at Friday's event at the Olympic weightlifting centre in Nikaia, Mr Papandreou sought confirmation of his popularity by staging a nationwide ballot on Sunday, having changed the party's charter to allow for "friends" of the party to vote.

Over a million Greeks turned out to vote, defying Mr Papandreou's rivals in Pasok, who aired their suspicions that he would struggle to get 500,000 votes to opposition newspaper editors.

The conservative press crowed that, as there had been no other candidate, this election was worthy of a Stalin or, closer to home, a Ceaucescu. But, as an act of political weightlifting, Mr Papandreou's first exercise in "participatory democracy" worked, proving there was a huge constituency for the ideas he represents lying outside the party.

Even his political opponents think he is doing the right thing. Kostas Hatzidakis, a New Democracy MEP said: "I think Papandreou would be successful if he had not to confront the heavy past of Pasok, which has won three successive elections.

"But he has arrived on the scene too late. Pasok is seriously ill. The doctor is good, the treatment is right, but sometimes the patient can still die."

Mr Papandreou maintains that participatory democracy is going to be a common project. How popular his policies remain, when, if elected, he starts to reform Greece's restrictive and inefficient labour laws or its near-bankrupt pension system, remains to be seen.

On the principle of reform, Mr Papandreou is clear: "Don't forget that in Greece only a few years ago, the political system was very, very repressive. It was a clientist system. The citizen's relationship with the state was based on political favours, where you had to use special connections to basically obtain a normal right. You had to go through the party.to get a job in the public service.

"Breaking that down, changing that into a rational system, of protecting citizens' rights to have services from the public sector without any kind of intermediaries or corruption is something that we need to change."

He faces bitter opposition in his own ranks, from those who at one time in their career thought they would inherit his father's crown. If elected, he would have to start with a squeaky clean and untested ministerial team, the old one has been so thorougly discredited.

And he would have to battle the popular expectation that change is painless.