Dalmatian motorways

Published here in Greek on 18 April 2015

The new [then deputy] minister of infrastructure kept flattering those fellow citizens still naively believing in the abolition of tolls (and bailouts) by a single-clause law.

Even an inquiry committee to investigate the alleged scandal could be set up, who knows. For the time being, the government's only achievement on the matter is the reappearance of protesters enforcing free passage with lunchtime daytrips, especially as the weather improves - the struggle being continued in the next hours at seaside ouzo-restaurants (damn' crisis).

This whole anti-toll movement has a very interesting history. To many, it is identified with Syriza - and justly so. Several of today's MPs used to lead the dynamic actions after 2010. A separate "Won't Pay" movement's support got almost wholly absorbed by the new strong left-wing pole in the repeat election of 2012. 

Nevertheless, the 2008 pioneer was not a Syriza member, not back then at least. The Pasok man from Kalavryta, a former MP and prefect, appeared almost out of nowhere, preparing the ground. By invoking an outdated European directive, early refuseniks claimed that no toll should be levied on the Corinth-Patras route. 

Shortly thereafter, the concession agreement - passed by a large majority in Parliament - incorporated the existing State tolls to the funding scheme of the new motorway to be constructed. In exactly the same way (via a parliamentary process studied since 2002 and hardly a novel one), the State's operating rights on four other motorways were transferred at the same time (2007-2008) to private special-purpose companies.

This whole process didn't give rise to a serious left-wing and/or patriotic reaction. Local MPs and local authority leaders were almost unanimously happy that the motorways would be "made". People trusted the private sector, judging from the first generation of such projects. Construction progressed fast, service and safety were improving - and tolls were being paid without complaints. International finance parties acknowledged the existence of a "toll culture" in the country.

A driver wouldn't examine, for example, what exactly he was paying for through the State-run tolls, for almost half a century. "Children's fares" were an open secret, as were other frauds, part of an unhealthy management reality and - as revealed later by the State's auditor Mr Rakintzis - bad corporate governance.

There was no crisis in 2008, Greeks didn't sense that their incomes were being reduced or that they would have to be economical. Therefore, the rates of 0.04 EUR per kilometre (plus inflation and VAT) didn't appear excessive. Nor were they, compared to the rest of Europe, with which we were anyway converging in terms of purchasing power. 

Naturally, the gradual abolition of an all-purpose redistributional fund - and its replacement by bank accounts financing specific projects under clear conditions - was not a welcome development for everyone. How could one support, however, a non-transparent and outdated model.

The golden opportunity arose in 2009 when, with the first dark clouds amassing over the horizon of the Greek economy, Pasok candidates did not hesitate - despite having themselves voted for the concession agreements - to promise cheaper tolls.

And when recession started, from 2010 onwards, to show its teeth, the torch was passed on to the leftists who, taking advantage of the Pasoki's inability to make good on their promises, simply raised hell.

Local leaders joined too, asking for exemptions, jumping on the bandwagon and highlighting certain local shortcomings of the toll structure, who for its biggest part nevertheless achieves an optimal balance between construction cost and the required distance-based proportionality.

Despite commitments made in late 2013 (as concession agreements were amended) to correct these local issues, the reactions have since been provoked as well by the new political heroes: regional prefects. This is now a cross-party movement: the person who introduced the original concession agreements to Parliament (under the New Democrats) now calls tolls a plague!

Social envy is a key ingredient of reactions. It is clear that the liquidity of concession projects is being eyed-upon by public bodies which, for various reasons, cannot achieve something comparable. A revival of the infamous bucket-fund would probably be convenient for those agencies.

Abolition of tolls would mean the end of concession projects, but this minor detail is overlooked for now. A "smarter" variation calls for maintaining the contracts until the end of construction and then write these debts "on the snow". A less obvious, but equally important, detail is the need to maintain the motorways themselves, in whichever way their construction would be funded. Some have started labelling the current maintenance regime a luxury, as if "using a dog leash made of sausages" - despite the admittedly overwhelming improvement in quality during the concession years. 

A better dog metaphor would be the Dalmatians, purchased in huge quantities thanks to the namesake movie - only to be abandoned as soon as kids got bored of them. In 2005 everybody asked for "motorways everywhere", far beyond the Greece 2010 strategic plan (itself impossible to materialize in full, due to the crisis). Karpenisi, for example [a small town in mountainous central Greece], would be at the intersection of two major highways - one along the Megdovas river and another across the Veloukhi mountain. Populists (sometimes sons of modernist political families) currently engaging in toll-bashing had better tell the public how they intend to fund the projects - not the irrational ones they still promise or adopt, but the ones currently being built with a thousand hurdles and struggling to stay decent. 

Solidarity

Greek version first published on 14 March 2015.

Poland is the answer to a lot of things.

As, for example, to the question, "Which country was simultaneously attacked by all its neighbours, along a frontier thousands of kilometres long in total?"

For what took place in 1939 was not just an attack to Danzig (today's Gdansk) by the western/northern neighbour, Hitler's Germany.

But a concerted invasion from the other two points of the horizon as well. The new, pro-German Slovakia from the south - and the Soviet Union from the east.

Proportionally to its population, Poland paid the highest toll compared to any other country in the Second World War. It is estimated that it lost 6 million people (out of a total of 35 million). Some of the most tragic cases of human carnage have to do with Poles (e.g. the officers murdered by Beria's NKVD at Katyn) or occurred on Polish ground (such as the large concentration camps).

For two years, the basic "Nazi collaborators" were the appliers of state socialism in Moscow. Only when they were attacked themselves did they denounce the alliance with the "bad" socialism, the national one (hence "nazi", from "Nationalsozialismus") and tried to lead the international antifascist struggle. After June 1941, spontaneous hammer-and-sickle rebel movements grew rapidly (e.g. Greece's EAM National Liberation Front didn't exist before September 1941).

And when the German defeat was imminent, Poles weren't at all discussed in Stalin and Churchill's "percentage agreements". Soviets kept the territories east of Brest (todays Belarus) and shifted Poland westwards, by handing over Pomerania and Silesia that were captured from the receding Germans. They controlled Poland for 45 years, as it was "too distant" for others to claim it - only the Pope might have been interested, but as Stalin wondered, "how many divisions did he have?"

Nevertheless, when - following 35 rather quiet years of Soviet influence to Warsaw (a city that gave its name to the "Warsaw Pact" i.e. eastern bloc) - the first Polish Pope was elected at the Vatican, something did change. Shortly afterwards, Poles were cheered up when the Solidarity trade union came to the forefront at Gdansk (ex Danzig). Lech Walesa's popularity led to a repeat of Soviet interventions against skittish allies, which had occurred in near-perfect 12-year cycles (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 - the very last one on themselves, with the coup against Gorbachev in 1991, just before their collapse). This time, in 1981's Poland, martial law was declared under Jaruzelski, so that Solidarity would be crushed.

And here may be the answer to another question - why Pole seems to confuse so much some of our compatriots - such as the minister who "coordinates the government's work", while he should rather coordinate some mangled historical information inside his head (he recently said that Poles "cooperated" with Nazi Germany, in the framework of a paranoid and harmful anti-Germanism promoted by Greece's new leadership).

For at that time (1981) we had again a political change in our country. The first foreign-policy crisis of the new Andreas Papandreou government was our differentiation from the rest of the EEC (the other 9 countries back then), who wanted to apply sanctions against the Jaruzelski regime.

Asimakis Fotilas (father of a likeable young politician of today, by the way) was Deputy Foreign Minister when he took off after a European meeting - in which he had, "wrongly" as it turned out, supported the communiqué. Upon landing in Athens, he had already "placed himself" out of the cabinet.

Andreas Papandreou wanted the support of the anti-rightwing bloc, nurturing EAM's memories. For that reason, he had decided to adopt a stance that satisfied Soviets and pro-Soviets, under fire then by those who were both anti-American and democratic. 

I remember a Greek Communist Party (KKE) wall writing saying that "Poland will not become Chile", implying that Jaruzelski thwarted a supposed capitalist "reactionary" takeover of Poland. This was a somewhat odd claim, though, at the time that Poland had a junta, a socialist one of course, but equally uniformed to that of Pinochet. 

Plain folk, on the other hand, were so confused that I doubt whether any intended message was passed to the supposed target audience. The following summer, a relative of mine, in the broader left-wing camp, proudly praised Poles, for bravely daring to raise banners at Spain's football stadiums, in the 1982 World Cup, "against the junta" - meaning Solidarity's banners, which in essence said the same thing. 

Years passed by, we met Poles for a while in their small, quiet immigrant community (before the Albanian influx), around Michail Voda Str. in Athens; and several years later as partners in the enhanced European Union. They joined the "club" later than we did, and yet their former Premier is now head of the European Council. I think we envy them for that too, as well as for their overall decent standing at the international stage, despite their having suffered more in total. Going a long way back, we would even owe them a little bit of gratitude for their king, who expelled the Ottomans and ended the Vienna siege. Coming back to the present day, it would suffice in my opinion if we could just admire them a bit, instead of envying them. And, in any case, respect them a little more, avoid offending them by claiming that they were "Nazi collaborators" at a time when we are about to turn Europe upside-down on the pretext of our own resistance.

Five Greek flavours in Denmark

The Danish "Rion-Antirion" Straits 

The "Sound" between Copenhagen and Malmoe is the narrowest entry point to the Baltic. In Scandinavian tongues it is called Øresund, as we learned thanks to the cable-stayed bridge inaugurated in 2000. The øre prefix means (a) gravel beach and (b) one cent of the Danish krone. Maybe more than a coincidence: there was a price for passage through these straits. According to legend, the king controlled traffic from the Helsingoer fortress (Hamlet's Elsinore, that is), shooting with the guns in order to warn pirates and other would-be free-riders - and surcharged the gunning costs on top of the toll rate. Today, the bridge [of a similar type to that of Rion-Antirion in Greece] has made Malmoe a suburb of Copenhagen (the two downtown areas are within 6 train stations from one another - barely an hour's ride). Helsingoer still serves a part of cross-channel car traffic via the once-busy ferry; at the same time [and contrary to the two fortress towns at Greece's Rion and Antirion] it has remained attractive, not just for the Shakespearean palace but also for the exceptional marine museum and cultural centre at the premises of the old shipyard.

 

 

Ja sou, ti kanis?

My home island of Samos happens to be a favourite holiday destination among Danes. No idea if this is related to the old local flag, used during Samos' autonomy period (1834-1912), which looked like a cross between the Greek and Danish emblems. In any case, there is a centrally-located restaurant called "Samos" near Copenhagen's Cathedral. We found nice and reasonably-priced food there, with tzatziki served in all dishes, plus paper-napkins featuring basic Greek vocabulary, allowing some basic tourist-friendly vocabulary to prospective Greece visitors - such as "ena uso parakalo" for "one ouzo please".

 

My royal(ist) love affair

The combed hair is unmistakable, despite the dim screenshot (and the equally dim collective memories). At Amalienborg, one of the numerous palaces of "Europe's oldest kingdom", there is a special room dedicated to the marriage of Anna-Maria, sister of today's Danish queen, to the pictured gentleman - Greece's then king Constantine (also a descendant of a Danish royal house). The screen shows the official 1964 wedding movie (a similar one is to be found here). It is a high-quality film - reportedly the most widely shown one in Copenhagen that year - in which the royal yacht, after passing through the Corinth canal, lands near Athens, where the royals are welcomed by a very tall George Papandreou [grandfather of the recent namesake Greek leader], Greece's then prime minister. Just one year later, the polite relationship between king and PM were no longer there; Greece's parliamentary monarchy entered a crisis with no exit, terminated only by its abolition through the 1974 plebiscite. 

Our citizenship

Whatever the changes to secular regimes, faithful Christians look forward to the true citizenship, which according to the Apostle Paul "is (only) in heaven", as quoted on the Greek inscription at the building of Copenhagen's Lutheran Diocese - at Nørregade 11, opposite Our Lady's Cathedral. This epistle had been sent by Paul to the residents of the northern Greek town of Philippi [near Kavala] (Philippians 3:20).

















Always on my mind

George Papandreou the grandson had spoken about [Greece capable of becoming] a "Denmark of the south"; however, Scandinavia had already been connected for a long time with the specific political family and the broader centre-left spectrum. Andreas Papandreou was based in Sweden for his resistance activities against the Greek dictatorship; nevertheless, Denmark had a fair share of the action as well. In 1968, a onetime Greek Embassy employee named Mavrogenis was murdered at a forest near Copenhagen, apparentlly by Greek junta agents. How apt, therefore, that one day after grandson George announced his latest political party, we saw at Helsingoer a poster for Carmina Burana, a musical theme associated in the past with rallies of the seminal political party of Pasok, which was founded by Andreas P. and had dominated Greek politics in the post-junta period.