WSJ.com - Greece Struggles to Be Reborn July 23, 2004 COMMENTARY DOW JONES REPRINTS This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit: www.djreprints.com. • See a sample reprint in PDF format. • Order a reprint of this article now. Greece Struggles to Be Reborn By GEORGE KASSIMERIS July 23, 2004 Three days after Turkey's invasion of northern Cyprus 30 years ago, Konstantinos Karamanlis was summoned from his Paris exile by the country's military and political establishment to oversee the dismemberment of the dictatorship and the return to democratic government. Like some deus ex machine, Karamanlis returned to Athens for the first time in 11 years and, amid intense drama and anxiety, was sworn in as prime minister at 4 a.m. on July 24, 1974. Greece has come a long way since then. In less than a generation the country has emerged from dictatorship and international isolation, kept the army in the barracks, maintained civil and political liberties, held regular, competitive elections and transformed itself from a Mediterranean backwater to a regional powerhouse with the fastest economic growth rate in the euro zone. No other European country -- with the exception of Spain -- has achieved so much, on so many fronts, so quickly. And yet for all its recent progress, there is something persistently Third World about the country. No wonder that this anniversary finds Greece in a state of nervousness, if not apprehension, notwithstanding the current euphoria about the unexpected (and for many of us still unbelievable) success in Portugal's Euro 2004 and the Olympics homecoming next month. As a matter of fact, the preparations for the Olympics only serve to illustrate Greece's shortcomings. The games were seen as the critical test of the country's ability to organize a major international event without turning the whole thing into an orgy of chaos, waste, corruption and exploitation of the tax-paying public. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened. Changing a country like Greece is hard. Too many vested interests are happy with things as they are. Former Prime Minister Costas Simitis, who served a record eight consecutive years, deserves much praise for having turned some things around. He inherited a country with low growth, double-digit inflation and a colossal budget debt. Under his tenure, public finances got under control for the first time in decades, allowing Greece to join the euro. Mr. Simitis also moved Greece away from the isolationist anti-Westernism and the vendetta politics in the Balkans of the Papandreou years that had turned the country into a pariah state. But the failings of the Simitis governments have been almost as momentous as their achievements. While his first term was dominated by the task of preparing for monetary union, Mr. Simitis missed a chance to deepen and widen his eksychronismos (modernization) project in the second term. Health care services and public education remain bad value for taxpayers' money, forcing ordinary Greeks to pay astronomical sums on private hospitals and after-hours schools to make up for the state's substandard services. The Simitis governments also failed to overhaul the bloated and corrupt state bureaucracy. Overall, Mr. Simitis enacted a number of much-needed reforms but didn't live up to the root-and-branch reform he promised when first elected in 1996. A considerable portion of the blame for this lies, of course, with Pasok itself, the socialist party that steadfastly resisted most of its leader's reform projects. Greece is a country that has reached democratic maturity but not adulthood. Governments don't yet deliver the kind of services that citizens of any advanced Western democracy have a right to expect, such as reliable institutions, competent bureaucracies, transparency in public affairs and respect for the rule of law. Politics in Greece still have many of the characteristics of tribal conflict, conducted by party barons who behave as if they own the state apparatus. In 21st-century Greece, a system of party-political patronage still decides on most public-sector appointments, from university professors and hospital directors to local government officials and even football referees. And yet the opportunities for changing this system seem now more propitious than ever. This year's March parliamentary election may well be seen not only as the end of the monopoly of Pasok (which had been in power for 19 of the past 22 years) but also as the natural end of Greece's post-junta transition to democracy. The new government under Costas Karamanlis, the country's youngest prime minister and nephew and namesake of the first post-junta premier, appears well-equipped to launch this second transition. Armed with the clearest mandate his party has had since the November 1974 election, Mr. Karamanlis has a unique opportunity to do what his socialist predecessor did not dare: facing up to the full extent of the country's problems and making policy changes that are up to the challenge. In contrast to the previous Simitis governments, where reformers and reactionaries fought one another to a standstill, the current cabinet is largely united and backs the main issues of reform and the direction that needs to be taken. For a politician who has spent his entire career on the back benches, Mr. Karamanlis also looks like he is learning very quickly to cope with the hard choices of government. His decision to take personal control of the Olympic project to cut through the bureaucracy and inertia that has been hindering progress on the preparations all along demonstrates his willingness to lead. Last March's vote told Mr. Karamanlis that the country is in the mood for new politics, new ideas and new approaches. It gave him the political support to be bold and decisive and therefore to go where Mr. Simitis feared to tread. Mr. Karamanlis and his team, to use a football analogy for what is now a completely football crazy country, has scored the first goal -- but winning the game requires that they continue to attack. Mr. Kassimeris, a Greek political commentator and a senior research fellow at Wolverhampton University, England, is the author of "Europe's Last Red Terrorists: The Revolutionary Organization 17 November." URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109053336683971550,00.html Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 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