The PASOK is up in arms about Adonis Georgiades. He spoke of “targeting” judges, of institutional boundaries being violated, of dangerous logic.
The occasion was his references to European prosecutor Popi Papandreou.Only there is one small detail. In 2014, the same party was calling for her disciplinary action. Not implicitly. Properly and by name.
Then there was no concern for Justice. There was annoyance. The file on the submarines arrived in the Parliament and Evangelos Venizelos was in it. That was enough to raise the alarm. The
then secretary of the PASOK parliamentary group, Panagiotis Rigas, didn’t mince his words. He called for the prosecutor’s prosecution because, as they said at the time, he had overstepped his boundaries. No sensitivity, no second thoughts. When the issue touches the party, the institutions become a rubber stamp.
Let’s recall the scene of that year for a moment. 2014 was not some distant, innocent past. Greece was trying to pull itself out of the crisis. The economy was showing the first signs of life. In Amphipolis we were digging up royal tombs and finding national pride. The national team was making it to the World Cup round of 16 and it made us believe that something was changing. In the world, Crimea was changing hands and Ebola was spreading fear. And somewhere in between all this, PASOK was fighting for… institutional order. With threats of disciplinary action.
Today, the same people are asking us to forget. They talk about an “old” case from twelve years ago. They say it in the tone of people who are tired of hearing the same thing. Only at the same time they are dusting off nineteen-year-old cases and serving them up as a fresh political indictment. There’s no fatigue there. There’s no time lag there. There memory works like clockwork.
This is where the pretense stops. PASOK does not just have a past. It has a criminal record. And every time it attempts to appear as the custodian of the institutions, that record opens itself up. It doesn’t take much effort. The facts themselves speak.
Nikos Androulakis tries to give the party a new role. To turn it into a force of denunciation, with strong speech and constant attack. It is strongly reminiscent of the path of Alexis Tsipras. Except that this route is well known. And its end too. Successive defeats by Kyriakos Mitsotakis and a political decay that was not hidden behind big words. If this is the pattern, then the outcome is already written. Because hypocrisy is not forgotten. It just comes back.
