In his final dispatch from breadline Europe, Jon Henley finds nepotism,
bribery and systemic low-level corruption are as much to blame for southern Europe’s crisis as anything else.
Jon Henley in Thessaloniki
It’s the system, they say. It sucks you in, makes you complicit. You really have very little choice. It’s everywhere, in every corner of your life.
“I thought I knew what to expect,” said Vangelis Sgouras, 55, a council worker in Thessaloniki, who returned to his home town more than 20 years ago after spending the first half of his adult life in Australia.
“But I had no idea of the extent. It’s staggering. You want the electricity fixed, it’s in a month, or tomorrow if you slip someone a note. The lawyer, the same. The doctor costs €50, or €80 if you want a receipt. So what do you do? Thirty euros is a lot of money to my family. You pay €50, and you become a part of it.”
In southern Italy and northern Greece this week, people didn’t want to talk about the financial and economic crisis, the fate of the euro, debt-to-GDP ratios, credit downgrades or bailout. Many of them wanted to talk about the system.
It’s about backhanders, I’ll see you right, dodging and diving, not doing things by the book. Turning a blind eye, scratching backs, fiddling where you can. Nobody, for example, lands a job because they’re the best candidate, said Leonidas Pitsoulis, a maths professor who came back to Greece after studying and teaching in the US and at the LSE.
“You’re hired because you’re the son or nephew or schoolfriend of someone who knows someone who can maybe do them a favour. I saw it on military service: I was back from America with a PhD, you might think they’d try and use it. But I got sent to an island, and 19-year-old sons of people who knew people got real, serious jobs to do in Athens.”
A social historian at the university of Naples, Gia Caglioti, said much the same: there’s a strong feeling, she said, “particularly here in the south – I see it in my students – that it really doesn’t matter what, for how long, even how well you study. What counts in life is who you know.” And never more so than if you’re a politician.
The problem with the system, they say, is that it creates a culture. The law doesn’t really count, whether it governs smoking in cafes (Greece has had three goes at an anti-smoking law; none has been made to work), or dodging your taxes (untold millions stashed in Switzerland and the Bahamas by taxpayers declaring incomes of a few thousand a year.)
In southern Italy, the tentacles of the black economy reach far. The director of a ship repair yard said his biggest concern was not the slump in world maritime trade but “the fact that my business is in Italy, and specifically in Naples. I’m fighting my competitors and the downturn, yes. But mostly I’m fighting the system in Italy.”
The system weakens the economy, worming its way into business practice and labour relations. It weakens politics, because many politicians play by the same rules. “So there’s even more of an excuse for some people not to pay their taxes, still less make extra sacrifices,” said Veta Tsaliki, a secondary school head. “They’re pretty sure they won’t do much good.”
But the point is, everything somehow holds together, as long as things are going all right – there’s money circulating, people have jobs, standards of living are steadily rising. “You don’t like the system, but it is the way it is, and you’re doing OK,” Antonis Gazakis, a high school teacher, summed up.
The trouble starts when the money dries up, which is what has happened, dramatically, in Greece, and could now be beginning in Italy. When that happens, the real consequence of the system – a state apparatus so enfeebled, corrupted and inefficient that it recently asked Tsaliki to take her aged, confused mother to the bank to prove she was still alive, because too many dead people were claiming pensions and it had to find out who they were – become very apparent.
Spyros Gkelis, a biologist, said the Greek government, desperate to claw back money where it can and appease the international lenders, having admitted it is “completely unable to collect tax effectively from the people who really owe it”, is “going after those it can most easily get. And cutting costs where they can most simply be cut.” The universities budget, incredibly, has been slashed by 60%.
So Sgouras, 35 years a working man, is expecting, after two successive pay cuts, a raft of tax hikes and a brand new “solidarity tax”, to bring home €730 next month. Last year Gazakis, eight years a teacher, was earning €1,200 a month; it’s now €850. His rent and bills – heating oil, up 40% this year, is set to rise again in January – come to €400.
Only this week, nearly two months after the start of term, was Tsaliki’s school able to offer a full timetable when its last two teachers finally arrived. The textbooks should get here next week.
In Naples, Pietro Varriale, a street educator and mentor for teenagers in difficulty, including children from families linked to the Camorra, has not been paid for two years. Police cars stay in the car park because the money hasn’t come through to repair them.
In Greece, an already unpopular government is detested with a dangerous passion (in Italy, they’re getting there). People, Gkelis said, “have simply lost all trust, all belief. They’re saying: ‘No, enough. We’re not going to give you any more, because you have failed utterly to do your job, the job we pay you to do, and now you’re making us pay for it.’”
There is, visibly, a growing popular awareness that this is not a national question; global economic factors, unstoppable trends in world trade and manufacturing, lie behind it. Italy, as Caglioti put it, “has been in decline since the 1980s. All we can do is manage it better.” But an awareness, too, that if Greece and Italy cannot determine the planet’s future (in the world economy, people point out, Greece weighs about as heavily as the Midlands), the crisis is hitting them hardest because of the system.
There are energetic, imaginative, hard-working young people doing their best to ignore it. In Thessaloniki, a genuinely inspiring art Biennale is under way, organised on less than a shoestring. Young, web-savvy entrepreneurs with flourishing, internationally oriented startups say there’s no alternative but to play the hand you’ve got, and play it boldly. Gkelis keeps teaching, on a complete pittance, “because I love my job, and I want to do the best for my students. And I’ve never been one to spend a lot of money.”
The fact that so many families own their own homes, and that household debt is comparatively low, may be cushioning the blow more than in Spain and Portugal, but that won’t last for ever. Not even for very long; living standards in Greece are plummeting. So what almost everyone here tells tell you that the only way forward is for the system to be dismantled root and branch, replaced with something – in Tsaliki’s words – “clean, competent, conscientious, trustworthy”.
The problem is, nobody knows how; this is about more than the “new way of doing politics” sought by Spain and Portugal’s Indignados. Remarkably, Sgouras, council worker, unionist, patriot, is prepared to contemplate some kind of foreign supervision, a temporary administrative occupation, to get his country back on track.
Pitsoulis, the professor, said something “has to happen now. We have to change this system, but it’s not possible while it’s still there. It’s like a machine infested with viruses; we need to reboot, wipe the hard disk, start over again. Politically, I don’t see a way out.”
Change on such a scale is an exciting prospect, many say. But scary, too. Valeria, a Naples school and university teacher, spoke for Italy, but it holds for Greece too: “The thing is,” she said, “I think up until now, there’s always been this feeling that Italy will somehow get by. You know, slalom round the obstacles, dodge the difficulties, find ways – smart, possibly a little bit illegal ways – to solve its problems. But now I think we are facing up to it: the Italian way won’t work any more.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/oct/21/europe-breadline-blame-culture-corruption?fb=optOut
