Greece’s Broken Democracy Is a Warning for Europe
European authorities promote Greece as a postcrisis success story. Yet Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s right-wing government relies on spyware and the opaque use of EU subsidies — and is now overseeing a brutal cost-of-living crisis.
Greece’s conservative government under Kyriakos Mitsotakis has taken disturbing authoritarian measures against its opponents. It’s also ever less of an outlier, as Europe races toward a right-wing, increasingly militarized order. (Lionel Ng / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On the night of his election victory on July 7, 2019, new prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared that Greece was “returning to normal.” Leader of the right-wing New Democracy party, Mitsotakis promised a government of the “best and brightest” and drew a line under the previous four years of Syriza rule, vowing to erase its legacy piece by piece.
More than six years on, that promised “normal” looks less like stability and more like a permanent state of managed scandal. Mitsotakis’s tenure has unfolded in a landscape marred by allegations of corruption, financial mismanagement, illegal surveillance, cover-ups, abuse of European Union funds, manipulation of the justice system, and a tightly controlled propaganda machine financed through state resources.
It’s something we hadn’t seen since the fall of the military dictatorship. In that half-century of democracy, there has been no comparable case of a governing party that so stubbornly refused to police its own ranks, shielded itself from scrutiny with such discipline, and retaliated so aggressively against anyone who dares challenge its record. This is made all the easier by a weakened opposition — and a wider left that has been disorganized for years. This has given New Democracy a virtually free hand to reshape Greek politics.
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