Greece is a country where daily life is never idle. Fired up by print and electronic media constantly discovering “bombshell” news, and a parallel universe of incessant public and private gossip, Greek daily life is never boring, if, that is, you have the stomach for incessant exaggeration, crude “fake news,” outlandish claims, and so-called “journalists” struggling to correctly use their mother tongue.
It came as no surprise, therefore, that at a time the incumbent Mitsotakis administration is struggling with several parallel crises (forest fires, Ukraine, the prospect of a freezing winter, inflation, rising consumer prices, etc.) the leader of the socialist Pasok party, Nikos Androulakis, announced his smartphone had been tapped via the Pegasus spyware. Pasok is currently trailing Mitsotakis’s New Democracy (ND) party and the neo-communist SYRIZA groupuscule. The entire opposition is pressing for early elections in the fall.
Androulakis issued a loud denunciation of this shattering breach of Greece’s “democratic system;” opposition newspapers and news sites had a wild party slamming Mitsotakis; Greece’s cartoonish “woke” president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, added her own urgent request for a comprehensive investigation; and if all that wasn’t enough, it is now the European Commission demanding an investigation of the Androulakis claims.
The immediate blowback of this charade was the resignation of both the PM’s private secretary, who also happens to be his nephew, and the chief of the Greek intelligence directorate, known as “EYP” [ΕΥΠ],
a mysterious character, whose only experience with intelligence amounts to previously working for a private security company (!)
This literally storm in a teacup (if you have a pragmatic view of things Greek) has no feet to stand on.
Androulakis, a Europarliamentarian who speaks only Greek, is hardly the political “star” you’d target with wiretapping. He is not a strategic player, he has obviously precious little command of political and security issues, he is a provincial Europarliamentarian, with a command of his mother tongue that leaves a lot to be desired, and , all in all, he is not the typical “exploitable” target of a serious wiretapping operation.
The sanctimonious furor raised by the opposition is blatantly opportunistic. Greece is not a prep school for girls of the aristocracy. She is a classic Balkan country where almost all is allowed (and practiced) and consistently wins a prominent place in global corruption indexes.
Those who are tearing their robes in and out of parliament over this frightful wiretapping breach of “democratic order” forget the days of the original Pasok of the 1980s, run by the late PM Andreas Papandreou, who had the director of the national telecommunication company OTE illegally monitor the telephone traffic of opposition politicians, journalists, and others, with cassettes of these conversations freely peddled at kiosks in downtown Athens.
Another day, another “crisis” Greek style.
Greece Wiretapping Scandal Might Cause EU Probe
The European Commission has intervened in the wiretapping scandal in Greece urging the government to investigate the revelations.
The European Commission wants embattled Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, trying to distance himself from revelations that a rival politician and journalist were being surveilled, to speed up an investigation into how things played out.
Mitsotakis said he was not informed that the phone of PASOK Socialist leader Nikos Androulakis, who resurrected a party once the major rival to the ruling New Democracy, was bugged so as to allow for his conversations to be tapped. Mitsotakis certifies that he would have otherwise intervened had he known.
The eavesdropping was revealed after Androulakis, a Member of the European Parliament, said analysts there discovered an attempt to install Predator spyware on his cell phone in September 2021, three months before he took over PASOK.