The following essay was originally published in French as “La Grèce et la pandémie: Quelques réflexions,” in Revue Politique, June 30, 2020, and appears here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
It is widely recognized that Greece survived the difficult test of COVID-19 well. The international press has been writing about the “little Greek miracle” for more than a month: a country ravaged by the economic crisis of the past years has been able to resist the public health challenge better than many other European countries. And it is right to emphasize this unexpected success as due primarily to the speed of the government’s decisions, the closing of the borders, the strict lockdown of about two months, but also the population’s obedience to special laws issued by the authorities, both in terms of health and politics. Every evening at 6:00 PM, the epidemiologist Professor Sotirios Tsiodras spoke to the public directly on television about the measures taken and the track of the pandemic, in a calm, humane, and confident tone, showing appropriate emotions when he spoke of the deaths, turning into the family doctor, a personality familiar to everyone.
One has to concede: if the return of the state is the indisputable outcome of this public health crisis in nearly all countries, this return is characterized in Greece by the will of the previously liberal ruling elite to take control of the situation.[1] Of course, these political authorities claimed that they made decisions on the basis of the recommendations of public health experts, but actually they understood very quickly, especially in light of the Italian debacle, that the public health state of exception could turn into a major political crisis if they gave up the initiative to the “responsibility” of civil society. Even the powerful Orthodox Church itself capitulated to the will of the state, which was able to impose the closure of churches and the prohibition (not without contestation) of communion. On the other hand, the social climate of fear favored the adoption of these exceptional measures, without much contestation, at an approval rate of around 80%.
Some observers have spoken of the patriarchal mentality of Greek political culture that legitimized the state action: Prime Minister Mitsotakis has been judged as “more competent” (53%) than his rival, the leader of the left opposition Tsipras (22%). At the same time, in mid-April, the popularity of S. Tsiodras [the television doctor—trans.] beat all the records at 94.6%! The liberal Mitsotakis has gone so far as to declare himself a partisan of the “the strong state.” Other observers, from the modernizing and Europhile camp (whether of the right or the left) have insisted that, in light of the discipline displayed by society, the adversarial and nationalist populism of the years of resistance against the memoranda [agreements with the EU—trans.] has been vanquished and that today’s social attitudes now indicate an entry into a new normalcy, i.e., Greece is in the process of becoming a “normal” and “Western” country.
But one can also defend an alternative hypothesis that can provide a key to understanding the “disciplined” behavior of society. This involves the nuclear family and, let us say, its matriarchal constitution that took the shape of a mother-state taking care of “her children” in the case of this vital crisis. This infantilization of society, starting with the imaginary of a family that is hyper-protective of its child, found its double in the public image dominated by the soft populism of an academic doctor, sympathetic and often moved, communicating with his national audience directly, without mediations, and surpassing all political, social, economic, and cultural divisions. The “medical populism” of a matriarchal state reflected and integrated the fluidity of the perpetual empathy that marks Greek culture, imbued with feelings of “community” self-care, of which the family is the basis.
In a reliable survey carried out by the Institute Dianeosis in April 2020, carried out in the midst of the lockdown, institutions that received high public approval included the family at 97.2% (previously 98.2% in the 2018 poll), but also the army at 87.1% (85.1%), the police at 77.1% (72.3%), the Prime Minister at 69.7% (53.9%), the government at 64.6% (51.2%), the welfare state at 56.7% (40.9%), as well as technocratic experts at 85%. Meanwhile the confidence in the executive and the state contrasts with the stagnation or decline in the trust in international institutions and the forms of modern communication or cooperation, such as the internet at 46.5% (52.8%), the European Union at 27.3% (42.1%), the social media 26.9% (25.8%), and NGOs at 13% (18.7%). Even the Orthodox Church faced a small reversal, falling from 58.3% to 54.9%.
It is this Greece that went out onto its balconies at midnight on April 19 to shout that “Christ is risen,” in order to mark Orthodox Easter, which could not be celebrated in the closed churches. Identity is always a matter of unity. It is a Greece “in fusion,” conservative and even “populist” (“fearful” and even “irrational” and “archaic”) that has been able to “vanquish” the first wave of the pandemic, while all the feelings of the country have been taken charge of by a state “decisionism,” but it is a supra-personal decisionism, defying all the economic norms. On his own terms, the liberal Mitsotakis ignored the obvious consequences that his decision for a general and rigorous lockdown would harm the country’s economy. Despite warnings even from his own cabinet ministers, he gave greater importance to the protective aspect of governmental action. It is this concrete action in a concrete situation that mattered in his decisions, diverging from or even in contradiction to his liberal ideology. It is a model of action that can be compared with alternative experiences, such as in Sweden, for example, where the laxity of the political and public hygiene authorities “followed” the dominant tendency of post-material values in public opinion, leading to the results that are well known.
It is this return to politics by liberal modernizers transformed into “statists,” or even “soft populists,” i.e., this resurgence of the protectionist norm for the reassembled community that has given a new air of confidence to a political system punished by years of economic crisis.
A country based on the “heavy economy” of tourism, deindustrialized, and burdened with considerable debt can at any moment become easy prey for a new economic crisis. Nonetheless, it should not be lost that the state can and must play a central role in the protection of its population; that it can reclaim its position and the functions that have been usurped by the economic crisis during the previous years, but also by clientism, another Greek plague. Its correspondence with a social imaginary that must certainly be reworked can reground and reinvigorate its contract with the community of citizens.
Notes
1. Pierre-André Taguieff, “Beyond the Fears of the Pandemic: Reinventing the Nation-State?,” Telos 191 (Summer 2020): 69–90; Russell A. Berman, “The Reemergence of the State in the Time of COVID-19,” TELOSscope, April 9, 2020.
Andreas Pantazopoulos is a Political Scientist and Associate Professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Political Science.
