Episode 36 of Borderlines brings former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou into dialogue with host Professor Katerina Linos, to share visionary insights about authoritarian threats undermining global democracy and citizen-centered solutions. Currently serving as Rapporteur for Democracy at the Council of Europe, Mr. Papandreou discusses his storied family of leaders in Greece and the United States and surviving violent coups, rightwing cabals and austerity crises. Listeners will learn about his diplomatic advances while Foreign Minister which helped humanize relations between Greece, Türkiye, and Cyprus, and how innovating on the values of ancient Greece as the world’s first democratic state could counter today’s polarization.
At UC Berkeley in early 2025 to deliver a public lecture at the Institute of European Studies, Mr. Papandreou recounts growing up on campus when his father, Andreas Papandreou, served as chair of the Department of Economics during exile from the Metaxas dictatorship in Greece. His father’s and grandfather Georgios Papandreou’s influential legacies as themselves Prime Ministers of Greece as well as the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s helped inform Mr. Papandreou’s commitment to the European project, consensus-building and transparent governance. Serving as Prime Minister in Greece from 2009 to 2011 during the post-2008 financial crisis meant navigating tough decisions and pushing for European and G20 legislation to end corruption and global tax havens. Decorated as a break-through bridge-builder in foreign policy and protection of the environment, Mr. Papandreou’s concrete strategies toward rapprochement between historic enemies and proposals for dismantling geopolitical power grabs will enlighten students of international law. Mr. Papandreou made major (if ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to resolve the “Cyprus problem” – a topic Professor Linos discusses with him in this interview and during her interview with CJEU Judge Lycourgos, who similarly worked on this complex issue.
Berkeley Law’s Borderlines features exclusive content with the world’s most influential legal minds. Check out the ground-breaking European Union Court of Justice profiles series and recent interviews with former top international court leaders, ICJ President Donoghue and ICC President Hofmański. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! Follow Borderlines on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!
Episode Transcript
Reimagining Democracy with George Papandreou
[00:00:00]
Katerina Linos: Welcome to Borderlines. I’m Katerina Linos, Tragen Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. And today, I’m joined by George Papandreou, who served as Greece’s Foreign Minister from 1999 to 2004, and Prime Minister from 2009 to 2011. He’s currently the General Rapporteur for Democracy at the Council of Europe, and he’s at the forefront of addressing democratic backsliding across the continent. We had the great privilege of having him speak last night here at Berkeley. So let me ask about that speech.
Prime Minister Papandreou, in your Berkeley speech yesterday, you mentioned that in your life you had guns to your head at two moments. First, when the junta was searching for your father, it was a literal gun, and then when you had to negotiate the austerity conditions for Greece during the financial crisis.
Could you tell us a little bit about those moments and about your life’s key difficulties? How did they shape your [00:01:00] understanding of democracy under pressure?
George Papandreou: Very nice to be with you, Katerina, and very happy to be part of this podcast. And of course, democracy is a concept which is dear to my heart, personally, but it’s fundamental, I think, for our societies over many, many centuries, going back to not only the ancient Greeks who coined the phrase or the term, but even in many aboriginal communities, we do see that there were democratic practices – although they may not have called them democratic practices – collective ways of just making decisions.
In my life, of course, I grew up first here in Berkeley, so this is a bit of a homecoming. But when we moved back to Greece, my father got into politics after being in self-exile, basically, after the fascist regime – Metaxas’ in Greece in the early ‘40s, before the Germans occupied Greece. He got into politics as a reformist. His [00:02:00] father, my grandfather, were fighting for a democratic Greece and – a more, if you like, socially-equitable country – economic development. My father was an economist, head of the Department of Economics here in Berkeley. And we knew that the upcoming elections were going to be contested and that there would be a possibility of a coup. It looked like my grandfather was going for a landslide victory. And that was preempted by a coup. So that night, as you said, they came in, they broke into our house, put a gun to my head after I had hid my father on the roof. My father gave himself up in order to protect me.
This was, of course, a shaping moment in my life. And then later on, when my father was released, we went into exile. It was a time of movements around the world – so, the Vietnam War, the fights for Black rights, gay rights, environmental issues, women’s rights. [00:03:00] It was a moment of social mobilization and hope, which obviously affected me.
Being in exile, I was also able to work with many of the Greeks in the diaspora who were fighting for democracy at the same time. Then coming to Greece, of course I started working and finally, I got into politics myself. When, many years later, I did become Prime Minister, I had to deal with the biggest crisis Greece had gone through after the junta, after the fall of the dictatorship, and it was the financial crisis.
We were close to bankruptcy. The previous government not only had overspent, but it also had a lot of practices of clientelism, rampant corruption, and even doctoring the statistics so that it looked like we didn’t have a deficit or a debt. But it was revealed, and that even made us less trustworthy.
So I had to deal with a very difficult [00:04:00] situation. I did start making reforms. I was telling the world, and my colleagues in the European Union and in the IMF, who eventually became part of a troika to help bail out Greece, that the deficit was the tip of the iceberg, and actually, there was a democratic deficit. Because had our institution worked or worked well, had we had checks and balances, had we had greater transparency, we wouldn’t have reached the point of having such a huge deficit, mismanagement of the economy, and waste and corruption.
So, I said, my purpose was to actually make these changes: bringing in transparency, bringing in open government, more merit-based employment into the public sector and into even higher positions of governance – and general secretaries, heads of big organizations, government organizations, such as the electricity organization, and so on – which broke down this sort of clientelistic and very inefficient, I would say, [00:05:00] way of governance.
But at the same time, I had to deal with the markets that were disbelieving, if you like. And the markets were relentless. First of all, because Greece was an easy target. We were not a big economy, so there was a lot of speculation, the so-called CDSs [credit default swaps] – you could bet against Greece, hoping that it would go bankrupt and you would make money – but there were also the rating agencies who had made a mess of things with the complex bonds in the 2008 crisis, with the guaranteeing that these bonds were A+ quality, but in fact they were fraudulent bonds and people were buying them and banks were buying them, and that was the basis of the banking crisis.
So they released all their fury against Greece, being over-austere, so when I was making reforms, they would not believe it. They would say, “Yeah, these are good reforms, but will he be able to implement them?” Even though I would be making very big reforms, they would be downgrading [00:06:00] Greece. So when I went to the European Union, I said, “I need the backing of the European Union to back our bonds so that they are credible in the market.” That took a long time to be done. And in the meantime we would have to make decisions. In the European Union, some of the decisions to help Greece, even just as a statement to say that they’re backing Greece, would have to be done under immense time pressure. I remember one night we were close to two o’clock in the morning, somebody shouted, “We have to finish our negotiations on this statement because at two o’clock the markets open up in Japan, and if the markets open up in Japan and we don’t have a statement, the markets will go crazy!”
So, this type of time pressure, of course, was relentless. It was very much another gun at my head, if you like. Not allowing for the necessary time – to discuss the different measures, to see which ones are more [00:07:00] effective, what are the causes of our deficit and our debt, what kind of economy we want to create, and how we bring a wider consensus in the society – even though people would be having to make sacrifices, but still sacrifices they would want to make, and many did make them, but they want to know what the outcome would be. And therefore, the democratic deliberation was missing in this process. And that, of course, created, down the road, frustration and a sense of injustice. Even though people were willing, and many of them, to make sacrifices to see the country do better. So I feel that we have created systems, global systems, where at the time the phrase was “too big to fail,” but I saw them, “too big to control.”
And this is where I see one of the big issues of our times. In our globalized economy – in the globalized capitalist economy – have been both pros and cons. Some countries, [00:08:00] such as China for example, have been able to grow and bring millions of people out of poverty. At the same time, capital has been able to flow freely away from its responsibilities at the national level – a social contract – which, in Europe, was basically a contract to make sure that you had the welfare of our people as a basis. You could have your profits, but you needed to have good wages, you needed to have a good working environment, a pension system, an education health system, so that people felt that they were also benefiting from this growth and this capitalist economy. In the U.S. it was the New Deal. But when the neoliberal paradigm took over completely and allowed for a widespread, quick movement of capital here and there, wherever in the world – they could move to tax havens, they could move to areas which were much cheaper for labor, without environmental or other workers’ [00:09:00] rights, which then undercut not only the rights in those countries, which may actually have been helpful to bring them up a little bit in a better economic situation or financial situation – but it did undercut in the more developed world. At the same time, there was a huge concentration of wealth. So when I was asked to tax Greeks, I realized that the banks – whom we were supposed to be bailing out from their conundrum – they were also helping people and the richest of Greece to take their money out of Greece, therefore not to be able to be taxed, and put into tax havens somewhere else in the world. I pushed for global – first of all, European – legislation. I actually managed to get decisions at the highest level, the European Council, where all the prime ministers sit even with a lot of resistance from some of the conservative leaders. However it did pass. But it was never implemented. Recently– last year’s, [00:10:00] actually – Biden in a G20 [meeting], started pushing this as a big change, and the OECD has backed this, to be able to tax this huge wealth, which goes untaxed, and unjustly so. However, what I have seen – and I see this particularly now as I am not only a former Prime Minister, but also as part of the Council of Europe, where I’m General Rapporteur for Democracy, to look at where our democracies are going – this wealth concentration has also meant power concentration. And power concentration then comes back to the nation state in other different forms – basically as lobbies or as corruption, buying up power, from judges to policemen to politicians, influencing politics, buying up media, buying up digital platforms, getting into culture and football and athletics, and really undermining our democratic institutions.
This is where I feel that [00:11:00] people feel a great injustice, a great sense of powerlessness, and there is this backlash. Both towards globalization, but also towards our institutions, because they’re not working for them. But is it a fact that democracy itself is failing? And I say no. It is that democracy is itself captured. So we need to liberate our democratic institutions again. Take control back, if you want to say.
Katerina Linos: Let me follow up with two brief questions. You had your gun to your head. There’s no question that Greece had very, very few options at the time. And the media portrayed the crisis as a big debate between “spendthrift” countries like Greece and Italy and Spain, and “frugal” countries that had to come to the rescue, with austerity as the key term. Did you have any allies at the time of these negotiations – any bureaucrats, any experts, any surprising coalitions? And did you win any small victories, even though you were under extraordinary pressure in 2010, [00:12:00] 2011, 2009?
George Papandreou: I think it’s a wrong dichotomy to put the countries that are more frugal against the countries that want to spend more. We’re talking about needs. These countries that want to spend a bit more, are ones that are lagging behind and need infrastructure. They need training. They need investment. And this would benefit, I think, the whole of the European Union as well. I believe that for other countries, too, in the so-called Global South or Global Majority, however you want to call it, where there is need for investment. Obviously, the type of investment plays a major role, and to make sure that these investments are transparent and accountable, and not just corruption going into the pockets of some minister or some government official.
One of the actual differences was quite peculiar. The socialist governments in the south were the ones that actually were more effective in holding the budget to the Maastricht Treaty. And I [00:13:00] inherited from a right-wing government, which basically was using the state to pay to help its “friends” – its big business, some of the oligarchs, if you like, we had in Greece – in a clientelistic way. So, I think that we were much more responsible as a political party. And this is not only in Greece and in some of the southern countries. There are many countries around the world where you see that the democratic forces and people in the governments that want to as much as possible serve the common good, are much more aware of the need to make sure that governance is good governance, transparent governance, and efficient for our citizens.
I’ve been living in Sweden over the years as a refugee and I’ve seen how the social democratic government there was very careful to see that government was efficient, in a way that was actually serving the common good. The tax offices were very popular. Because people [00:14:00] realized that their money was being used and spent well, efficiently, and for their own benefit.
Katerina Linos: I want to ask about a different area for which you’re famous, and that is foreign policy. You have this reputation as a bridge builder, especially in Greek-Turkish relations. You succeeded in fostering Türkiye’s membership negotiations, and Cyprus’s actual membership in the EU. Could you talk about how this was accomplished? Which diplomatic approaches were most effective in fostering dialogue?
George Papandreou: Greek-Turkish relations have been contentious for many years, and there are many reasons for it. Greece became a state two centuries ago, breaking off from the Ottoman Empire, but the realization of its state and the borders took actually quite a few decades, even a century.
We had the Balkan wars, but even after the Second World War, the [00:15:00] Dodecanese, which was under Italian rule, became part of Greece, having its basically Greek population. But then what happened during the junta, during the dictatorship, which just shows how dictatorships can make a mess of things, they tried to overthrow the government, the sovereign government, in Cyprus, not liking Makarios, who was somewhat independent, not to their liking. And that, of course, then brought on the Turkish invasion, because Cyprus has a Greek majority – Greek Cypriot community and a Turkish Cypriot community – and therefore, Türkiye felt that they wanted to protect the Turkish Cypriot community. They invaded. They’ve occupied Cyprus, the northern part of Cyprus, since then.
So we have had this problem, as well as a problem that emerged as we have been able to invest and exploit some of the natural [00:16:00] resources at the bottom of the sea. So that, for example, drilling oil, the borders of the continental shelf, as it’s called, were not delineated between Greece and Türkiye. So then, if we wanted to drill for oil or other types of resources, whose was this plot of land between our two countries, or in the Aegean? This became another contentious issue, where we say “Well, we need to follow international law and go maybe to the Court of Hague if we don’t agree on the exact terms. Let’s have the lawyers or the judges of the Court of Hague who have a lot of experience from other cases do this.”
So there was a very contentious relationship and we were being pressed by the European Union: “Well, Türkiye should become a member of the European Union,” but we were always vetoing it. Why? Because of Cyprus and because we said, “Well, how can we let Türkiye in when we haven’t solved these issues?” [00:17:00] We reversed that when I became Prime Minister. We thought about it a lot and we said, “Well, let’s think of it in a different way. Why don’t we see Türkiye – since it does want to become a European member, it does have obligations, it has a roadmap, it has a way to go – don’t we really want a European Türkiye?” Which would mean also not just being a member of a club, but it’s also partaking in the same values and principles and practices of the European Union.
Now, what are those basic practices? It’s the rule of law. It’s democratic processes. You can’t have the military running your country, or deciding the leadership of the country. You have to support human rights, minority rights, religious rights and you also have to be a good neighbor and follow international law and solve your problems through peaceful means and not through war or military means or the threat of use of violence.
So we said, “Well, that is a very good framework. Let’s change the whole [00:18:00] debate. Let’s change the framework. Let’s see Türkiye as a future member of the European Union.” So, let’s say yes to Türkiye, but then say “These are the conditions to become a full member.” So actually from vetoing Türkiye, we turned it around and said, “We are going to be the strongest proponents of a European Türkiye, because actually they are our neighbors and we’d love to have a neighbor which is built on these principles.”
That change of the framework changed the whole narrative and the whole sense of our relationship.
What preceded that were two events. One was when Öcalan, who was head – he’s still in jail now, but he was head of the PKK, the Kurdish organization which the Turks see as a terrorist organization – had left Syria under Turkish pressure, but then traveled around Europe to try to find asylum, and each country was worried. They didn’t want to give asylum to Öcalan.
He finally landed in Greece [00:19:00] and the Greek then-Foreign Minister wanted to whisk him off to South Africa. His plane stopped in Kenya, but he was picked up by the CIA and the Turkish Secret Services and whisked then back to Türkiye. Of course, you can imagine how our relationships became so tense at that moment since we were harboring a person that was seen as a major terrorist in Türkiye. The minister resigned, and my Prime Minister, Prime Minister Simitis, actually called me up. I was in Berlin meeting with former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He said, “You now become Minister of Foreign Affairs, you solve this crisis.” So I had a great crisis on my hand. I got an ultimatum from my counterpart, İsmail Cem, in a letter.
The diplomats said, “Don’t respond, don’t react,” and so on, and I actually said, “No. I’m going to respond but I’m going to add our questions too.” So we started a dialogue. We got together. We met at the UN a month later, and we [00:20:00] said, “Okay, we have problems. Let’s see if we can find areas where we can work together to build a new trust. Let’s say we can’t solve our Cyprus problem just like that, and we can’t deal with the continental shelf issue because there’s a lot of baggage and a lot of misunderstandings and different viewpoints. But maybe we can build trust. And if we build trust long enough, then we can maybe deal with the more thorny and difficult issues.” So we started a dialogue on trade and on tourism and on other areas of cooperation – health, pandemics. Mostly then it was about livestock and so on.
But a few months into that, there was a huge earthquake in Türkiye. Massive.
Hundreds of thousands of houses, tens of thousands of people under the rubble. This was in the middle of the summer. I decided to take a risk. They’re our traditional enemies, but I came out publicly and I said, “We may see them [00:21:00] as enemies, but down deep, we are both human beings. We’re all human beings. Let’s show this humanity. Let’s show our need to help them and let’s give them help.”
And I wasn’t sure what the response would be, but the response was absolutely amazing. There was so many people went to the hospitals, giving blood, bringing all kinds of foods or medicine or clothing. So much so that some of the doctors from the hospitals called me up after a few days and said, “Tell people to stop because we don’t have enough staff, we can’t take all this blood.”
Then we sent a whole team. Because we also have had earthquakes and are an earthquake-prone country, as here in California. We have specialists that go there and they went to help. One of the firemen who was diggling under the rubble pulled out a young Turkish boy, three years old, alive. That became front page. And all the Turkish newspapers the next day wrote, “Thank you, Greece,” in Greek.
That began [00:22:00] what I call a citizen’s diplomacy. We had an earthquake a month later. The Turks came. Their teams came to help us also. We then started people-to-people meetings: women’s groups; women-to-women, mayors-to-mayors, business-to-business, basketball, football teams to football teams.
Cookbooks were written for Turkish and Greek recipes. A TV show started burgeoning, where a Turk would fall in love with the Greek, and vice versa. I actually had somebody tracking this, this people’s diplomacy. And I said, “Every month, I want to report to see how things are going,” because we wanted to promote it.
And after a few months, he stopped reporting. And I called him, and I said, “Why are you stopped reporting?” He said, “Well, I can’t report anymore. Because there’s so many initiatives, I just can’t follow them.”
Katerina Linos: [Laughter]
George Papandreou: This was, in my mind, also a democratization of foreign policy. Foreign policy is not just between foreign ministers. It’s also [00:23:00] between societies, between cultures. It’s so important, I think, if we want to deal with some of these more conflictual issues. And we did say, “We have our conflicts, we have our difficulties, we have our past, we have our history. We’re not going to forget our history, but let’s not try to repeat it. Let’s not try to repeat the battles of our ancestors. Let’s actually use the scars of the wounds as lessons for what we need to avoid to build a better future for today and for future generations.”
This was, I think, a major change. Change in the framework, changing the context, and looking at your opponent or your other side with as much respect as possible and trying to understand. But both from both sides. It needs, of course, to be mutual.
And that did create a whole period of détente. We started talking about the Cyprus issue. We started talking about the continental shelf more openly. We got very close to solving the two of them. Then, as politics has it, governments [00:24:00] change, new leaders don’t follow up. The Cyprus plan was not voted on by the Greek Cypriot community. It was voted on positively by the Turkish Cypriot community. There were efforts later on also. But it did show that we can work together in a much more peaceful way.
We even at some point, and this was with İsmail Cem, we would sit down together and say, “Okay, what more can we do to really solidify this relationship?” We had to become innovative. We talk about innovation more in technology and industry and so on – but I think we have to think of politics as the ancient Greeks did, as imagining a better future. We have to use our imagination, and therefore innovation. And democracy is an innovation. We were trying to say, “Okay, how can we think of new ways, innovate new issues, new ideas?”
So we started working together, on Kosovo with humanitarian aid, working together helping Romania and Bulgaria become members of NATO, which they wanted to be. We had [00:25:00] the Olympic Games coming up. I had started an initiative to come back to the original meaning of the Olympic Games, which was peace. This was a peace treaty, and the longest, historically, in humanity’s history: 1,100 years. Every four years, there was this truce.
So I said, “İsmail, why don’t we start a global movement for the Olympic truce?” We signed the document together, the first of us. And then we went around the world asking for signatures from leaders. We went to Arafat, he signed it. We went to Shimon Peres, he signed it. We went to the Iranians, they signed it. We went to the Saudis, they signed it. We went to the Chinese, they signed it. We went to Bill Clinton, he signed it. We went to all the European leaders, they signed it. We went to Mandela. He came to Greece, he signed it. So these were the type of things we did.
I think one of the high moments of this was when there was a huge clash, unluckily, as it is today, in Gaza/Israel. Ariel Sharon was the Prime Minister then, and [00:26:00] Arafat on the other side. Ariel Sharon had just given up Gaza, but there were problems with the West Bank. Ramallah was being bombed by the Israelis. So İsmail Cem and I said, “Okay, maybe we can be of help if we go together.” So the Greeks and the Turks, two Foreign Ministers, went together to the Middle East. And Ariel Sharon would tell any leader who would come, “If you meet Arafat, I’m not going to meet you.” But when we went together, he said, “I couldn’t resist, I had to meet you. And you can go to Arafat, too.” So we did.
It was a show of, first of all, that traditional enemies – we can work together. So we were trying to bring a message of peace. But it also showed to our own populations that, “Listen, when we work together, we have not double the power, but multiple credibility in the world.” We even set up a group in the UN for disaster relief, Greeks and Turks, to be emulated or used by others, too.
So this is, I think, a lesson which [00:27:00] we need to look at in foreign policy. There are alternatives. There are different ways of dealing with problems. You don’t need to dominate, if you treat issues with respect and understand the other side. Not always. It depends. You need a mutual sense. There are ways where we can build trust, and through trust build a more peaceful world.
Katerina Linos: Thank you so much for that. All of that optimism is necessary for your current role. Now at the Council of Europe, you’re the General Rapporteur for Democracy. We worry so much about Hungary. Türkiye is a member of the Council of Europe, and democracy does not seem to have been entrenched there.
What mechanisms do you see as potentially powerful or effective as we look at this move towards oligarchy in many stable democracies and some transition countries?
George Papandreou: First of all, we have to [00:28:00] understand why we’re seeing this development of oligarchies or authoritarian leaders. What are the root causes of this? Once we understand, I think, the root causes, then we can be vocal and clear about how we counter them.
And I think we have been somewhat blinded to, as I even said earlier, the globalization factor, which has had both its positives and negatives, but it has not allowed us to regulate the concentration of wealth and power. If you read Oxfam’s reports, they have shown how deep these inequalities are and how they have been deepening over the last decades – how this has impeded many policies. Many people are talking about the oligarchies or the oligarchs around the world. And they are not only in Russia or some of the other former communist states, which developed basically by a too-quick privatization and without real rethinking about it. [00:29:00] So you had the expropriation of public companies by individuals who then became oligarchs.
But in the West, the oligarchs have been created through other methods, through using the market, and sometimes very skillfully. But the huge wealth that they have amassed is, I think, out of what would be a moral, ethical, or even a socially-responsible type of activity because this wealth is not even taxed. It’s moving around the world. But as I said, then it becomes a huge power.
Now when that happens, governments face crises, they face problems, and the institutions, if they are captured or lobbied or influenced, do not serve, as they should, the public. It also means that our representative democracies are not representative. Because representative democracies [00:30:00] mean that you are serving the people. But, the representative democracies are also competitive. Obama and Clinton call politics “a contact sport.” So, we have been moving, and I believe because of this concentration of power, more from representing the people, to a fight, a game: who will gain power? Politics has become much more a power game than an actual way of representing people and finding solutions. And this has been exacerbated by the platforms and the algorithms, which are basically legislating our public space. They have taken over our public space and the algorithms are the legislation which tell us how we should engage with each other, unconsciously or subconsciously. But they are deliberate from the owners of these platforms, and they are basically gaming the system for profit. They have found ways to do so, which bring out some of the most [00:31:00] negative instincts and not building community.
I think also that this inequality has created a deeper sense of injustice in our societies. It has created divisions – financial and economic divisions – where a great number of our citizens feel marginalized, not listened to. They feel that the system is not working for them. They not only feel injustice, but then they feel insecurity and also a sense of powerlessness. Those feelings are fertile ground for demagoguery. Some people call it populism. I like the ancient Greek word of demagoguery.
It is a way to tell people, rightly so, that they have not been dealt with well, that they don’t have prospects, they have problems. However, these authoritarian figures are using this rhetoric for [00:32:00] power. They usually will not want to change the power structures, but they just want to control the power structures. So, what we see is, they will use a façade of issues which are emotional. Let’s take Hungary; but it’s not only Hungary. Many of these leaders are are doing it. The façade is, “Let’s be against the gays, let’s be against the LGBTQ. Let’s be against migrants. They’re terrible. They’re going to destroy our culture. And let’s be against foreign powers interfering into our country.” Sort of a nationalistic isolationism which is then defined by the leader, what it means to be Hungarian. And then you see that behind this, it is actually a grab of power where, during a crisis you have a government that may come in – people react to the existing government and say, “Okay, we want something else.” Orban had a landslide victory after the financial crisis, but he used it to then control the institutions – [00:33:00] justice, media – through a number of tactics, whether using the money for advertising or tax services to undermine opponents; finding some irregularity to make them go bankrupt; local government usurping powers from the local government and of course using the money of the government for procurement, for friends. And then you consolidate power. This is, I think, a playbook which many authoritarian leaders follow. And we need to call them out.
When I hear these arguments – about migrants or about this corruption of the gender issues and so on – I say, that for all these leaders, is simply, they love these issues because it hides their real intentions. And the real intentions are just grabbing power and using it and creating a system of repression or even persecution.
Therefore, calling it out is the first thing. And the second [00:34:00] one is, how do we deal with these issues?
So I think we need to find at a global level more tax regulation, to undermine the concentration of wealth and power. As I said, the G20 recently has come up with proposals, but they haven’t been implemented. At the same time, we have to find ways where we bring citizens back into power by giving them more of a voice.
Katerina Linos: I hope you enjoyed this interview with George Papandreou – his journey from celebrated diplomatic mediator to crisis-era Prime Minister to guardian of democratic values across the Council of Europe. One thing that really stood out for me, and I think will be of interest to a lot of our international law audience, is the insight that resolving one conflict, or making progress towards the resolution of one conflict, can have multiplicative effects. That bringing the Greek and the Turkish Foreign Ministers together to Israel and having the Israelis and the Palestinians try to speak to [00:35:00] one another, going around and circulating efforts for an Olympic truce around many conflicts, can really bring some optimism, to see how this initial negotiation can multiply.
If you enjoyed this episode of Borderlines, I hope you share it with a friend.