When state data is exploited for politics
“Forty-one percent” is one of the jokes doing the rounds on social media these days – it is also a trap for the ruling conservatives. The almost 41% (40.56%) attained by Kyriakos Mitsotakis in last June's parliamentary elections was felt on the government's mind like a baptismal font washing it clean of all previous sins and a carte blanche for future ones. Every accusation was countered by party officials with “These matters were settled in July” or “The people have spoken.” Then came the tide of rage over the Tempe rail tragedy.
The bottom line is that 40.56% is not what victory usually looks like. PASOK lost the elections of 2004 with as much (40.55%) and ND lost the 2000 polls with an even bigger percentage (42.74%). What was indeed impressive about the 2023 elections was the main opposition's massive slide. SYRIZA nosedived from 31.53% in 2019 to 17.3% last summer, when the country's second-biggest party has always (with the exception of the financial crisis years) held more than 30% since the restoration of democracy 50 years ago. This fact alone should act as a damper for certain government officials' arrogance. Sure, that 40.56% was, to a significant degree, a confirmation of the government's success in dealing with the big crises of its first term in office, but it was also driven by fear of SYRIZA or the desire to punish the leftist party.
The chasm between the ruling party and the main opposition stoked the government mechanism's arrogance. Great and small, officials in the government felt invincible in everything they did and brushed off criticism with the facile: “Yes, but SYRIZA…” They only recently discovered the “big interests” that are seeking to harm our country.
The affair with Anna-Michelle Asimakopoulou is a typical example. We all focused our attention on the European lawmaker for getting her hands on and using the personal information of Greeks living abroad. We should also have been focusing on her claims that the source of that information was the 2023 Greeks Abroad Register, which “was put into my hands at the end of January 2024, in digital form, by New Democracy's then general secretary for diaspora Greeks, Mr Nikos Theodoropoulos, who has now been dismissed.” The register, she claimed in a letter on March 26, contained data collected during the 2023 parliamentary elections.
What Asimakopoulou was basically saying was that state-held data came into the ownership of the party and was then exploited for campaign reasons.
SYRIZA may have gotten its just desserts in last year's election, but the government's sense of entitlement is not only doing itself a disservice, it is also harming the country.