by Dan Alexe Greeks have discovered hubris and they are still the best at it. “Hubris” is the permanent state of mind of the hero guilty of arrogant happiness. The sufferer of hubris, a delusional insanity, believes that he rightly benefits from supernatural luck. He lives in a permanent state of autosuggestion, even as he is fingering his prayer beads in his pocket. The Greeks considered this a form of madness. They knew that nothing lasts forever. Take Margaritas Schinas, for instance, Jean-Claude Juncker’s spokesman and the man sent into the arena to fend off the attacks of the mob of hacks: he is certainly a man of hubris. Decided to communicate as little as possible, he was bought by Juncker after a deal with the Greek government, something called a barter in anthropology: the Greek representative in the Commission agreed to have as chief of cabinet a lady from Luxembourg, Diane Schmidt, previously Head of the Immigration and Integration Unit. In exchange, Juncker took Margaritas Schinas, who was in a dangling position after Barroso’s departure. Schinas became the Commission’s main spokesman, but he is not much of a communicator. His Twitter account is used sparsely. He has no Facebook page, except for an unused stub with no picture, which has received only 18 likes (Greek families used to be larger than this in the past), containing exactly the same two paragraphs from his Wikipedia stub: “born July 28, 1962 in Thessaloniki. Worked at the European Commission since 1990; chef de cabinet for the Cypriot Commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, from 2004 to 2007.” Schinas has a smooth carrier, smooth as a piece of lokum, that delicacy unfortunately called by the English “Turkish delight”, a carrier resembling that of so many Greek politicians from the Nea Dimocratia or the Pasok seraglio. In 2010, he was made by Barroso Deputy Director General of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA). Barroso created this structure, BEPA, in parallel to his own cabinet, with the only use of giving jobs to people and making the architecture of the system even more complicated and opaque than it already was. Nobody ever understood what BEPA was doing. One learns something about Schinas only by checking his interventions in the plenary as an MEP for the EPP-affiliated Nea Dimokratia. One can learn thus that he is an adept of more control of the Internet by the state, and of the identification of owners of prepaid card phones. The way in which he talks to the press forebodes ill for the way in which Juncker’s team intends to communicate. Thus, Schinas played down the LuxLeak scandal the very day it became public. No story there, stubbornly repeated Schinas, with a superior, ironic smile, insisting that that was simply state aid. “Member states can do anything to attract companies. They will continue doing this.” he candidly insisted. That was all he gave to the press, during an almost one hour-long salvo of questions: “This is a typical state aid case” (as if the scale of it was not important). He speaks English and French fluently, indeed, but the fact that Juncker named him head of his communication team says more about Juncker than about Schinas. After all, given the nature of the barter (Diane Schmidt as chief of cabinet for the Greek Commissioner, against Schinas for Juncker) Juncker could have named him in a more innocuous position. Head of protocol, for instance. Although, given the way he keeps his hand in the pocket when he talks to the press, one would hardly see him leading the protocol. Hacks, on the other hand, are used to be treated carelessly.
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