How the world sees Greece
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's political heavyweights went head-to-head for the first time on Wednesday in campaigning for national elections, trading accusations over the economic crisis as they sought to win over undecided voters. In a televised debate, former prime minister Alexis Tsipras said the international bailout he had agreed to in July had stabilised Greece, while his conservative rival Evangelos Meimarakis said it had damaged the economy. ...
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece's left wing leader Alexis Tsipras admitted making mistakes in negotiations for a massive new bailout agreement, during a televised election debate late Wednesday, but insisted the deal would safeguard the country's financial future.
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We've got Oysterfest at Flagship Brewing Co., West Fest at Northerleigh Park and GREEK Fest in Bull's Head. We've also got a restaurant crawl and a ...
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Greece's Coast Guard says it is investigating media reports of uniformed men forcing dinghies carrying refugees or migrants to return to Turkey. The post Greece Probes Migrant Boat Pushback appeared first on The National Herald.
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All eyes have been on the Greek island of Lesbos near Turkey as it struggles to deal with some 20,000 refugees - and counting - who keep on coming. The post World Press View: Lesbos Becomes Symbol of Greece Migrant Crisis appeared first on The National Herald.
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Melanie Nelson plays the title role of Electra and Max Huftalin plays Orestes in this year's Classical GREEK Theatre Festival production of Sophocles' ...
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A formation of four Turkish fighter jets violated GREEK national air space in the northeastern, central and southeastern Aegean on Wednesday, defense ...
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Yiasou GREEK Festival Holy Trinity GREEK Orthodox Cathedral, 600 East Blvd.Thursday, 11 a.m. - 9 p.m' continues through weekend: Enjoy GREEK ...
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In July 2012, Citigroup was warning of a 90 per cent chance Greece would leave the euro only to be proved wrong
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In July 2012, Citigroup was warning of a 90 per cent chance Greece would leave the euro only to be proved wrong
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The procedures for the first evaluation of the new bailout programme will start in October, a senior Eurozone official said on Wednesday. Apart from the technical issues of the evaluation, issues of political interest such as the IMF‘s role, measures for debt relief, and recapitalisation of the Greek banking system, will also be discussed. He
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“Our government has continued the implementation of the measures on migration, which had been initiated by previous governments,” Greek caretaker Prime Minister Vassiliki Thanou said in an interview with ANA-MPA on Wednesday. “Despite the efforts to improve these measures, we are trying to decide and implement some additional measures in order to contribute towards the solution
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The output of the Greek industrial sector decreased by 1.6% in July 2015 in comparison to July 2014, according to the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT). Among the sectors with significant slow downs were the manufacturing sector with a 5.7% reduction in output, the mining sector whose production decreased by 4.8%, while water provision fell by 3.2%. At the same the index of electricity production increased
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The Greek government denied a rift with Moscow over refusing to allow Russian air-crafts to fly over Greek airspace. The air-crafts were scheduled to transport humanitarian aid to Syria, but did not, after an alleged U.S. intervention. “No displeasure or any other negative comment has been expressed from anyone,” foreign ministry spokesman Constantinos Koutras told AFP
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The East Aegean Greek Island of Lesvos, which has a become a centre for migrants and refugees seeking to enter Europe, has gotten a significant breather in the past two days. Between Monday and Tuesday evening 10,000 migrants and refugees had left the island’s port of Mitilini for the port of Piraeus. Another 3,200 are scheduled to depart
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Car registrations grew 20.1% in August to a total 7,039 vehicles (new and used vehicles), up from 5,862 in August 2014 (in passenger cars the increase was 25.8 pct), the Hellenic Statistical Authority said on Wednesday. The statistics service, in a report, said that car registrations were up 20.8% in August 2014 (23.1% up in passenger
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The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki held a summer programme with the participation of 180 students from 35 countries. The president of the committee and the representatives of the academic community expressed the hope that the students will be the ambassadors of Greece abroad. The students who came from Egypt, Armenia, Australia, France, Georgia, Switzerland, the
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Watch now Greece’s party leaders debate live: With Greece’s future at a crossroads, the first Greek party leaders debate since 2009 is expected to offer clear answers to undecided voters for the crucial September 20th Greek general election.
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WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that the Obama administration aims to allow more refugees to resettle in the United States, including a larger number of Syrians who are fleeing their homes for Europe and other Middle Eastern countries at crisis levels. "We are committed to increasing the number of refugees that we take and we are looking hard at the number that we can specifically manage with respect to the crisis in Syria and Europe," Kerry told reporters after meeting with lawmakers at the Capitol. He said the number of refugees who will be accepted has not yet been determined and is being "vetted fully right now." President Barack Obama must set the figures for refugee admissions for fiscal year 2016 by the end of the month, but the administration has not yet stated whether a large increase in the number of Syrians admitted will be a part of that figure. The U.S. is under pressure to take in more Syrians. More than 4 million have left their homes since the start of the civil war there, and more than 2,600 migrants drowned this year in the Mediterranean en route to Greece or Italy, according to the International Organization for Migration. One of the Syrians who drowned, 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, drew more attention to the crisis when a photo emerged last week of his body washed up on a beach in Turkey. The U.S. set a ceiling of 70,000 refugees total for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. But groups devoted to resettling refugees have long said that number should be far higher, and are now calling for the U.S. to take in 100,000 Syrians next fiscal year, along with 100,000 people from other countries. Germany expects to take in 800,000 refugees this year. By contrast, the U.S. has accepted only 1,500 Syrians since the beginning of the war in 2011. The U.S. contributes significant aid to refugees, including about $4 billion for migrant camps in Europe, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday. Kerry told The Huffington Post's Sam Stein in an interview last week that the U.S. "could do a lot more to protect those people," but with regards to camps overseas, not resettlement in the U.S. A number of politicians have said the U.S. should do more to help Syrians who fled their country, and some have offered specific numbers of refugees that the country should accept. Fourteen Senate Democrats called in May for the U.S. to accept at least 65,000 Syrians. Pressure has grown since Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley said last week that the U.S. should accept that number of Syrians by the end of 2016. Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier Wednesday that the United Nations should convene an "emergency global gathering where the UN literally tries to get commitments" to take in refugees, but did not indicate how many people the U.S. should take in. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. has an obligation to take in more people and should appropriate more funding for refugee organizations, along with responding in other ways. "My goal is to make sure they don't have to flee their country," he said. "They're not coming here because they want to. Women are coming here because they're being raped. Christians are coming here because they're being subject to genocide. People leaving Syria are fleeing tyranny, not to get jobs." His fellow GOP candidate Donald Trump also said the U.S. should accept more refugees. Others have been vague on how the U.S. should respond, other than to say something must be done. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters on Wednesday that the crisis in Syria was caused by "the president's lack of strategy with regards to ISIS and what's happening in Syria is causing a worldwide problem." "This refugee crisis in Europe is serious; it needs to be dealt with," he continued. "How we deal with it and what our role is in trying to help resolve it frankly is unclear to me at this moment." There is some pushback to the idea of accepting more refugees from Republicans who say it would run the risk of letting jihadists into the country. Refugees go through a long security vetting process -- sometimes more than 18 months -- before being admitted into the U.S. Some Republicans say the president should ramp up his military response in Syria and the Middle East, rather than discussing refugee resettlement. “We must not avert our eyes from Aylan and the millions of other refugees running for their lives," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "We must commit to a strategy to defeat the malign forces in the region that are sowing chaos and mass destruction." -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Protests against austerity propelled Podemos to the forefront of Spanish politics. The fate of Syriza in Greece shows some of the problems ahead As Greece heads yet again for elections, with Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, facing a major test now that he has accepted the stringent economic terms laid out by creditors, the fallout will be watched closely in another country in Europe’s south where traditional parties have come under the assault of new grassroots movements: Spain. Indications are that the rise of Podemos, the “We can” movement that grew out of Spanish anti-austerity street protests, has slowed, if not stalled. This summer, opinion polls placed Podemos third, with around 15% of votes, behind the ruling rightwing People’s party (28%) and the PSOE socialist party (24%). That is a far cry from the peak reached by Podemos at the start of the year, when it seemed set to overtake the socialists, just one year after its fiery, anti-establishment agenda had first burst on to the scene. Continue reading...
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For Germany, it's been a mixed few months in terms of international headlines. Europe's biggest economy was the bad guy in the Greek crisis earlier this year, blamed for the austerity policies that the country attempted to reject. It's now Europe's angel – the model that liberals around the continent (and the world) want their governments to copy in their acceptance of refugees travelling through Europe. A lot of people have expressed confusion at this. How can Germany be so seemingly cruel to southern Europe and so positive about bringing in people fleeing a war-torn country? But they both have the same root: Germany's experiences in World War II. First, Germany's economic orthodoxy. In his book on austerity, political economist Mark Blyth explains the development of Ordoliberalism, an discipline that emphasises a mixed economy with a balance between the market and the state: The German population was exhausted and hungry while the country’s capital stock was decimated. Fearing political instability, the postwar authorities needed growth, and like the population they governed, those authorities were suspicious of growth coming from “big-state” projects, whether from the left or the right. Second, the Freiburg school, which was not shy in hawking a growth project, emerged from the Nazi period unsullied and more or less intact. Jörg Bibow at the Levy Economics Institute offers some pretty similar thoughts: While aspiring to overcome traditional liberal views on economic order, the country did not join in the international triumph of Keynesian demand management either. The economic instabilities of the 1920s and the Great Depression were seen as a failure of laissez faire, or lack of government intervention of the right kind, namely, in organizing and regulating its market order. Early practical experiences with Keynesian policies in overcoming the Great Depression in 1932-3, if anything, helped to discredit Keynesianism. The perception was that these “full employment policies”— seemingly inevitably—evolved into the full-blown command economy of the subsequent Nazi era. This doesn't seem too surprising. Germany had a brutal period of economic turmoil dating back to long before the Great Depression — hyperinflation and deflation both appeared during the 1920s, followed by mass unemployment as the depression unrolled. The Nazi government's economic control was focused towards war production at the expense of anything that got in the way, so it's easy to see why the more pro-market and liberal element of ordoliberalism developed. Given the economic chaos of the interwar years, and the painful reforms in the aftermath of WWII, it's also not hard to see why untrammeled free market economics weren't popular. People craved order and stability. So unlike much of the rest of the world, Germany never had a particularly pro-Keynesian post-war orthodoxy. Germany may have gone too far in the application of this mindset to the eurozone — combined with a panic that more profligate states would take advantage of Berlin, the ordoliberal system has been expanded to fit the whole continent. But it's not at all difficult to see why it developed in the historical context. A mixed system that emphasised a significant role for the state, but without grand spending projects must have seemed extremely compelling in the ashes of the Nazi economy, and while eastern Germany was coming under the control of the Soviet Union. Now, to migration. A lot of commentators have been suggesting that Germany's incredibly welcoming attitude towards refugees is to do with its demographic crisis. My colleague Oscar Williams-Grut rightly notes that while the UK's population is set to climb considerably in the decades ahead, Germany's is set to slide. Attitudes are certainly different: British Prime Minister David Cameron says the UK can accommodate 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years, while Germany's vice chancellor says the country could take 500,000 per year for several years to come. But to me that doesn't explain the issue. Other countries have demographic problems — for example, Japan and Russia. But neither is particularly warm to the idea of large-scale migration. In fact, they're both pretty cold to the idea. Other European countries, like Spain, Greece and Portugal are expecting declines _larger _than the one Germany is, but they're not throwing their doors open to the world's huddled masses. I've been surprised by how little Germany's war experiences have been mentioned in recent weeks. It's crucial to understanding the country's view of asylum and refugees, and why it departs so significantly from the other large European countries. Germany still harbours a remarkable sense of guilt about the country's WWII regime and the Holocaust, which itself caused enormous flows of refugees, and indirectly the founding of the state of Israel. The younger generation of German voters was born 50 years after the war, but the sense of collective responsibility remains with the older generation, which in other countries tends to be more anti-immigration. Again, Germany's immediate post-war and cold war experience is important. Ethnic Germans flooded into the country from neighbouring states after WWII, and more than 10 million came. Flows of people moving to find sanctuary have been comparatively minuscule almost everywhere else in Europe, certainly in the UK. Many of the children and grandchildren of those who came to post-war Germany are citizens today, which could go some way to explaining their attitudes when it comes to accepting refugees. West Germany had an extremely liberal asylum system and many people headed to the country from Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, with more coming as the Balkans erupted into war in the early 1990s. The Syrian migration trend is large, but it's a development of an existing trend. Germany has not changed its stance — there is a long and easily traceable trend, rooted in the German history surrounding WWII. But once you understand the history, it's not just easier to explain — it's clear that both impulses come from the same period in Germany's past. That shouldn't be surprising, given the scale of the event and the chaos of those years. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Beautiful footage of Cecil before he was killed and why he was so important to Zimbabwe
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Besides Varoufakis, a number of ministers in SYRIZA's outgoing cabinet, as well as popular GREEK actors, own properties on Aegina. They all tend to ...
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The phrase "German moral leadership" may sound strange to many ears, what with the role the country played in two world wars and more recent indignation over the tough stance it took towards Greece's debt woes. Yet anyone witnessing how the nation has responded to this summer's flood of refugees would have to acknowledge that leadership as a fact.
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GREECE has the worst quality of life for senior citizens in Europe, according to the findings of a New York-based nongovernmental organization which ...
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In apportioning blame for the Greek government debt crisis, it would be difficult not to lay the major share on GREECE itself. With government jobs ...
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LESBOS, GREECE—Stuck on this island for six days, Hussein Mahdi finally could continue his journey from Iraq to his desired ...
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"The bonds have rallied hugely once it was clear Greece wasn't going to exit but they have now reached a ceiling.
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The Greek island of Lesbos is on the "verge of explosion" because of an ever-increasing influx of refugees, a Greek minister told the BBC. About 25,000 ...
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Holidaymakers wrap babies and the elderly in blankets as they arrive soaking wet on a Greek beach after a perilous journey.
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The president of the EU commission is a sensitive soul who has been heckled by Ukip, ‘profoundly hurt’ by Greece, and will respond to all criticism of Brussels, no matter how petty NAME: Jean-Claude Juncker AGE: 60 Continue reading...
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STRASBOURG, France (AP) — The latest news as countries across Europe cope with the arrival of thousands of migrants and refugees. All times local (CET):
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Greece will set up a working group with officials from its "troika" of creditors to look at ways of supporting its fragile banking system after this month ...
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Send remittances via the retail offices of foreign-owned money transfer companies in GREECE. There are a number of money transfer companies with ...
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American investors have long accessed shares of National Bank of Greece (NYSE:NBG) through the bank's American Depository Receipts trading on the NYSE.
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The Greek debt crisis from this past summer featured dramatic footage of citizens on bank runs. The European Commission is now pushing a common deposit insurance scheme to prevent such scenes in the future.
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LONDON, Sept 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The United States ranks among the world's nations least likely to achieve the set of global goals aimed at ending poverty and combating climate change that are due to be adopted this month by the United Nations, a study said on Tuesday. The Scandinavian nations of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland have the best chance of meeting the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 15-year objectives that range from ending hunger to promoting education, said the study by Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German foundation that researches and promotes social responsibility. Holding the United States back are such issues as its income gap between rich and poor, consumption behavior and environmental protection, the study said. The nation generates more than twice the municipal waste per capita than do the highest ranked nations, the study said. The United States does, however, have a high gross national income, relatively clean air and ample housing, all of which would contribute to achieving some of the global goals, the study said. Many industrialized nations could fail to meet the 17 goals, to be adopted by 193 countries at a Sept. 25-27 U.N. summit, due to inequality, energy and environmental issues, the study said. The goals aim to end poverty, combat inequality, protect human rights, promote gender equality, protect the planet and create conditions for sustainable growth and shared prosperity. Using indicators that could predict a nation's success, Bertelsmann Stiftung ranked the 34 primarily wealthy member nations of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. "We in the rich nations, with our growing social inequality and wasteful use of resources, can no longer present ourselves as the world's teachers," said Aart de Geus, Bertelsmann Stiftung chairman, in a statement. "Rather, the analysis shows us where we, too, have to do our homework." The nations with the lowest rankings were the United States, followed by Greece, Chile, Hungary, Turkey and Mexico in last place. In first place was Sweden, with its low greenhouse gas emissions and high employment rate, followed by Norway which also has low greenhouse gas emissions and makes generous financial contributions to developing countries, it said. Britain ranked in the middle, strong in its financial contributions to poor countries, air quality, ecological wastewater treatment and low material consumption, the study said. Its weaknesses in potentially meeting the global goals include a low level of sustainable energy production, its fertilizer use in agriculture and its income gap, it said. (Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org) -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Having already recorded three straight wins in the tournament’s group stage, the Greek Men’s Basketball team secured the first place in Group C in the FIBA Eurobasket 2015 with a 83-72 victory over Slovenia. The game was decisive for the fate of the group, as Greece and Slovenia were the first and second teams respectively, with a one
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Change in policy of governments sees reduction in chaos as flow of people from Turkey to the EU continues When the Halawis, a family of Syrian haberdashers, wanted to get from Greece to Macedonia on Wednesday, they took a direct coach from Athens to the last hotel before the border. At the border itself, they joined group number 106, a line of 50 fellow Syrians waiting patiently to cross into Macedonia. Group 105 was already over the other side. “There is a system,” 28-year-old Assad Halawi nodded approvingly, as he and his sister waited in line. In his arms he held Amr, his one-year-old nephew. Amr’s parents could not afford the trip from Syria, where the civil war has destroyed the family’s home in Aleppo, and two of their shops. So Halawi has carried him from Aleppo, and will soon take him into Macedonia. Related: Refugee crisis: Juncker calls for radical overhaul of EU immigration policies Continue reading...
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#politics
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San Antonio Spurs superstar Tony Parker will look to lead France to their fourth consecutive win at EuroBasket 2015 on Wednesday. (Photo : Shaun ...
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GREECE has allowed Russian planes to fly to Syria in Greek airspace, the Russian embassy to GREECE reported on Sept.9. "The press service of the ...
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The European Commission has announced, through its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, plans that will offer a ‘swift, determined and comprehensive’ response to Europe’s migrant crisis. According to the Commission proposal, Romania is supposed to host 6,351 immigrants out of a total of 160,000 who have arrived to Greece, Italy and Hungary, according to the EC website. […]
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Gabriela Andreevska, Macedonian activist and one of key organizers who has been working on the ground for the last four months to provide food, ...
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Help us map community action in response to the refugee crisis in Europe by sharing details of events, and find out what’s being organised near you Supplies are being donated across Europe to help support people who have arrived on the continent this summer as refugees. Grassroots organisations are advertising collections and drop-offs, as well as demonstrations and vigils, to show support for thousands of refugees travelling through and staying in temporary camps in Greece, France, Germany, Hungary and Austria. One of these groups, Calais Action, which began delivering donations to refugees in Calais in August, has been charting these community efforts in the UK and Europe. To raise awareness of the ways in which the public can help, people can submit details of organised collections and trips to donate using this form. Calais Action has produced a crowdsourced map of activities so far with all major giving groups contributing, according to the organisation. Continue reading...
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Centrist Potami party leader Stavros Theodorakis said he's willing to work with even "the devil" to keep Greece in the Eurozone. The post Theodorakis Would Deal With Devil appeared first on The National Herald.
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We are about to come full circle. According to the latest polling, it appears that on September 20th the GREEK electorate will regain its sanity by sending ...
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In the U.S. presidential elections of 1960, the winner received around 100,000 more votes than the runner-up. It was the smallest margin in history. At the same time, it was the first time in history for two nominees to face each other in a televised debate. Only four of them at that! Seventy million people watched the first of these debates. What they saw was Nixon with no makeup on, who appeared to be exhausted and unshaven, up against a tan, healthy-looking and well-painted Kennedy. (His mother, as legend has it, called him immediately after the broadcast, concerned that he was sick.) An urban legend was then born: that the young senator beat the experienced vice president, because he had won the debate. A poll taken at the time supported this urban legend; it showed that among those who had watched the showdown on television, 30 percent felt that Kennedy had won, while 29 percent thought Nixon came out on top, while 49 percent of those who listened to the debate on the radio said that Nixon was the winner, compared to 21 percent who preferred Kennedy. So, the urban legend assumes that pre-election debates influence the elections, and that image edges out substance, sound bites overpower arguments, and the spectacle beats politics. How much did President Bush's gaffe cost him when he faced Clinton in 1992, when the camera caught him as he glanced at his watch, giving the impression that he felt uncomfortable? And how about when, in a 1997 debate, the Canadian Prime Minister continued to answer a question, even as a reporter fainted and fell flat on the studio floor? Did that incident have any bearing on the elections? How much does reality fit in a debate? The truth is: if Kennedy was deemed the winner of the first debate, the next three were won by Nixon. Yet he still lost the election. The truth is also that the difference, between television viewers and radio listeners, in their perceptions of who the winner was could have a simpler explanation. In 1960, 87 percent of American households owned televisions. Accordingly, most of those who caught the debate on the radio may very well have been poor farmers from the Deep South, who would not have voted, in any case, for a Catholic, wealthy candidate from snobbish Massachusetts. What's certain is that the American political system was not thrilled by the experience. While Canada, in 1968, West Germany, in 1969 and France, in 1974, enthusiastically adopted the medium, American audiences had to wait 16 years to watch the next debate. It took place in 1976, between Carter and Ford. Ford had most likely won the first debate, which centered on domestic policy, but at the second one, which revolved around foreign policy, he committed one of the biggest gaffes in the short history of televised debates. ("There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" he said. "And there will never be under a Ford presidency.") The very next day, he took a dive in the polls from which he didn't recover until the end. Since then, debates have become one of the staples of the electoral process in all democratic countries, with either presidential or parliamentary systems. Great Britain was the last to jump on the bandwagon: it resisted the practice until 2010! By now, there is a huge bibliography of theoretical analyses and research findings. The influence that debates have on the electorate, and their effects on political discourse has been thoroughly researched. There have been candidates who have been blessed with charisma, which has rendered the televised debate an easy arena for them, among them: Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. But all three won the debates prior to elections that they would have won anyway. And if there was an exception, in the case of Dukakis-Bush, where a poor answer by Dukakis to a question that came from a gotcha journalist damaged his campaign. Otherwise, would Dukakis have won the election? Probably not. Debates usually strengthen views that already exist in the electorate, rather than overturning them. Changes in electoral tendencies after a debate are the exception, not the rule. In fact, in the case of Greece, there has never been an exception. In 1960, when the first televised electoral debate between Kennedy and Nixon took place, Greece did not even have television yet. And when it did get television, it no longer had elections -- it had a dictatorship instead. And, finally, when we had both, democracy and television, the role of television in elections remained, for at least two decades, tangential at best. The first to ask for a televised showdown with his opponent was Mitsotakis, during the 1985 elections. However, Papandreou refused, calling on old scores, from the the lost spring of 1964 and the defection of '65. In November 1989 (preceded by PASOK's defeat in the June elections and the formation of the Tzannetakis government) the tele-visually French-bred Ricardos Someritis, in his brief time at ERT, managed a hybrid mode of dialogue, where three political leaders, answered questions for the same panel of three reporters on three consecutive nights. It was not exactly a debate, but Someritis and those who took part in it were hoping that it would help break the ice. And break the ice it did. During the next election, which followed a few months later, Mitsotakis, Papandreou and Florakis sat together for a conversation on foreign policy at the Padeio, with Yannis Kapsis as moderator. Even that, however, was not a proper debate. The first debate took place in September 1996, between Simitis and Evert, who did not have any unfinished business from the '60s. It was overly formal, and highly restrictive -- journalists were forced to direct the same question to both leaders, who were forbidden from speaking to each other. Seven more debates followed, in differing formats, during the elections and Euro-elections in the following years, up until 2009. Only one though, that which brought Karamanlis and Papandreou head to head in September of 2009, under the moderation of Maria Houkli, resembled a true dialogue. The rest of the debates had leaders who were protected by strict rules which prevented the unexpected. And there were even more reporters (since TV-channels demanded, foolishly, as a condition for them to televise the debate, that a representative of theirs would be present.) The result was bland and uninviting, even insufferable. And then, we discovered that there is something even worse than a badly organised debate: a completely absent one. With the advent of the referendum, debates were abolished. As relations between political parties completely crossed the line of common decency and as, at the same time, Antonis Samaras faced the television cameras with inexplicable insecurity, the four elections of the referendum years (three national showdowns and one Euro-election round) were debate-less. Now we witness the return of the medium in Greece, after six whole years. Will it influence something this time? It would be difficult, but it is not impossible. While voters remain reluctant and morose, and political leaders fail, it may play a role. So, get on your marks. Watch it. Prepare yourself by looking at the basic positions of the candidates before you watch the debate. Do not watch it on your own. Watch with company and converse during it. Have a pen and paper next to you and make note of things you want to think about or discuss further. And do not rush to decide on a winner and loser. Thing are, usually, more complicated than they may look at first... _This post first appeared on HuffPost Greece and was translated into English_ -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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“Europe is the baker on Kos who offers bread to hungry refugees; Europe is the people who welcome refugees at the Munich train station,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, addressing the European Parliament. In his first annual State of the Union address on Wednesday, Juncker stressed the gravity of the refugee issue by saying
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The President of the Hellenic Parliament requested to be briefed and express her opinion on Greece’s position during tomorrow’s vote at the UN General Assembly on the draft resolution on “Basic Principles on Sovereign Debt Restructuring Processes”.The Foreign Minister briefed the President of Parliament fully and in detail on the matter, as is his institutional duty, during their meeting today.
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