Editorial Ta Nea: Spoils

Images of destroyed government files are shameful for a state that wants to be considered contemporary.

Such images have nothing to do with democracies that have a functional bureaucracy that is not party-based (as ours should have been) but rather with regimes that treat the state as spoils and when they lose power remove the traces of their misdeeds.

One wants to believe that the outgoing government is not such a regime and hence it must explain what has been going on over the last days at various ministries and at the PM’s Maximos Mansion offices.

Why did these state organs obtain paper shredders?

Why did they destroy whatever they destroyed?

What did they have to hide and what are they afraid of?

What was going on behind closed doors and what was being written on computers which the next government must not see?

It is not only in the name of transparency that answers must be given.

It is for the sake of democracy.

Answers must be given by a party that supposedly is devoted to transparency and democracy and in the past has charged others of pillaging.

As it seems, the outgoing government made that mistake too. It handled power as if it would hold on to it forever and treated the state as booty, and now it is rushing to eliminate the traces.

In this manner it revealed a mentality which is inconceivable for a European state and with which it governed for the last four years.