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A Citizen’s Guide to Greece 2015

 
 

 
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The least bad option

Posted  June 19, 2013  by  pdcadmin

By Kevin Featherstone Last week’s dramatic decision to close down Greece’s state broadcaster, ERT answers a question Greece’s political leaders – in and out of government – have lacked the will to confront for a generation.  At one level, the move is gesture politics: a sudden, unilateral act intended to impress the Troika (the EU, […]

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Triumph of the statisticians

Posted  December 25, 2012  by  Politis

By Politis “A year in a word: Grexit,” runs the headline of this article in yesterday’s Financial Times. Coined in February 2012, when speculation on Greece’s fate in the eurozone was reaching frenzy, the term later spawned its very own progeny — the Brexit. Sounds like a very bad sequel to the Hobbit. What has […]

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It’s our right: I think I’ll vote

Posted  May 3, 2012  by  pdcadmin

In this week’s installment of “It’s our right,” college student Iliana Sansi, who is eligible to vote for the first time in her life, deliberates whether she wants to exercise this right on May 6. The last three weeks we’ve been witnessing confusion all over Greece that mostly deals  with the coming elections on this Sunday. Political […]

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How to design a new government

Posted  September 27, 2013  by  Politis

With all the talk of public sector reform in Greece these days, it would not be surprising if a casual reader might ask, what alternatives are there to the current state of affairs? Where might one start to look? Fear not, Google has an answer. It is called Constitute. It works, too, according to a recent […]

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Nowhere to hide

Posted  December 23, 2012  by  DW

By David Wisner Politis has pointed this phenomenon up before. Newsworthy Grecians can no longer hide behind the figurative distance between Athens and the rest of the world, or the relative inaccessibility of the Greek language outside Greece. Two examples since the beginning of December suffice. Stephen Grey, who spoke at the Dukakis Center on […]

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The tyranny of little things

Posted  January 14, 2013  by  pdcadmin

By Nikos Konstandaras Our country bears many great wounds, which, over the years, brought us to the point of bankruptcy, ridicule and insecurity. But however great the problems which stem from the corruption and incompetence of our political elite and state machinery, from the chaos of the public sector, from the lack of national strategy, […]

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Blockupy

Posted  May 31, 2013  by  KK

Newsworthy, I think… “Our main goal is to show that the regime that is governing Europe through this crisis is neither democratically legitimate nor acting in any responsible way for the people. It’s really working for profit. One of it’s symbolic places is the ECB – the place that has economic and financial reign over […]

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The Sprit of Eidomeni

Posted  March 27, 2016  by  Politis

The makeshift migrant camp in Eidomeni has been in the news regularly since the end of 2015. Reports today claimed the camp was finally being evacuated by Greek authorities. This would not be the first time. Last November a group of fifteen Dukakis Center interns, from Greece, the US, and several Balkan countries, organized a […]

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Greek Election Coverage 2012

Posted  May 5, 2012  by  PR

Hellenic Elections Election Central 2012 Rolling coverage by the team at the Dukakis Center of elections in Greece, France, and Serbia. Monday 23:34 No comment. Tuesday 01:05 Griechenland its unregierbar. Tuesday 00:27 Wealthy Frenchmen are taking their money and running. Maybe they will find some Greeks who left early to avoid the new taxes. Tuesday […]

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The mandate, and other democratic myths

Posted  February 17, 2015  by  DW

This past weekend the digital site of the French newspaper Le Monde ran an interesting story entitled, in translation,  “The Greece that did not vote for Syriza.” I cannot say the piece was faultless, but Eliza Perrigueur, the author, did good research and presented an interesting view of the Greek elections for a francophone audience. […]

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In praise of public servants

Posted  January 9, 2013  by  Politis

The Dukakis Center hosted the inaugural Business  & Politics Forum in Thessaloniki last month. One of the speakers, Efi Stefopoulou of the General Secretariat of the Government, gave a standing room audience at the Elektra Palace Hotel a brilliant taste of what a truly competent public servant can do. Thankfully, she told her audience that […]

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Wanted: leaders and local color

Posted  January 21, 2013  by  DW

Surveying the panoply of contemporary European leaders, John Lloyd quips in Reuters, “All this grey almost makes you wish for Silvio Berlusconi to return, to lighten the mood.” “At times it seems that Europe, both in its national leaders and in the little-known men who are presidents of one EU institution or another, chooses obscurity […]

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Happy birthday, coalition

Posted  June 18, 2013  by  Politis

By Nick Malkoutzis It is one year to the day since Greece held its second general election in two months and third in three years. What better way to celebrate the occasion than trying to relive the uncertainty and tension we experienced during the summer of 2012? The leaders of Greece’s three coalition parties go […]

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We want out

Posted  January 31, 2013  by  Politis

As reported yesterday in Greek Reporter, as many as One Greek in three would consider leaving Greece, as the economic situation becomes ever more dire. They report, “The startling statistic came from a a survey carried out on primary and secondary school pupils by the Children’s Ombudsman. Out of 1,211 pupils from 22 schools around […]

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To serve our country’s democracy

Posted  November 9, 2016  by  Politis

By Michael Ertel NB Michael Ertel is Supervisor of Elections in Seminole County, Florida, where he has served since 2005. He spoke at two Dukakis Center events during the 2016 election period. Politis reproduces these remarks with permission of the author. When I tearfully hugged our staff as they left the building last night, my […]

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In search of a Greek social contract

Posted  February 24, 2012  by  DW

By David Wisner I’ve been thinking a lot about the American Declaration of Independence. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time business associate, is blind in one eye, owing to complications in a cataract operation. As Alice Schroeder tells the story, Munger never blamed the doctor, instead accepting responsibility […]

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How does it feel to be Ukrainian?

Posted  March 10, 2014  by  pdcadmin

By Iana Nazarenko In a democracy, realists claim that the government should represent the common will of citizens, or at least act in the interest of the state and its people. But what if it does not? Should then citizens take action and change the situation, even if at the cost of hundreds of lives? […]

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One crook for another

Posted  February 28, 2013  by  Politis

This one’s rich. According to todays Chicagoland blog in the Chicago Tribune, “Republican voters are suggesting the 2nd Congressional District replace one felon with another after picking ex-convict Paul McKinley as the candidate to run for the seat recently ceded by former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.” Jackson pleaded guilty last week to misusing campaign […]

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Paid or unpaid?

Posted  October 6, 2013  by  M P

By Maria Patsarika As practitioners of public service and volunteerism, we encourage high school and college students to pad their c-v by doing internships. That leaves open an important question: Paid or unpaid? It may be more a matter of one’s own background, ambitions (and one’s family ambitions too) and personal understanding of why one […]

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Lessons from a shipwreck to a shipwrecked country

Posted  April 25, 2014  by  M P

  By Maria Patsarika This is not an easy piece to write. The tragic April 2014 ferry accident in South Korea, better deserves a an expression of humble, silent sympathy with the mourning families. Watching the story unravel on the news these days, however, one image kept coming back: inside the gymnasium, where the relatives […]

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