Parliament and the Athens municipal authority celebrated Valentine’s Day in their own special ways, though in the former, the big sparks flew on Thursday and not on Friday.
The clash between the Greek Communist Party (KKE), via its parliamentary representative, Thanasis Pafilis, and Course for Freedom, via its president, former parliamentary speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, extended from barbs – sharp as Cupid’s arrow – to social media video posts. In the former category, they jabbed at each other like this: “Lady, you’re spinning some narrative about your family and women’s matters and whatnot (…) What do you know about struggles? You haven’t even had a slap in the face,” said Pafilis. “Do you remember when I called you in August 2015 to come to the emergency session [over the bailout agreement with Greece’s foreign creditors] and you said, ‘Zoe, dear, I’m in Serifos with the family’? You put your holidays above opposition to the memorandum,” said Konstantopoulou. And these are the least offensive excerpts of that cesspool of a “discussion” that took place in Parliament. The videos, however, coincided, as they were dragged out of the mothballs to show the party leaders sending a message to voters and making love hearts with their fingers.
The Municipality of Athens, for its part, carried out what it described as an “original awareness-raising campaign” in the city center on Friday, which was aimed at “sending a powerful social message to motorists who park illegally and antisocially.” How did it go about this? A team of Municipal Police officers, accompanied by Mayor Haris Doukas, handed out parking tickets to offenders, along with a cardboard broken heart emblazoned with the words: “You don’t love me: Love isn’t just chocolates and flowers.”
Let’s put Parliament aside for a moment. The fireworks between KKE and Course for Freedom came during a period of euphoria for both parties, who are seeing their popularity rise in public opinion polls and probably felt that such antics would boost them further by giving them more exposure on social media – given that they’re fishing from the same voter pool. Because politics has been reduced to finger-pointing, vulgarity, “anti-systemic” posturing and anything else that can help them go viral – not for their political position on serious matters, of course.
But the mayor and his broken hearts? What was that all about? Was it because everything in Athens is broken: from the streets, sidewalks, playgrounds and parks to the buildings and garbage bins? Not to mention all the Athenians who have been injured by falling on said sidewalks.
If everything, in Parliament and the municipality running the Greek capital, is about reaching out to the audience on social media, what is supposed to happen to all the people who live out here, in the real world? Unless, that is, public opinion polls show that their numbers are shrinking too.