Clinton’s example inspired a new program that I established at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Program. The Kennedy School has always brought in veteran leaders to share past experiences with the students, our future leaders. The Angelopoulos program offers a twist. What we want is to bring to Harvard successful leaders who have completed their terms in their countries. These people are too valuable to be put out to pasture. We want to give them a place and some time where they can explore new avenues so that, just as President Clinton did, they can once again serve the public by confronting the global challenges of our time.
I am proud that, a decade ago, I provided a model of leadership for my country, one that unified a fractious nation behind the public interest. But governments, especially with today’s severe budgetary constraints, are often too inefficient and too politically insecure to utilize their power on behalf of the common good for any sustained period.
Bill Clinton has inspired me to find a new path, and I hope that through my public-leaders program I can in turn inspire others to join me on that path. Public service was my dream as a child and my life’s work as an adult. I have returned to that arena a little bruised but a lot wiser for my experiences. I am convinced not only that I can I make a difference but also that I can make a difference in the lives of extraordinary leaders who will then make a difference in the lives of many more people.
AS I LOOK BACK ON THE GLORIOUS NIGHT of the closing ceremony of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, when I urged my countrymen and women to keep showing “the new face of Greece” and to “keep the flame for creativity, effort, and victory burning in our souls,” it becomes clear that the call went unheeded.
By early 2013, Greece’s economy was in a nosedive: Unemployment had reached 27 percent. More than half of the population under the age of twenty-five was out of work. Businesses failed by the thousands. Hundreds of thousands of households fell into poverty. GDP had decreased by more than 20 percent in four years.
The country I love, the country in which I live, has been turned upside down. Those who were comfortable have seen their lives contract as they sold their car and sold their home. Families have pulled their children out of university because of the exorbitant cost. Young Greeks are going abroad for opportunity, a brain drain that could hobble Greece long into the future.
No statistic signifies the devastation more than this: By mid-2012, Greece, which once had the lowest suicide rate in Europe, had the third highest.
This situation and Greece’s global image form a tragic antithesis to the pride and joy Greeks felt during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. Today, even the most troubling aspects of “the Greek Paradox” seem minor by comparison.
Over decades, there were many causes that contributed to the crisis, but I am convinced a lack of decisive leadership deepened and compounded all of them.
What I learned heading our Olympic effort is that leadership is about confronting the issues head-on, about inspiring people to try to find solutions to the problems that keep us from achieving our goals.
The graver the situation, the tighter the timeline, the greater the importance of leadership.
A leader shows and paves the way and has a vision; a leader exercises discipline and leads by example; a leader does not shy from hard, hard work; a leader is willing to sacrifice; a leader instills a “can-do” problem-solving approach and always has plans A, B, and C available.
As I said in an address to the Clinton Global Initiative in April 2012,
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, as I’ve seen my own country go from the “high” of a successful Olympic Games, to the “low” of the current crisis.
And the more I thought about it, the more it confirmed my belief that the Greek people have great capacity. After all, we were the ones who were able to do in four years leading up to the Olympics what other countries could barely do in seven.
What we lacked—during the years when no progress was made on the Games, and in the years that the country has slipped into decline—is leadership. Leadership that is tough, and honest, and inspirational. Leadership that allowed the Greek people to envision a future for themselves that they may not have envisioned by themselves.
To me, that is the definition of leadership: to help people see a future and to see their own role and their own power in achieving it.
From Athens, to Arkansas, and to the Arab Spring, leaders who can do that are a vital resource. And they are a renewable resource.
Greece has suffered from a lack of leadership.
Successive governments blamed the previous ones for the gravity of the crisis; parties blamed other parties; and analysts blamed the bloated public sector and tax evasion. The Greek public was led to blame the European Union and Germany in particular; the European public responded by blaming their own stereotypical images of the lazy and profligate Greeks.
Taking their cue from all of that blame shifting, some thought it would be politically useful to blame even the Olympics themselves.
When the cost of the Athens 2004 Games began being mentioned as a factor that affected Greece’s debt, I was appalled. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. When fingers are being pointed, facts tend to fall by the wayside. And what began as a whisper campaign among those who opposed hosting the Games in the first place started to find purchase in the mainstream media.
By 2009, when the crisis erupted, Greece had amassed a public debt of 365 billion euros. According to the government’s own accounting, however, the investments made in the Summer Olympics by the government amounted to only 6 billion euros—less than one-sixtieth of the total debt of 2009!
As I have noted earlier, the organizing committee’s budget of two billion euros, which was my direct responsibility, returned a surplus of 123.5 million euros at the Games’ end.
What’s more, politicians inaccurately added to the costs of the Olympics much of the costs for several major infrastructure projects that were previously planned and budgeted: a new airport, a new ring road, and a suburban metro system, among others. (Never mind many other projects that were christened “Olympic” projects simply to get them funded and fast-tracked by the government.)
Yes, the major infrastructure projects were useful for the Games, but more important, they were necessary for the economic functioning and everyday life of the citizens of a modern country.
Indeed, one of the reasons that Greek governments of differing political stripes had sought to host the Games was to spur critical investments for economic prosperity. This is why many countries throughout the world compete to host the Games.
Even as the poisoned perception of the role of the Games in Greece’s economic woes spread, it wasn’t until January 2013 that we heard the economic benefit of the Games openly acknowledged by the Greek government.
On January 15, a member of Parliament named Yannis Panoussis asked Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras what, at the end of the day, the Games actually cost.
Stournaras began running through the numbers. He started with a total expenditure of 8.5 billion euros. From that, he subtracted ATHOC’s roughly two-billion-euro budget, because it wasn’t paid by the state, but rather funded out of television rights, sponsorships, and ticket sales.
He then cited another two billion euros that financed work done for the Unification of the Athens Archeological Sites or for the modernization of Athens hospitals (matters that were related to the Games, but loosely).
He also made reference to additional investments, such as of the Olympic Ring road or the revamping of the Coastal Front, and then explained how tourism and additional economic activity from the Games brought in a further 3.5 billion euros to state coffers (mainly from the value-added tax), resulting in a net cost of some one billion euros.
This sum, he continued, was more than compensated for by additional economic benefits from the Games.
Remember, the growth rate for Greece in the years up to the Olympics and
in the three years following was one of the highest in Europe, averaging 4.5 percent per year.
In the discussion that ensued in Parliament, Panoussis and Stournaras addressed the fact (one that I have addressed previously in these pages) that, beyond the dereliction of the Olympic venues, the legacy of the Games, in which modernized processes coupled with the people’s can-do attitude to overcome any challenge, was abandoned.
Yes, people who are concerned about Greece’s situation should point their fingers at the Olympics. But they should do so for an entirely different reason.
During the 2004 Summer Games, Greece had become a totally new country, acknowledged by everybody around the world.
Greece was a place that had won the Games not by right but by merit, and that sense of being governed by rules rather than relationships had started to infuse the culture of the country.
We created a vision for the Greek people that they may not have had for themselves but that they came to embrace. It was a vision of a competitive, modern, willing-and-able nation.
On the strength of that vision, we were able to create a mentality—in the organizing committee and the volunteer movement—that permeated through the administration, the judicial system, the local authorities, the public sector, and the citizens of Greece.
People took it upon themselves to solve problems. When I saw our staff, volunteers, and spectators smiling, I knew they weren’t doing so because they had been told to smile; they were smiling at a bigger role they were seeing—for themselves and for their country.
We banished the inefficiency that holds back the capabilities and talents of Greeks individually and collectively.
Everyone, whether they were a government official, an executive, a blue-collar worker, or a homemaker, believed that they had a role to play—even if that role was just being a spectator—in making the Olympics a success. And they acted on that belief.
The Greek people adapted to and, in many cases, came to embrace the changes we asked them to undertake.
In this common effort, we had resolved the paradox that Greeks overseas achieve great success while Greeks in their own country seem to accept failure.
If something of the “common cause” spirit we had built back in the days of our Olympic endeavor had survived, then that same spirit could have helped the people of Greece to solve the present difficult situation.
Instead, so much of what we were able to create was completely and unnecessarily dismantled, including the volunteer movement we had built. We had tens of thousands of dedicated individuals—a corps larger than either the Greek navy or air force—who had demonstrated a willingness to serve their country.
To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, Greece had people who were asking not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country. What other great national projects could those patriots have been asked to undertake?
Had these patriots and their sense of duty and selfless commitment been nurtured or enhanced, or simply kept intact, it would have been key to the spirit of solidarity that is so vitally needed now as Greece faces a crisis of almost unimaginable proportions.
EPILOGUE
SO, I HAVE GIVEN YOU MY STORY. A life story I could never have imagined but actually lived.
A rebellious girl who dreamed of a life for herself beyond the rocky shores of her native Crete.
A young lawyer who defied expectations to win a seat on the Athens city council.
A woman who found herself in a fairy tale romance, a coup de foudre, with one of Greece’s most admired businessmen.
A new kind of public figure who battled state bureaucracy and inefficiency to successfully invite the world to see a new Greece during the 2004 Olympic Games.
If you had told that little girl in Crete who dreamed of becoming an ambassador that she would one day be the face of her nation to the world, she would not have believed it.
If you had told that young lawyer that she would one day represent her nation in Parliament, she would not have believed it.
But this has been my journey. It is a journey I never could have predicted I would take. And one that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
My nation has likewise been on a long journey. And I truly believe that my nation’s future, like the future for that little girl in Crete, can be bright.
Leading up to the Athens Summer Games, we managed to overcome every challenge that was placed in our path: endless procedures for belated projects, permits covered in red tape, a sense that “We can do it tomorrow” instead of “We need it done yesterday.”
We were able to achieve in four years what was supposed to be done in seven.
It can be done.
The Greek Paradox can be resolved.
The Greek people have the capacity for change.
It is the Greek leaders who saw the Games not as a pinnacle but as a threat to the established order.
We must continue to expand the grassroots movements that are springing up in Greece to bring support and relief to those in need.
We must break the shackles of inefficiency that have created a culture of dependency.
We must overcome the deficit of confidence, get results, and only then confront our partners, not by begging but by believing in our own capabilities and skills.
Most important, we must seek out leadership at all levels of governance: leaders who will explain to the people the truth no matter how harsh it is; who will represent us with honor and pride and not with condescension; who will not fear responsibility; and who will nurture expectations and cancel envy.
And we must begin yesterday.
Only then, like the basil seeds that I distributed during my first political campaign, will Greece once again flourish and grow.
Only then will the world rediscover Greece for what it truly is.
Change is so desperately needed. A daring new start that will relegate past practices to history, permanently, and usher in an era with less Greek Drama and more Greek Triumph.
Yes, things must change. And that change begins with each and every one of us.
A fellow Cretan, Nikos Kazantzakis, once wrote: “You must love responsibility. You must say: ‘I, I myself will save the world. If the world perishes, I will stand to blame.’”
My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country Page 28