and Mitsotakis sits comfortably inside it. Within the European People’s Party, governments that deliver growth on paper, lock down borders, and stay aligned with NATO are rewarded and shielded, regardless of what they do domestically. On top of that, the EPP is now unapologetically edging toward formal alliances with the far right. A right-wing bloc made up of the EPP, Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists, and Patriots for Europe now dominates the European Parliament, giving the EU the most right-wing assembly in its history and normalizing collaboration with forces once considered beyond the pale. Qatargate and other lobbying scandals did not produce a serious cleanup; they signaled to the political class that influence is simply another commodity, to be traded so long as it stays behind closed doors.
Greece is the clearest example of how this works. A country once cast as the sick man of Europe, punished with memoranda and IMF supervision for its corrupt political class in 2010, is now paraded as a model. The same state that was disciplined for cooking the books is sold back to Europe as a star pupil to be copied, with Mitsotakis garlanded for an “economic miracle” and talked up in Brussels as a future European Commission president.
For years, European leaders warned of an external menace to democracy; yet ultimately, the coup came from within. Politically, that is the real danger of the Greek “miracle”: it hands Europe’s ruling class a handy manual that says you can gut labor protections, hollow out media pluralism, spy on opponents, dismiss deadly disasters, funnel public money to party clients, and talk up new weapons deals with an Israeli government that has committed genocide in Gaza — and still be hailed as a modernizing reformer, so long as bond yields stay calm and capital keeps cashing in.
From: Greece’s Broken Democracy Is a Warning for Europe
Maintaining Tradition
New Democracy is not suddenly drowning in scandal; it has been swimming in these waters for years. Under Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis between 2004 and 2009, it faced a rolling crisis of legitimacy: these years saw the “Greek Watergate” wiretapping affair, the Vatopedi land swap controversy, the Siemens bribery case, and murky financial deals involving pension funds and state assets. This all fed a sense of entrenched graft and impunity. None of this ever brought real accountability for those at the top, but it normalized a style of rule in which backroom deals, clientelism, and the protection of party networks were treated as the Greek state’s basic operating system.
Mitsotakis came to power promising to break with that past, but his premiership has extended it. The first major crack in his stage-managed image came in 2022, when the Predator spyware scandal blew open. Investigations showed hundreds of people — ordinary citizens, journalists, opposition figures, and even his own ministers, including reporter Thanasis Koukakis and PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis — under surveillance through a toxic mix of illegal spyware and “legal” wiretaps, just after he pulled the intelligence service under his direct control. The trail led straight to his office: his nephew and main fixer, Grigoris Dimitriadis, and the head of the National Intelligence Service resigned, but no political figures have been prosecuted, and the government hurriedly shut down the parliamentary inquiry in what the opposition called a staged whitewash.
[…]
The OPEKEPE scandal — named after the state agency that channels EU farm subsidies — exposed a subsidy system riddled with made-up agricultural projects: invented livestock numbers, banana plantations on Mount Olympus, olive groves in military airports, even grazing land stretching out into the sea. Billions in EU funds were routed through this machinery while auditors were pushed aside and agency heads who questioned irregularities were removed.
A European investigation led by Kövesi’s office describes a systematic, organized fraud operation using OPEKEPE to siphon off Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds. Brussels has already hit Greece with a €392.2 million fine and a 5 percent cut to future farm subsidies for years of nonexistent oversight. Far from a handful of crafty villagers milking Brussels, the trail runs straight through the political class: New Democracy ministers and MPs, with especially thick clientelist webs in Crete — the same island flipped by the party in the June 2023 elections — as subsidy money washed through party-friendly intermediaries into safely fenced-off fiefdoms.