AB

That’s a very good question. I would take back the word absolutely for various reasons, which is in itself an exaggeration. Because you find also in this state, certainly in this ministry, treasures of generosity or self-effacement in view of something bigger.

I found people here ready to sacrifice many hours without pay to help me find my way around, people whose talents were concealed, shoveled down, because the previous governments could not use them. And without this, you couldn’t do anything.

It also requires historical qualification. We had a society in 1821, when the revolution broke out, which was under Ottoman rule and organized locally through clans, extended families, and things like that. Many of the people who made up the revolution didn’t know anything about the Enlightenment or things like that. This came from the outside.

But when the revolution was finished, I mean, not really won, but not lost, you had a state structure imposed upon it which was based on the then dominant forms of state. This, together with a Bavarian bureaucracy, which came together with that new state, conflicted with what people knew, were conversant with, understood of themselves or society, and produced a sense that they could not really enter in what was for them a new kind of structure.

So you have a congenital divide, a congenital mistrust, from the very birth of that state. During the two centuries since, instead of political parties at power to break this kind of mistrust, they heightened it, and also added all kinds of clientelistic networks. With each new government a new superstructure was imposed over the old ones, so that a pyramid of such structures upon structures was built.

For instance, when we came in, we found that bidding processes for contracts from the ministry were under way. And as we tried to rationalize them, requests for interviews with me suddenly started coming in from some businessmen. As the ministry responsible for sports, we passed legislation to clean up betting on sports matches. During this process, black limos drove up here dispensing owners of football clubs who had to be told they could not bring the guns they were bearing into the building.

These are mere examples. A deeper symptom of the structure of corruption is that someone who has worked hard on a brief which is ready to go up to the next level for approval might put a €50 bill in the file in the hope that this might ensure it would be not neglected!

You arrive at a point when you don’t know where to start to do something about the whole structure. When you break, or try to break one structure, there’s another below, and this ad infinitum. So this is, let’s say, the site, the structural site, of corruption related to all the clientelistic networks.

But it is also, to be frank, related to how ordinary people are so very used to approaching the state to solve their problems. You have people with tragic histories and tragic problems who don’t know how to enter the state, to try to solve their problems through the institutional channels — or because the institutions throw their problems away. So what they do is bypass the institutions to reach the minister. The minister likes that, because this way he gets votes. And so this whole structure has in-depth effects on mentalities.

Even those of us who have always stood against this kind of thing, when we have a problem, the first question is whom do you know, not how to solve the problem. Whom do you know? We do it ourselves. So if you don’t accept this for yourself, you cannot address people and say from above, like the rationalists would try to do, oh, this is all bad, follow the rules. And this continues the mistrust. What we have to break is the mentalities. But this breaking of mentality starts from above; if you are to be frank start with yourself. And, of course, this is a long term procedure.

There is the question of whether to destroy the state or rationalize it. This seems to be the wrong question. On the one hand, you cannot rationalize this kind of state. On the other hand, rather than destruction we need a different word. What I would prefer, based on my experience in these few months, is to say: open up the state. For example, we have a big hall downstairs, and when schools arrive for different events I go down to address the students and teachers, and this is a breath of fresh air.