Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

The speech of politicians is not guiding, ideological, or clear. It does not inspire, teach, or direct. It is empty speech. For that reason it is not useful.

Moreover, the speech that comes from politicians has been and remains unstable, shifting, vague, contradictory, misleading, and, above all, fanatical, intolerant, uncompromising, and wooden.

It closely resembles the speech of a fanatical preacher who does not tolerate dialogue and does not place under discussion the religious and theological dogmas considered timeless, unalterable, and immutable, not subject to the wear of time and not evolving.

Consequently, empty and dogmatic political speech corresponds to those who, as a rule, have an elastic conscience, tolerate everything, whose morality is mercurial, and whose ideology is identified with chaos.

These observations come from following what politicians over decades until now have put forward, analyzing without analyzing, explaining without explaining, arguing without arguments, and at the same time supporting diametrically opposite views on the same issue, views that constantly change like sand in the Sahara desert...

Political speech rarely becomes critical when it refers to the party or faction of the person who delivers it. And when judgments are expressed, they are directed immediately and indirectly at rival and competing parties. Never, however, at the party to which the speaker belongs; instead of analyzing and explaining, he obscures, conceals, and always justifies.

For many decades now, together with the spread of television channels, empty political speech has spread to the ends of the territory.

We enjoyed to saturation the endless cockfights of politicians of various shades and supposed ideologies, and we became certain that politicians belonging to different parties cannot reach even a formal understanding, nor maintain an acceptable level of exchange of views and dialogue.

Political confrontations are always accompanied by sharpness, rudeness, provocation, half-knowledge, and above all the pursuit of deception through the presentation of falsehoods, monstrosities, and pretenses.

The representative of the government cannot possibly agree with the representative of the opposition, or especially of the left-wing tendencies, on any matter, even the most commonplace, pointless, and insignificant. I would say that the sharpest and absolute disagreement would arise even in a discussion of whether it is now day or night. The representative of the governing party would claim it is day, the opposition representative would claim it is night, the representative of the third party would declare it is neither day nor night, the representative of the third party would stress that it is dusk, the fourth that dawn is visible, and the fifth that we have a lunar eclipse. In any event, agreement is impossible even on the most trivial, meaningless, and worn-out matters.

Disagreement is maintained with stubbornness and anger, with irony, hypocrisies, and insults. It is impossible for the television viewer or listener, however well intentioned, patient, and willing, to follow even the appearance of dialogue. Monotonous monologues, declarations or slogans, cries and barks are heard, from which the citizen cannot benefit or manage to understand the subject of the discussion, much less of the quarrel.

In earlier times, after the Cyprus tragedy and the change of regime of 1974, when the party charmers were at their zenith, first distributing the money gathered in state coffers and, when that ran out, borrowed money never to be returned, the squares and surrounding streets were packed with supporters. The monologue of the leader was heard, with repeated slogans, exaggerations, flattery of the mob, ceaseless promises of benefits, and foolishness.

Later, beside the supposedly gifted leaders, who were endlessly amused by the stupidity and naivete of the applauding masses, other poor-quality orators attached themselves. Usually they were close relatives of the leaders and their flatterers: sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Each of them chewed over a slogan. Even then, there could be no talk of political speech.

Recently, amid the general crisis, after the slogans, witticisms, promises, assurances, and all the other words that professional and apprentice politicians had learned to scatter were exhausted, the speech of fanaticism, human devouring, pseudo-patriotism, and sharpness was put into operation.

All those engaged in politics, old and new without exception, transmit this equally hollow speech.

One shouts that he will fight the troika unyieldingly and throw it out of the country. Another declares that he will punish the traitors without mercy, those who handed over Greece's sacred things to foreigners, meaning Europeans. A woman forgotten in the general secretariat of one of the Marxist parties announces that Greece must leave the European Union, leave the monetary union, and carve its own path in order to fight the imperialism of others.

Detached from the large parties and self-excited, a stout former minister has raised the banner of revolution, invoking divine help. He has taken on everyone and is rewarded for it with increased preference rates.

Most people whose old or new profession is politics have understood that they are dealing with a people without ballast, uneducated, egotistical, led here and there, ignorant of history, and not taught by suffering. That is why they renewed their empty speech with abundant fresh air or, as the sovereign people would say, hot air. This air will push those who speak empty words into parliament and from there into comfort, to our health.

By choosing such representatives, without political arguments, without principles and ideology, without programs and without ballast, with only empty words and the wooden language of fanaticism and decline, we will again be called to pay for the damage. We will suffer another tragedy, and the last error will be worse than the first.