A Greek economist living in New York, a friend of George Soros, delivered the package to an Olympic Aviation pilot on the New York-Athens route. Inside this package was the “secret formula” for the 2000 elections, which today, exactly 23 years later, can be revealed. This package crossed the Atlantic in eight hours, crossed Europe and fell into the hands of people working in the state of Kostas Simitis. In early March, with the start of the election campaign, PASOK was leading the polls with 3%-4%. In early April, the difference with N.D. Kostas Karamanlis has shrunk. A radical solution had to be found.

PASOK’s problems arose because of the innovations of the then 33-year-old Ari Spiliotopoulos, a spokesman for the ND press. and a friend of Karamanlis who was an adherent of the middle space strategy. Aris believed that the party should turn off the “anti-right” reflexes of public opinion with love attacks on the left. At the same time, he had to question whether the reform policies of PASOK’s modernizers, which ensured the fulfillment of the Maastricht criteria, led to economic development with social justice. Together with the publicist and friend of Karamanlis from Thessaloniki, Perikli Pilides and Gina Dragona, he staged N.D. which seemed doomed to eternal opposition.

Aris drew an original frame for posters and commercials on the block. So did Pericles, who then developed all the scripts. The central slogan of the New Democracy was “Greece is better. And we want her.” This came from qualitative research (focus groups). They showed that the townspeople adhere to one phrase: “Greece is better.” However, as a political slogan (“Greece got better”) it didn’t work when the researchers tried it in the same focus groups that chose those words. One evening at Pagrati’s bar, Aris came up with a solution: “Let’s add the phrase: ‘And we want her.'”

Descending Mars came to the attention of the party nomenclature. Some were furious when he insisted that Karamanlis’s Athens performance be short, held at the Olympic Stadium, followed by a concert by Stamatis Spanoudakis. Somehow N.D. he lost that election in a stream but received 42.7% and thus Karamanlis was not contested after the election. Stratos Fanaras of Metron Analysis was the only one who predicted PASOK would win by 1% during the ANT1 exit poll. The victory was mainly due to the massive movement of voters from the Coalition to PASOK in Athens B.

The strategies of Aris Spiliotopoulos and Kostas Laliotis, who “managed” the election campaigns of Rigillis and Harilaou Trikoupis, respectively.

PASOK started the pre-election period with confidence in victory. However, public opinion experienced “reform fatigue”. Simitis, who consistently outperformed “premier fitness”, had to show that, along with the confidence he instilled in managing major national goals and protecting the country’s European perspective, he also guaranteed revenue boosts. . Most importantly, EMU membership should not be taken for granted before the elections. However, it has not yet been ratified, which will happen in June 2000 in Feira, Portugal. All this was discussed in Kostas Simitis’s meetings with the late writer and head of the prime minister’s office, Nikos Temelis, and Petros Efthymiou, who, among other things, took over the editing of Simitis’s speeches.

At the beginning of the pre-election period, Harilau Trikoupi was preparing for a walk, for the “sofa elections”, but soon the dust of defeatism began to settle on the “sofa” elections. Until Kostas Laliotis took action. And only his presence in the party offices changed the situation. Every day he held briefings for the press. As a backdrop, he set up a booth and hung up the old front pages of right-wing newspapers (mostly Apogeumatini), which said that N.D. he would definitely win the 1996 elections. In this way, he wanted to undermine the credibility of a part of the centre-right press that was reporting that victory in 2000 was inevitable. He activated additional long-distance transport networks once he realized that Rigillis had already booked all the plane and ship tickets. He took advantage of the slopes of N.D. (e.g., Karatsaferi’s infamous statement that “we will appoint 500,000 of our own children”). He himself invented and actually directed all the TV commercials. He found slogans, wrote texts for posters, gave clear instructions on staged coverage of speeches. “PASOK got off the couch,” the press wrote. “The future has begun” was the main slogan.

“Simitis’s speech in Athens should be the Greek equivalent of Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech,” was the idea that arose at the Champ de Mars meeting. But no one was able to find the text of America’s black leader’s speech on the early Internet. A phone call to economist Stelios Zavvo in New York solved the problem. The next day, an American collection of historical political speeches arrived in Athens. Reading Luther King’s speech prompted me to formulate an unexpected Greek speech.

The logic was this: Greeks feel unprivileged, resentful, almost alienated in Europe, just as blacks feel in America. Stimulating a sense of pride can have such a strong emotional effect that it overcomes anxiety about finances or the traditional competitive relationship that the Greek people develop with the respective authorities. In addition, the word “vision” (instead of “dream”) has always been at the heart of PASOK’s political discourse. Simitis evaluated the data and for the first time decided to speak in person, in the first singular. “I have a vision for Greece, a vision that marked my political path: Greece occupies a high place in the society of European states.” “One Vision and Seven Commitments” was the title of a speech believed to have helped PASOK lose 1% in rolling polls on Friday and win 1.1% on Sunday.

Fact

Battle for identities

It all started a week after the election. The new Minister of Justice, Michalis Stathopoulos, says that the indication of religion on a police identity card is contrary to the relevant 1997 law. What followed was the most violent conflict between church and state in our recent history, with the fiery “assemblies of the people” in Thessaloniki. and in Athens and collection of signatures, which will not prevent the inevitable.

Epilogue

Last victim

The November 17 reappears in the Psychiko area, mortally wounding British military attache Stephen Saunders. The diary is written on June 8, 2000. He was supposed to be the last victim of a terrorist organization.

Sophocleous Street

Greek collapse

On September 17, 1999, the general index of the Athens Stock Exchange recorded an all-time high (6,335 points, an increase of 579% compared to 1996). It is the culmination of a collective madness created in the euphoric climate of the time (entry into the EBU, the Olympics, etc.). A downward spiral begins very quickly and will not end until March 2003, when the General Index falls to 1467 units.

What have we seen?

“New” TV

On June 6, 1998, Sex and the City began airing in the United States on the HBO subscription network. In early 1999, The Soprano premiered on the same television frequency. And in June 2001, we see the first episode of The Client is Always Dead, also produced by HBO. It was the dawn of a new television form, a new language with the cinematic quality and narrative ambitions that are now considered the norm. But then it wasn’t. History was being written before our eyes.

What do I remember?

Two files

In May 1999, I settled on the second floor of Maximos. We created a war room that drastically closed the voting gap in European elections and led to the overthrow and victory of 2000.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 8, 2000, I went down to the Prime Minister’s office. In the lobby, Daphne Simitis asked for my forecast. I said, “Win by 1.5 points.” I repeated the same thing in a meeting with the Prime Minister, who responded with his familiar—inconspicuous—smile.
I’m staying at Maximos. Shortly after 9 o’clock, the Prime Minister called me: “Petro, I have been picked up by Ilias Nikolacopoulos. He told me that tomorrow we will lose the elections. Please prepare two statements for me. One for victory, one for defeat. I answered him that “tomorrow we will win the elections. The declaration of victory will be ready, the declaration of defeat will be in a sealed envelope that will never need to be opened.”
I actually ripped open the sealed envelope with my hands…

PETROS EFTHIMIOU
Former Minister of Education

City

Next station: metro

It was an incredibly sunny weekend, last in January 2000, when the government was due to open two lines of the Athens Metro after eight years of work. To give the event a celebratory tone, the public is allowed free travel “to experience the new environment”. And what is happening is unprecedented: hundreds of thousands of Athenians are flooding the 14 glittering stations, thereby showing their impatience for the most important infrastructure project of the post-colonial period.