Eight months before the legislative elections that will elect the new head of state, the government of conservative Prime Minister Kyriákos Mitsotakis has been mired, since August, in a scandal of eavesdropping on political and media figures. New revelations relaunched the case on Sunday, November 6, when a European commission of inquiry summoned the Greek state to shed light on these serious accusations.
It’s a multi-act state scandal that’s been dubbed the Greek “Watergate,” named after the wiretap affair that brought down the US presidency in the 1970s. Not only worthy of a title film, this nickname also says a lot about the extent of the crisis that is shaking the Greek government today.
It began last July, when Nikos Androulakis, leader of the Pasok-Kinal socialist party, the country’s third-largest political force, accused the government of spying on him by revealing that his mobile phone had been the target of malware. Predator monitoring. This makes it possible to record messages, calls – even encrypted – and to access passwords and the internet browsing history of the infected device.
This Sunday, November 6, a new list of personalities who would have been wiretapped using the same software was revealed by the national weekly Documento. Among them, journalists, important businessmen… But also current ministers of New Democracy (EPP) and their wives, such as that of Foreign Affairs or the former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. If Kyriákos Mitsotakis, the current Prime Minister, had acknowledged the surveillance of opposition member Nikos Androulakis by evoking “an error” by the intelligence services, he vigorously denies having wiretapped some of his ministers. He also claimed that the Greek state had “never bought or used” the Predator software.
This affair, and these new developments, shake the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. In power for three years, the latter has already been sailing for several months in a difficult context. After his election in July 2019, the Prime Minister had placed Greek intelligence directly under his aegis. His government was already suspected of monitoring journalists working on sensitive subjects, such as corruption and migration.
The Greek state is also implicated for illegal and violent refoulement of migrants at the border with Turkey, which it denies. All in a tense economic situation, since demonstrations are multiplying to protest against inflation, which reached 9.1% in October. Two important figures have already been pushed out of the door following the first revelations last August: the head of intelligence and a close adviser to the prime minister – who is also his nephew.
At the national level, the government of Kyriákos Mitsotákis, bogged down in these scandals with drawers, is threatened, while legislative elections are looming in July 2023. At the European level, it is the confidence of the member countries of the Twenty-Seven in the Greece which is altered by it. Until now, Greece had always denied having recourse to this software, contrary to Hungary, Poland or Spain, which admitted to having used spyware for reasons of national security. “This is not only one of the worst breaches of privacy, but it affects democracy and the rule of law”, pointed out MEP Sophie in’t Veld, who took up the case within the European Parliament’s Malware Inquiry Committee (PEGA).
A special national parliamentary commission of inquiry had been set up after the revelation of opposition MP Nikos Androulakis. But many denounce a hindered investigation: it did not hear the Prime Minister in particular. “They did not investigate the subsidiaries of the Intellexa company, nor confiscate servers or computers (…). Some documents were very unfortunately destroyed”, lamented with the World the rapporteur of the PEGA committee. The European Commission, which deployed ten MEPs on the case, also came up against the silence of the Head of State, as well as that of the group which markets the software in Greece. MEPs have called on the Greek commission to investigate “urgently and thoroughly ahead of next year’s elections”.