A week ago, the weekend edition of Ta Nea published an opinion survey conducted by one of the country’s oldest and most trustworthy polling companies.
The government, confronted with that objective data – and obviously motivated by a another objective fact, its implosion in the polls – reacted in a manner unfitting for democracies: a lack of composure and mudslinging.
Confronted with a commonplace government practice, which betrays the principles of political culture, our newspaper is obliged to defend the self-evident.
One must tell the hopping mad “government sources” which react in an unseemly manner that a poll depicts nothing other than the reality of a moment.
If that reality is not comfortable for the government, it is not the citizens who believe what they do, nor the pollsters who inquire in order to learn, nor the newspapers which publish their responses, who are to blame.
Consequently, the government need only do the self-evident. It must seek out the reasons for its implosion in the polls, which are not so difficult to find, and do whatever it can, in the framework of our democratic state, to recover.
In so doing, it must take into account a third self-evident fact. In a democracy, recovery does not come with name-calling, threats, and mudslinging, but rather with methodical effort, works, and results.
Here, we cannot but wish the government good luck, as we would do with every government, for the good of the country and with the hope, albeit faint, that our criticism, and that of all the media, will at long last motivate it to become better.
