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Closing of State Broadcaster Leaves Greece in Turmoil News Finds New Ways to Flow as Greek State Broadcaster Is Shut
(about 11 hours later)
ATHENS — Greeks were in shock and the fragile coalition government was in disarray on Wednesday, a day after Greece unexpectedly shut down the state broadcaster, the most drastic move to slash the country’s bloated public sector since Athens applied for a foreign bailout in 2010. ATHENS — Private television channels here suspended their news coverage as of 6 a.m. Wednesday in solidarity with employees of the state broadcaster, ERT, which was shut down by the government on Tuesday, while newspaper headlines conveyed the shock felt by many Greeks at the closing of a 75-year-old institution that had employed 2,900 people.
Thousands of protesters, including many of the 2,900 workers laid off from the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, known as ERT, rallied outside its headquarters northeast of Athens in the early hours on Wednesday as ERT’s symphony orchestra played for them. The crowds dispersed and reassembled later in the morning. “An Execution to Please the Troika,” read one in the center-left newspaper Eleftherotypia, a reference to the trio of creditors — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — whose representatives are back in Athens this week to audit Greece’s progress in sticking to conditions attached to the country’s multibillion-euro bailout.
Private television channels suspended their news coverage as of 6 a.m. Wednesday in solidarity with ERT employees, while newspaper headlines conveyed the shock felt by many Greeks at the closing of a 75-year-old institution. Thomas Dedes, 67, a Greek retiree, said that a day spent chasing underground news reports and racing across online video channels and digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook reminded him of the unsavory days when Greece was ruled by a military dictatorship.
The banners adorning street kiosks read “War Over ERT,” “Fury Over Sudden Death” and “An Execution to Please the Troika,” a reference to the trio of foreign lenders that administer the bailout money. “This is worse than the junta,” said Mr. Dedes, recalling how people had to get their news surreptitiously or by word of mouth in 1973 when the junta’s leaders tightly controlled Greek state television and foreign news broadcasts. “What’s next? Tanks in front of Parliament?”
The country’s two main labor unions, Gsee and Adedy, called a 24-hour strike for Thursday to protest the government’s “provocative” decision to close ERT. Staff members at daily newspapers also plan to walk out on Thursday in solidarity with ERT employees. By early Wednesday, a form of guerrilla digital warfare had sprung up on the Internet to defy the government’s orders for a news shutdown. Numerous ERT employees continued operating an underground broadcast of Greek news through satellite streams. Those in turn were picked up by young Internet-savvy Greeks, who retransmitted hundreds of headlines on Facebook and Twitter throughout the day.
In defiance of the government’s decision, ERT employees continued to broadcast on Wednesday from the defunct organization’s offices in the Athens surburbs and from the second-largest city in Greece, Thessaloniki, via digital television and the Internet. One leader of the organized charge is an Internet news outlet, the Press Project, whose founder, Kostas Efimeros, 38, sprang into action with his team of seven journalists and technicians immediately after the government announced that ERT, which ran radio and TV channels, would be closed.
The surprise decision on Tuesday to shut down ERT came a day after representatives of the troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — returned to Athens on Monday for new talks on the progress of the country’s efforts to overhaul its economy. Greece’s pledge to lay off public workers was high on the agenda. As the government tried to cut the power to ERT’s antennas, Mr. Efimeros and his team tapped into satellite signals broadcast surreptitiously by ERT employees and posted them to the group’s Web site and on social media. In a telephone interview, he said the Press Project was working to transmit ERT’s broadcast signal via Wi-Fi as a backup.
Also on Monday, Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company, failed to submit a bid to buy Greece’s national gas company, a deal that Athens had hoped was done after a series of meetings between Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and the Gazprom chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller. The Press Project’s reporters have also been stationed outside of ERT headquarters north of Athens, where thousands of people have gathered in protest, as well as in front of the Parliament building, armed with cameras and microphones to keep the stream of news updates flowing.
In another blow, MSCI, which compiles world stock indexes, downgraded Greece to the status of emerging market from developed market on Tuesday, citing the country’s failure to meet criteria for market accessibility, like practices regarding securities borrowing and lending facilities. Greece’s finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, said Wednesday that ERT employees were breaking the law by continuing to broadcast news surreptitiously and would “face the consequences” if they persisted.
The timing of the decision to shutter ERT was widely seen by political analysts as an attempt by Mr. Samaras to show boldness and decisiveness after accusations of foot dragging on economic changes and the Gazprom snub. But his move further alienated his two coalition partners: the Socialist Party, known as Pasok, and the Democratic Left, which increasingly complain of being sidelined in decision making. Mr. Efimeros said they were ready for that.
On Mr. Samaras’s orders, the press ministry on Wednesday quickly released a bill outlining the framework for a new, leaner replacement for ERT. A government spokesman, Simos Kedikoglu, said Wednesday that the new entity would be set up over the summer. It remained unclear how many people it would employ. “If the police try to shut us down, we will still have ways to broadcast the news for Greeks around the world,” said Mr. Efimeros, who said the group started “guerrilla transmissions” of news on the Internet three years ago from Egypt, as the Arab Spring broke out. He said its experience there taught it how to outwit government efforts to shut down alternative news outlets.
Pasok and the Democratic Left immediately responded with a joint proposal to revoke the decision to close ERT. It was the latest in a string of internal disputes that have tested the stability of the fragile coalition, which was cobbled together last June to prevent a messy default and a Greek exit from the euro currency union. It is dominated by Mr. Samaras’s center-right New Democracy party. The government said Tuesday that it had decided to shut ERT and would reopen it later with far fewer employees to satisfy the demands by Greece’s creditors because the news outlet had become corrupt and bloated. That view has long been shared by many Greeks.
Some officials suggested that coalition would hang together, at least for now. “It is common knowledge that every time a new government came in, they would put in a new director sympathetic to the leading party, and would then hire a lot of people,” said Amalia Zavacopoulou, 32, a schoolteacher. “There are a lot of stories about how many people work just two hours a day.”
“We don’t want to bring down the government,” said Andreas Papadopoulos, an official for the Democratic Left. “But this is a mistake by New Democracy and Mr. Samaras and must be corrected. With such actions they are testing the limits of democracy.” Voicing similar concerns was Dimitris Sporakis, 47, who lost his job in a detergent factory last fall. “They’ve been having a party up in Agia Paraskevi with our money for a long time now,” he said, referring to the Athens suburb where ERT’s headquarters are. “It’s about time the civil servants felt some pain, too.”
Pasok called an emergency session of its political council for Wednesday afternoon and was expected to press Mr. Samaras for a meeting of coalition leaders. Nonetheless, many Greeks felt uncomfortable with what Ms. Zavacopoulou called a “quasi-authoritarian” approach by the government.
On the streets of Athens, the reaction Wednesday was a mix of shock, anger and nostalgia. Prokopis Doukas, a former anchor for ERT’s main state channel, Net, said he and his colleagues were shocked and disappointed by the sudden decision to dismiss them but also angry that a government that is itself accused of corruption should call the state broadcaster a “haven of waste.”
“This is worse than the junta,” said Thomas Dedes, a 67-year-old retiree, referring to the military dictatorship that ruled Greece in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “What’s next? Tanks in front of Parliament?” “I’m not saying that employees and unions are blameless, but it’s the management and the politicians who put them there who are chiefly responsible for wasteful spending,” Mr. Doukas said before entering a studio in ERT’s headquarters near Athens to join colleagues for a live program, being broadcast on the Internet.
“You can’t just shut down state television,” said Irini Milaki, 50, a schoolteacher. “What kind of democracy are we? We don’t deserve to be European.” “Our real fear is that the same government that engaged in the exchange of favors is now saying it will create a modern, transparent broadcaster,” he said. “We don’t want the government to fall, but how can we trust it?”
Others expressed disbelief at the speed of the move on ERT. “It takes longer to shut down a taverna,” said Costas Tasopoulos,45, a restaurant manager whose wife is a civil servant. The government, he said, “might drag their feet on other things, but when it comes to cutting jobs and salaries they move like lightning.” The event raised the specter of a further weakening of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s fragile ruling coalition, whose politicians suggested they would try to block the move on Wednesday night even though it did not require parliamentary approval.
“We don’t want to bring down the government,” said Andreas Papadopoulos, an official for the Democratic Left, which is part of the coalition with the prime minister’s New Democracy party. “But this is a mistake by New Democracy and Mr. Samaras and must be corrected. With such actions they are testing the limits of democracy.”
On Mr. Samaras’s orders, the Mass Media Ministry on Wednesday quickly released a bill outlining the framework for a new, leaner replacement for ERT. The government spokesman, Simos Kedikoglu, said Wednesday that the new entity would be set up over the summer. It remained unclear how many people it would employ.