LETTER FROM GREECE:Nick Papandreou is devoted to literature and music and leaves politics to his family
I HAVEN’T met the new Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, but his brother, Nick, is a friend. He has spoken in Corfu several times at the Durrell School – but not on politics or not directly. Nick – the son, grandson, and now the brother of prime ministers – leaves politics to his family and is devoted to literature and music.
“Politics,” says Nick, “is an enemy to family. At some point love, no matter how strong, hides and cowers in the corner while politics, hot, naked and sweating, moves in like a Minotaur.”
In 1981 he saw his brother taking his seat in parliament and wrote: “I was a little jealous of him, but also relieved that it was him standing there and not me, that it was him locked for ever into my father’s world, not me.”
Nick is the author of Father Dancing (1996), a “fictional memoir” of growing up in his family’s political context before and during the military regime of “the colonels” (1967 to 1974).
Father Dancing could be anyone’s father, but it isn’t. If you have witnessed the military dictatorship holding a gun to the head of your elder brother (you are 10 and George is 15), if your grandfather (a former prime minister) dies under house arrest, then you see life through different spectacles to ordinary folk.
You may be a writer, but with this genetic imprint you don’t write about sunshine and daffodils.
Both George and Nick carry the excitement of politics in their bloodstream and its violent realities are etched on their memories. The Papandreous are a family indentured to democracy.
After exile during the dictatorship, their father (Andreas, 1919-1996) returned to Greece and became prime minister in 1981 as the socialist founder of Pasok (the party George has led since 2004).
He held office until 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, surviving a major political scandal and a big hiccup in his family life when he left his American wife for another woman.
In the second World War, grandfather George (1888-1968) led the government-in-exile in a crucial coalition of “national unity” – an idea still being discussed as a possible way out of Greece’s current difficulties.
He wrote of “the national struggle”, by which he meant the determination to evict the axis powers from Greece and to return to democracy, “a sacred subject in the hearts of Greek people”. He had the painful task of steering Greece through the civil war (1944 to 1949 or 1946 to 1949, depending on which history book you read).
That war is still being fought – verbally – between households in the village where I live and is reflected in the 21 parliamentary seats held by the communists (7 per cent of the national vote).
For “old” George, the sense of a nation was the prerequisite for liberty and justice. Today, faced with issues such as immigration, the Greek diaspora, education, health, the need for transparency and meritocracy (to say nothing of finance, where exchequer debt equals more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product), the question of what successfully constitutes the Greek nation is still being debated.
Young George has inherited the sense of indecision and the indeterminate nature of modern Greek politics that permeates society. Nick tries to express his own sense of a nation in a different way: he writes and speaks eloquently about the transition of traditional Greek music in the work of Manos Hadjidakis (1925- 1994) and Mikis Theodorakis (born 1925) – the latter a close friend and a thorn in the side of the colonels.
Nick has shown – in a memorable lecture in Corfu, published as Mikis and Manos: a Tale of Two Composers – that their styles of orchestration betray divergent attitudes to both culture and politics, different ways of projecting Greece’s old identity on to the modern world.
Theodorakis’s way is a socialist way of carrying forward what is soulful in the Greek “nation” and this chimes with Papandreou politics. It’s Nick’s way of saying “Greekness can be negotiated”.
For Nick, as he admits in Father Dancing, “the music is not music, it is speeches, cavalcades of cars, emigrant workers, crowd- filled squares”. It is the legacy of both a dynasty and an era in modern statesmanship. “Now,” he tells us, “when I get up to dance, I see crowds, I hear speeches, I see my father, dancing.”
We still have to discover to what tune his brother will dance. His 20-seat majority is not only a landmark in Greek politics, it is also a signal to the EU moguls that Greece is not typical of the general move to the centre-right.
In 1947, old George Papandreou put his finger on a point which must sorely beleaguer young George today, when he called for “moral rectitude to call things by their real names”.
In his fiction, Nick calls people and ideas by their real names – not least in his story about a village prostitute and the local priest – but his brother now has to choose between the transparency which he has promised the electorate, and more expedient strategies.
Today, with major political and financial scandals hanging over the outgoing and incoming governments, “calling things by their real names” will be a minefield.
Richard Pine is director emeritus of the Durrell School of Corfu, where he lives