Illiberal Conservatism Comes to Greece

It is now a meme-producing cliché in Greece to say that the government believes that all problems can be solved by hiring more police officers. Indeed, in inverse relation to the shrinking number of permanent staff in the Greek health system, police numbers have grown amid the pandemic.

As the official government census of public employees shows, between January 2020 and January 2021, the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection acquired 4,568 more staff, while the Ministry of Health lost 1,680 employees — possibly the only country in the world to reduce the number of its permanent health workers during the pandemic.