The phone tappings shouldn’t be an excuse to disempower a PM

The phone-tapping scandal may determine the outcome of the next election in Greece. It ought not to reverse the changes made to the institutional support around the prime minister. The latter should not be a matter of party or factional politics; rather, they concern the ability of a government - of any color - to deliver its policies. "Good government" is a matter of the national interest; complicity in phone tapping is a political question: The two should be kept separate.

Some years ago, I wrote a book (with Dimitris Papadimitriou) on how Greek prime ministers managed their governments. We highlighted a "paradox of power" between the formal strength of the position of the PM, enhanced under successive revisions of the Constitution, and the practical realities. We wrote of the period from 1974 to 2009 and we argued there were two enduring features of how the government...