Introducing GreeceIn the early days of the summer of 2007 Greeks awoke to find their country alight: literally. Forest fires had broken out in the thickly carpeted hills around Athens. Within a week or two they had also erupted with unparalleled fury across wide areas of the Peloponnese, Evia and even as far north as Epiros. Satellite pictures showed a pall of billowing smoke drifting skyward, ash covered many neighbourhoods of Athens, thousands lost their homes and 66 hapless souls their lives. All the while, incessant talking heads on Greek TV loudly proclaimed this to be Greece's worst disaster of recent times; it was widely believed that the fires were deliberately lit, adding insult to injury. The 2007 firestorm not only had an ecological fallout, but also severely dented the reputation of the conservative government of the New Democracy party of Konstandinos Karamanlis. Such was the anger directed at the government - accused by many of idly standing by while their country burned - that in the September 2007 national elections Karamanlis was returned with a majority of only two in the 300-seat parliament. It was a wake-up call and he knew it.
All this came at a time when the three-and-a-half-year-old Karamanlis Government had considered itself to be sitting pretty. Greece had been revelling in the European spotlight for some time, enjoying a residual glow after the success of the 2004 Olympic Games, their unexpected triumph as UEFA football champions in the same year, and Patras being the European Capital of Culture in 2006. Yet for all their pride in and celebration of recent achievements, the Greek population proved themselves to be, ultimately, pragmatic and illustrated that politics is never far from the core of the Greek psyche. In the land where democracy was born, true democracy still prevails and the will of the people can be as strong as the winds that fanned those calamitous fires.
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