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Anastasia Balezdrova

Thanos Tzimeros owns an advertising agency. He became better known abroad than in Greece with his letter to Angela Merkel, which he sent last October. In it, he wrote that in the country "there is no industry like those in Western countries." As he himself told for GRReporter, the letter was directed mostly at the Greek political system. The response was great and the interest of Greeks of normal reasoning has grown to the movement "ReCreate Greece" (Dimiourgia Xana), which has been an officially registered political party since December 2011.

"The letter to Angela Merkel was actually a letter to the Greek political system and the Greek public opinion. Because I am a person of communication, I knew that establishing a party by Thanos Tzimeros, who is known only in his circles, without a way of presenting his positions, would make no sense. I strived to become known somehow to enable others understand my way of thinking. The letter was written because of a very important reason. It was to tell Angela Merkel what we see: that to cure a patient suffering from profuse bleeding, no blood should be infused into the patient before the bleeding is stopped. If these scammers, the politicians are not forced to carry out the reforms immediately, all funds will sink into the black hole of corruption no matter how much money was allocated in the first, second, eighth, eighteenth memorandum. Now, two years after the immoral torture of Greek people, there are still 1,800 public enterprises that were established without activity but only to enable politicians to assign people “close to them” to these companies. There are public companies that have not worked since 2004. Their employees just go to work and do nothing. In the period 2007-2010, at the heat of the crisis and bankruptcy, unions received funding to the amount of over 177 million euro through the worker’s organisation without being invoiced. Today's politicians will not change this; they will do nothing different. We will see what will happen when the commissioners come, hanging around in the ministries like Cerberus, because they will face a wall of denial and protection created by employees, who come from the party apparatus. Serious civil servants, who work, are pushed into the corner, and all party puppets take the responsible positions.

I wrote the letter to show that Greeks think differently. It is not a coincidence that it was adopted with enthusiasm in Greece. So far, 150,000 have read it. They sent me e-mails like "yes, let someone finally say how things are. If you decide to do something, we are with you." And although the Greek media were silent and did not understand anything, the next day a journalist from the big German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung called me and the newspaper had published an interview on the third page under the heading "A Different Greece". Foreigners are confused too. They say, "These people were given so much money all these years and they wasted it. They produced nothing and only consumed. They formed these obligations. Now we are writing off 100 billion of their debt, trying to introduce order into their home and in return, they are shouting and cursing us?" I must tell you that the West will not be patient for long. I talk to people there and the messages from Brussels, Berlin and Paris are that the idea of kicking us out of the eurozone is no longer a taboo. This is what we are trying to save.

Thanos Tzimeros believes he has achieved his goal because a large number of Greeks appreciated his action. "Even the mere fact that I have got to know such brains that have succeeded in Greece and abroad, people who move between Athens and the Silicon Valley, do doctorates and teach is enough. The biggest wound of Greece currently is that the strongest brains are leaving the country. Most of my friends left because they could not continue here and would fail. Because the changes we strive to make will take time and it depends only on us to make it shorter. We are the ones to allow this tragic situation to continue over the next 15 years or to tell ourselves to get down to work immediately. I can describe what is necessary by combining the two slogans of the two immoral parties PASOK and New Democracy: What we need is to immediately re-establish the state."

"ReCreate Greece" (Dimiourgia Xana) is a political party, involving non-politicians, representatives of the manufacturing economy. In the words of the founder Thanos Tzimeros, their goal is to create a modern, European Greece, which will grow and prosper. "This is a different Greece. These are the Greeks, who were silent all these years but it does not mean that they had no opinion or political position. The only difference was that these positions could not be made public because the combination of corrupt politician and corrupt supporter holding the respective party flag in his hands was invincible. A few years ago, it was quite impossible to say that Greece was going to fail. Now, we think it is time for someone to go ahead and tell the truth and be heard. Before that, we would be ridiculous."

According to Thanos Tzimeros, despite the two years of financial supervision, Greece continues to be on the brink of default because "the politicians who have brought it to this state have undertaken to "save" it from bankruptcy, using the same method, i.e. cheating. All members of the Greek political system are ordinary criminal scammers. They simply have learned to cheat. They lie to our European partners, lie to their voters, and lie to everything and everyone. This is the only thing they know how to do. If there is a change in the political system no prospect for the country will appear."

He believes that this change can be achieved "if people, who do not vote or run the white ballot, or vote for one party to punish the other one, decide to allow people like them, but experts in their professional fields, assume the responsibility for the governing. We know very well how to take on a project, what is the term, the price, the effect. If we apply this vast knowledge we have from the private sector in governing Greece, it will shoot up like a pressed spring."

In his curriculum vitae, Thanos stated that he created his advertising company choosing the name Reverse in order to express his resistance to the way of operation of the advertising market in Greece. "The advertising market in the country was another closed thing. This was the fifth power, in terms of the fact that by the practice of paying the media, which paid the journalists, advertising could control the information flow. I.e. a businessman whose ad was running on TV benefited from the better treatment of the media to him as a customer. In addition, the legislation has facilitated the unclear transactions, which led to the strange phenomenon, namely the failure of a television station to cause the failure of its customers instead of its suppliers. This is something unprecedented. Although I was a very reliable young employee with significant influence over a large number of customers, I have left the big advertising companies and created my own agency, which is operating based on full transparency and proper invoicing. That is why I chose the name Reverse, to denote that I do exactly the opposite of what others do."

Thanos Tzimeros believes that the policy of cutting wages and pensions only creates problems. "What we will do is create a favourable environment for investment. The only thing achieved by cutting salaries and pensions, although they are really high, is to doom all citizens to poverty. Greece's problem is that investments are not tolerated." He believes that investors find it difficult not to pay the high wages, but the fact that they cannot even draw up a business plan. "The investor does not know when it will get approved, what bribe he would be asked, how many documents are needed, where they will be delayed. This environment hampers investments very much, especially when in neighbouring countries like Turkey and Bulgaria, and in Serbia and Macedonia lately, they can find a favourable environment for investment. Strange as it may sound, what will happen not only to the government but also to the private employees depends on the tax system and the business environment. If no conditions for development are created, it cannot come. What will follow if this does not happen? We will fight for a packet of pasta."

The people from "ReCreate Greece," know that deep-rooted mentality for increased state participation will be difficult to eradicate. "So many generations grew up with the dream of finding a place in the public sector, and unfortunately, that was all a person with insufficient knowledge, desire and ability could imagine. That is why it is difficult to eradicate this way of thinking. This is one of the challenges of a political movement that does not try to pat someone on the back. We are not bringing a sack of money, but are simply saying that we all need to roll our sleeves up and get down to work. To employ a mass in the public sector means that not only is the labour market deprived of young potential, but also that many young people are allowed to be unproductive. The rot created in society goes beyond the scope of economic factors. Generations are destroyed who learn to just do nothing. This is a moral crime."

"Our slogan is that responsible policy can be made only with responsible citizens. If they just sit on the couch at home and just go to vote for someone every four years, mocking his predecessor and then vote again for him and mock his predecessor, nothing good can happen. It is simply not possible for people not to get informed, not to be acquainted with the positions of political formations and decide the fate of Greece. For this reason we voted for the "re-creator" of the country Kostas Karamanlis, who was more than apparently lazy. And then, we voted for the expresser of the motto "There is money," George Papandreou, who was evidently a man of low intelligence. I.e. people who I would not even hire as doorkeepers, became prime ministers. Now, another one is preparing to take this post, who also seems to be not intelligent and who has not worked a single day in his life and has no prestige in Europe. Citizens should leave the nirvana of "what will you give us" and start thinking about "what we will do together." Both private and public sector, employed and unemployed should create a unifying vision for this country. This cannot be anything but work. All successful people have succeeded by working rather than by appointments and protests in Syntagma Square."

"Yesterday I had enough of crap like, "Shame on them, they should write off this debt. "Well, but nobody has put a gun to our head to borrow so much money. When a large part is being written off, requiring guarantees that they will get the rest is quite natural. If we pay back the money, the guarantees will not be threatened. If we have again decided to swallow it up, then I am sorry. Another issue is that Europe should not have left Greece get to this state, after years of exceeding all the statutory indicators for the size of the debt. They should have taken measures not to smile at Karamanlis, just because they were from the same party. They should have checked whether the money was used for the projects. Of course, Europe is operating on the principle of trust between the states and cannot have control authorities check whether a country is cheating or not. So, we should not be bothered by the fact that memoranda are voted and the supervisory Troika comes to the country. Because we ourselves should have made our own memorandum. It is not Wolfgang Schaeuble’s fault that we have not made a Property Register for so many years and the result is state property seized by anyone. It is now Angela Merkel’s fault that we gave pensions to 14,000 dead people and nobody thought to check who that man was, who had reached the age of 112 years and walked by himself to receive his pension. We gave pensions to the daughters of civil servants, who have not worked a day and salaries to the amount of 6,000 euro to heads of small railway stations in the country, given that the state railways OSE bilks the state every day out of one million euro. We ourselves have done these tragic things."

According to Thanos Tzimeros, parties are "mechanisms of fraud and corruption and salvation cannot come through small fixes. It is necessary to demolish the whole system and re-create it again." Asked whether he is optimistic, he firmly replied, "I am a fighter."