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...heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice. One of the reasons he went to the United States was that it there was a dictatorship in Greece. He was beaten up or tortured and then left. And then again during the dictatorship, all of us left Greece. That gives me a sense, when you go through a crisis, that...
...Minister of Education, for example, I would sign the leave of absence of the driver of a dean of a university. So if he had to take his holidays, I would have to sign that. This is crazy. This is micromanagement. But the reason that existed was that one hand people thought that was control, and that comes from a legacy of authoritarianism and dictatorship and so on, so a lot of power at the center of the state. But it also becomes easily clientelistic. You have to come to me for the smallest of favors. And then...
...example, if you like, and lead by example in many ways. And this is what I did when I took on the party, took the leadership of the party. I said okay, the first thing we have to do is change. As a matter of fact, one of our slogans is "We're changing ourselves to change Greece." I think this is what we've been able to do. It's not an easy process, but that's the only way we can do this. (Read: "Greek Austerity Measures Spark Rising Protests...
Talking to people on the streets, one thing I heard again and again is that people want to see somebody punished for corruption and tax evasion. What is your response to that? Will people see punishment? I get that all the time. This is the sense that I was telling you, that people feel that you do not have the rule of law, but the law of the powerful. So that's what we have to change around, so it's not as if simply because you've got money or simply because you have some high position somewhere...
...that migratory period - but it also can let you open up and let you feel happy about the fact that you have these different inputs and different cultures that you can use as resources. But this mixture of cultures I think also has, for me, done one more thing. You can see that Greeks in the diaspora have been very successful. I think one thing one can say is that it's not in our DNA, it's not even in our cultural DNA, to have these problems. We can succeed, we can excel...