Yannis Boutaris: A Maverick Who Redefined Leadership and Legacy
Dear Member,
This is our weekly round-up from Greece.
A great maverick, iconic winemaker and mayor, Yannis Boutaris, died this week. We look into some of his main achievements and memorable quotes.
SYRIZA will soon be a party of the past. This is where it seems to be heading, considering all recent developments, including the latest - the party’s congress, which was rather reminiscent of an arena.
In Greece, life is no good. Far from recovering from the crisis, the country is falling in terms of crucial Better Life indicators. This is what’s to be concluded by the new OECD survey, which Greece’s government tried to undermine by saying that the data refer to the pandemic and energy crisis years.
Late Yannis Boutaris: A great maverick worth to be remembered
Iconic winemaker and mayor Yannis Boutaris died on Saturday night, 9 November, at 82.
Deeply unconventional, a visionary cosmopolitan, a tireless one-man band, Boutaris was often setting fire to the political discourse by expressing his opinions in an utterly unpretentious way - a very rare quality for a politician.
He was the first and, back then, the only one to undertake the enormous yet noble task of elevating Greek wine to the international pantheon of winemaking. From 1969 to 1996, he worked for the family wine company Boutari, based in Naoussa. He left it to create the Kir-Yianni wine company, based on two estates in the abandoned village of Giannakochori and in Amyntaio, in 1998.
Contrary to the mainstream, he was one of the very few who truly served local governance as the mayor of Thessaloniki, rather than exploiting his public position for short-sighted, self-serving interests.
As Thessaloniki mayor (2011-2019), Boutaris opened this very conservative city to progress, light, and the world.
He was the one who first envisioned the Holocaust Museum of Thessaloniki to preserve the memory of the city’s Jews who perished in the Holocaust during World War II and led the vigorous efforts for its founding. He then served as the museum’s president.
During his time as mayor, the first LGBTQ+ pride event was held in the city – with Boutaris leading the parade.
An ex-alcoholic himself, he spoke openly about his struggle with addiction. He quit drinking in 1991 and has campaigned for addicts’ support since.
He was the founder of Arktouros (1992), an NGO for the preservation of Greece’s brown bear and wildlife. He conceived Arktouros when they found themselves in front of a captive dancing bear while strolling with his son. The shelter for the bears in Nymphaeum, Florina, is visited by thousands of people every year.
From January 2024 and until his death, he served as a municipal councilor of the city, a position he held again from 2003 to 2011.
He held a Chemistry degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an Oenology degree from the Wine Institute of Athens.
Here are some of Boutaris’s memorable quotes:
"In my family, they never imagined they would get involved with vineyards; they were winemakers and nothing more. But, as it turns out, you can't make good wine if you don’t have a good vineyard! Completely in secret from my parents, I took the initiative to buy a piece of land to plant vines. Things weren’t as simple as they sound because I went against the traditional way and 'got involved with mud and peasants,' as they used to say."
"I dreamed of the great European vineyards and thought, 'If they did it, why not me?' That’s usually how I operate. I dream of something, I envision something, and I do whatever I can to make the dream a reality. If it doesn’t happen, then we’ve lost."
"Why do they say, 'I plant a vineyard for my grandchild'? Why is communion wine and not milk or oil? Why did Dionysus become the 13th god? I haven’t found answers that satisfy me. I get easily bored with what I do once it reaches a certain level of maturity. But with wine, I’ve never gotten bored."
"You can’t be a winemaker and not be an active citizen. You make wine for people to enjoy, not just for yourself."
"What truly saddens me is that there are so many people who only have a brain because it’s part of their anatomy" (referring to the criticism he faced).
"Once a member of parliament came to my office acting like we’d known each other since childhood. At some point, he pulls out five parking tickets from his pocket. He says to me, 'I have a mischievous son studying here. Maybe we could erase these?' There were five tickets for 40 euros each. You know what I did? I took 200 euros out of my pocket and handed them to him. 'You’re insulting me,' he said. 'And what exactly do you think you are doing?' I replied."
In 2014, he stated: "I am ashamed that 10,000 Thessaloniki citizens voted for Golden Dawn, in a city that is a city of martyrs and has suffered immensely from Nazism. I don’t care about those 10,000 votes. Let them be thrown to the sea; I don’t want them."
When he announced he wouldn’t run for mayor again, he told the Athens News Agency:
"I’ve lived it, I’ve had my fill... Goodbye!"
"Life itself is like a harvest. It teaches you to have patience, and you learn that there are good and bad years worth enduring."
"Illness, at a certain age, is almost a natural death. Just as the sun rises, so will we die. So instead of crying about it already, let’s enjoy it. Until then..."
New Democracy political dominance established as SYRIZA further dismantled
Last week the SYRIZA party held their congress.
“It was more like a parody of a congress,” Lifo reported (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). “The sole purpose of the event was to expel Stefanos Kasselakis from the party officially. After all, this had been decided long ago and was well-known. They were determined to execute their plan by any means and at any cost, aiming to ‘correct the mistake’ they had made themselves when, a year ago, they welcomed him to Koumoundourou with great fanfare, handing him the keys as though he were a messiah.”
The report sums up pretty well what happened: “The parody congress featured bouncers, security guards, delegates sneaking in through back doors, others locked in isolated rooms or kept out entirely, complete opacity, allegations of manipulation, fainting incidents, and extreme situations never seen before.
Elected delegates were sidelined, entire organizations disappeared, and unelected individuals appeared in their place. When Kasselakis’s camp submitted 1,934 delegate signatures supporting his candidacy, the leadership team rejected the request. They claimed over 4,000 delegates, yet eyewitness accounts suggest that only about 500 were present in the hall… Meanwhile, excluding Stefanos Kasselakis and others protesting outside, the leadership team approved all other candidacies for SYRIZA's leadership as appropriate and serious.”
Ex-SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras did not appear at his party's congress. SYRIZA members reported that he was at a basketball game with his children. Tsipras launched his institute recently. Having left his party in tatters, bearing great responsibility for its downturn, having long disillusioned the people who had believed in him as representing something new and honest in Greek politics, now avoids getting his hands in the mud not to disturb his ‘international’ career through the institute.
The Congress concluded on 9 November. They approved Pavlos Polakis, Manolis Famellos, Apostolos Gletsos and Nikolas Farantouris as candidates for SYRIZA’s leadership. Elections for the leadership are set for 24 November, with a runoff on 1 December if necessary.
Deposed leader Stefanos Kasselakis announced on 9 November the creation of a new political movement, taking at least four MPs with him. This has left SYRIZA with 31 MPs - that is, now the party has the same number of MPs as PASOK/KINAL. SYRIZA only retains its main opposition status because they received more votes from PASOK in the last elections.
“Speaking to a large cheering crowd outside his new headquarters, the US expat declared that “Syriza has closed its democratic chapter” and positioned himself as the leader of a new, progressive political force,” Politico reported (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). “The party will be yours, and I will be your servant,” Kasselakis said.
It should be remembered that a year ago, dozens of Syriza MPs left the party and created a new one - the New Left. The poor performance in June’s elections for the European Parliament further increased intra-party tensions.
On Tuesday, seventy-six members of SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance’s Central Committee submitted their resignation (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) to party secretary Rania Svigou, citing “undemocratic procedures” at both the recently held party congress and the party. The 76 also resigned as members of the party.
Earlier on the same day, Olympia Teligioridou resigned from the Political Secretariat and the Central Committee, in a statement distributed by Kasselakis’ office. She also cited exclusionary procedures at the congress, where she said “SYRIZA-PA’s basic terms and rules of operation were not followed.”
The first opinion poll (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) following SYRIZA’s Congress shows that the party is in free fall. Published on 13 November, the survey, conducted by Opinion Poll on behalf of Action24 TV, placed New Democracy at 23.7%, PASOK at 16.2%, Greek Solution at 7.7%, the Communist KKE at 7.5%, SYRIZA on 5.2%, Course of Freedom on 5%, Voice of Logic on 3.8% and Niki on 2.4% (below the parliamentary threshold of 3%.)
No. Greece has not recovered.
How did Greece perform in OECD’s Better Life Index?
Not well, it appears. OECD provided an overview (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) of daily life based on 80 well-being indicators. Greece's profile is captured in the organization’s annual report on global well-being, offering comparative results with previous years and the other 34 member countries participating in the study.
A first glimpse comes from the "wheel of well-being," which highlights the country’s strengths and weaknesses across 11 components: income and wealth, housing, work and job quality, health, knowledge and skills, environmental quality, subjective well-being, safety, work-life balance, social connections, and civic engagement. Greece performs below the OECD average in at least one sub-indicator for each component: income inequality, overcrowded households, gender pay gap, excessive overtime, exposure to extreme temperatures, and voter turnout.
According to the OECD data, Greece only excels in social interactions, demonstrating that Greeks remain outward-looking.
Greece ranks third from the bottom in terms of wage level among 35 countries, ahead only of Mexico and Colombia, and close to Slovakia and Hungary.
The OECD notes that real wages decreased in 20 out of 35 countries between 2019 and 2023 due to the pandemic crisis and inflation. In Greece, however, real wages have seen the sharpest decline between 2010-2019 and continued to worsen between 2019-2022, placing the country fourth from the bottom after the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Greece has the highest percentage of citizens struggling to make ends meet, trailing only Mexico, Slovakia, and Turkey. Over 65% of Greeks face financial hardship — a higher percentage than in 2010, when the crisis started, though slightly improved compared to 2019.
Additionally, Greeks report some of the lowest life satisfaction rates in the OECD. In 2023, Greece ranked fourth from last in life satisfaction among 35 countries.
Last but not least, Greece’s financial capital index performance has worsened compared to 2010. Public debt rose from 94% to 134% of GDP, and gross fixed capital formation (investments) fell significantly from $97,000 per capita in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms to $78,000.
The only improvement in economic capital was household debt, which decreased to 86% of net disposable income—down from 107% in 2010, when it exceeded available income.
In terms of social capital, Greece ranks in the lowest tier among OECD countries. The country has consistently poor performance in gender equality in political representation, with only 21% of legislators and elected officials being women—unchanged since 2010.
Trust in government remains low, with seven out of ten citizens expressing distrust—a figure almost identical to 2010, the year Greece entered bailout supervision. Similarly, trust in other people has declined, with most citizens now reporting feelings of suspicion.
When asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, Greeks gave it a 5.8 grade on average (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), lower than the OECD average of 6.7.
Greece’s Finance Ministry slammed the media over the OECD report. “The attempt by certain media to portray Greece as the worst country in the world is now almost amusing,” they said in a statement on Tuesday.
They attempted to justify Greece’s low performance by pointing out that the incomes index refers to the period of the pandemic and the energy crisis, but “the latest figures –because this is 2024– show that between 2019 and the first quarter of 2024, Greece had one of the largest income increases among OECD countries.”
Read
Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganas witnessed the Greek Civil War as a young child and was taken into enforced exile in Eastern Europe with his family. Weaving together subtle references to the events and places that have defined his life’s story, Ganas’s terse and technically accomplished poems are a combination of folklore, autobiography, and recent history. Whether describing the mountains of his youth or the difficulties of acclimation in Athens of the 1960s and 1970s, Ganas’s writing is infused with striking and original imagery inspired by love, memory, and loss.
“A Greek Ballad: Selected Poems”, masterfully translated by David Connolly and Joshua Barely, in collaboration with Ganas himself, is the first English-language collection of the poet’s work, which also includes a scholarly introduction to his life and work.
Greece issues tax number (AFM) for children up to 12 years old (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Rural hospitals in peril amid staffing gaps (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Greece in talks with Israel to develop 2 bln euro “Iron Dome” (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Femicide: Mother of 3 fatally shot by former partner (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
‘I had to fight the flames burning down my own house’ (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Greece’s Mussel Industry Struggles Amid Rising Sea Temperatures (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Logo of new Thessaloniki Metro unveiled … inspiring Greeks (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Greece’s Piraeus Named Top Passenger Shipping Port in 2024 (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Hundreds of dead birds on Nafplio-Nea Kios coastal road (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Ferries, ships docked at Greece’s port due to general strike (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
That’s all for this week; please forward this email to anyone you think might find it interesting and ask them to join our international community!
The AL team
