ATHENS: Greece was in the grip of a new political crisis yesterday as the government faced a storm of public protest and a general strike over the shock shutdown of state broadcaster ERT.
The broadcaster’s television and radio stations were abruptly pulled off air late Tuesday and its 2,700 staff suspended as part of the conservative-led coalition government’s deeply unpopular austerity drive.
“The ERT lockup amounts to a coup d’etat,” leading union GSEE said in a statement it announced a 24-hour general strike today, the third in the crisis-hit country this year.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras government defended the closure of the 60-year-old institution, saying it was a “haven of public waste” and too corrupt to save.
“We are doing things correctly,” government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou told journalists.
“There was no other way,” he said as the government unveiled a bill on a new public broadcasting entity. “We are creating a completely independent public television.”
But the sudden shutdown of ERT caused uproar, with journalists kicking off a 24-hour strike yesterday while defiant staff staged sit-ins at the organization’s offices in Athens and Greece’s second largest city Thessaloniki.
Riot police were stationed outside ERT offices around the country to prevent “any destruction,” said Kedikoglou, himself a former journalist at the organization.
The government has imposed sweeping public cutbacks demanded by the debt-laden country’s international lenders in return for a massive bailout.
Unemployment is steadily rising and now exceeds 26 percent, with half of young people out of work. “ERT is a case of an exceptional lack of transparency and incredible extravagance. This ends now,” Kedikoglou had said on Tuesday in announcing the closure.
Employees at the station, stunned by the sudden loss of their jobs, were defiantly transmitting rogue broadcasts on the Internet, vowing to resist the shutdown.
“We are not leaving the building,” Panagiotis Kalfayiannis, the head of ERT’s main union, told AFP.
“We are going to Greek and European justice. Even if they want to destroy democracy, rules still apply and I am going to fight.”
Thousands of people rushed to ERT’s main headquarters in Athens and its Thessaloniki offices on Tuesday to show their support for the broadcaster.
The European Union said it did not question the government decision but that public broadcasting was “an integral part of European democracy.”
Media observers acknowledge that ERT has a long history of mismanagement and heavy-handed political meddling, but say the Samaras administration was not free of blame.
Recent controversial decisions include the appointment of a former deputy minister’s daughter as a show host, and the ousting of two journalists who had criticized the public order minister on air.
