Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis’s attempts to adopt the role of international authority on health reform ran in to trouble at an appearance before Greek students at Imperial College.
Mr Georgiadis was heckled by students as soon he took the floor. They accused him of lying and challenged him to talk about the health system of Venezuela. In a Youtube video of the incident the minister is heard shouting back at the students, “you know nothing about democracy!” to which one responds, “you know nothing about reality.”
Later, Mr Georgiadis appeared to get into a heated face-to-face argument with one of the students.
Following his February 13-14th visit to the Harvard Kennedy School, Mr Georgiadis was invited to speak by Imperial College’s Hellenic Society under its president Michalis Ntinalexis who is a member of the UK branch of New Democracy’s youth wing.
Greek students and academics at Imperial had already voiced their opposition to the minister’s visit in a written statement saying:
“The rise of Mr. Georgiadis in Greek politics is a symptom of the authoritarian, far-right turn of the Greek government…As Greek students, staff and alumni of Imperial College we strongly oppose the invitation to Mr. Georgiadis. We want to make clear that the few committee members of the Hellenic Society do not represent the Greeks of IC and that they act based on their own political interests. Most of us, as well as thousands of other Greeks in the UK and other European countries, have been forced to leave Greece because of the policies of Mr. Georgiadis’ government (and the governments preceding it, which came from the exact same parties that are in power today). Inviting someone with such a background to lecture on exiting the crisis is quite ironic and surely problematic. On top of that, a person who has so vehemently lashed out at Greek universities, which are the alma mater of many current students and staff of IC, cannot be welcome here.
Today in interviews Mr Georgiadis sought to attribute the heckling to a small faction of reactionary left-wing students who support SYRIZA. “All in all they were 30 or 40 students in an audience of 250” he said speaking to SKAI radio (link in Greek). “One shouted at me, you are an idiot who sells books. That doesn’t harm Georgiadis, that harms Greece.”
The Health Minister went on to bolster his right-wing credentials saying, “In Greece if I went to speak at an amphitheater of a Greek University, they would beat me up. There however, they make a fuss in the hall but then act like chickens later, because they would have to deal with the police at the entrance and it would not have ended well for them.” It is unclear where this sentiment fits into Mr Georgiadis’s version of ‘democracy’.
In a separate interview on Vima FM Mr Georgiadis also doubled down on his criticism of what he sees as the privileged students that he said belonged to ‘Syriza of London’. “Let’s make this clear, if you are a communist, you can’t be in the City of London. Go to North Korea or Havana.. Go to the guy who got 100% in North Korea and enjoy his socialism. Don’t pretend to be a socialist in the City.”
Following the shouting match with the students, Mr Georgiadis ceded the floor to Zoe Mavroudi, director of the documentary Ruins about the Greek state’s treatment of HIV positive women, who read a fact-filled statement condemning austerity driven cuts in healthcare spending which have led to, among other things, a 43% increase in infant mortality and 2.3 million uninsured Greeks in a country of about 11 million.