–Joanna Demopoulou, PhD in International Affairs and former Executive in Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)
On 27 July 2026, Greece’s health minister, Adonis Georgiadis, was asked on live television why, some years earlier while a member of parliament, he had messaged a senior figure at Novartis, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, to have a friend’s website included in a privately run advertising campaign from which it had been excluded. He did not deny it. He said he did it because she was his friend, and then explained that this was nothing out of the ordinary. “It is entirely normal,” he said. “I was not a minister then, I was an MP. We MPs do favors, in case you did not know.”
The remark matters, but not for the reason most of the ensuing argument assumed. The publicly available evidence does not establish bribery or a criminal exchange. That legal boundary does not weaken the constitutional argument; it identifies it. What Georgiadis defended was not a single intervention but a general account of what elected office is for: he had direct political access to a corporate decision-maker, and the practical ability to raise someone’s case with that person himself. That access could then be turned into a selective opportunity for someone in his personal circle. That account does not repeal the formal promise of equal citizenship; it runs alongside that promise and builds a parallel order in which proximity to power decides who receives an intervention others cannot obtain.
This is an informal constitution of access. The formal constitution promises that public power will answer to general rules, open to challenge and review. The informal one answers to relationships. One recognizes the citizen; the other recognizes the contact. The two coexist within the same democratic state, but they do not recognize the same person. A single television exchange did not create this second order, and it is not the whole of Greek political life. The rule is not merely inferred from the fact that an intervention took place; it was stated by the officeholder himself: it is entirely normal that we, MPs, offer favors. Informal institutions are not isolated departures from formal rules. They are socially recognized rules that organize expectations alongside them. Georgiadis did not merely defend conduct. He articulated the rule under which that conduct becomes normal.
Personal mediation of this kind functions as a parallel, informal rule of political membership: what a citizen’s formal rights are worth comes to depend on whether someone in power will speak for them. The constitutional problem lies there, and it exists even where no illegality can be shown. The damage is done not by any provable offense but by the quiet substitution of relationship for rule.
Said without embarrassment
Most of the time this second order stays quiet. Favors are performed, calls are made, a word is put in, and nobody describes the practice as a principle. What made the Georgiadis exchange unusual was not the intervention but the candor. He did not treat it as a lapse he regretted, or an exception forced by friendship. He folded it into the ordinary business of parliamentary office and grew impatient with anyone who would find it strange. The journalist’s question (“is that normal?”) was met not with a denial but with a lesson in how things work.
That is the whole point. An informal norm becomes visible when someone in power articulates it as though it were obvious. When a minister explains, without embarrassment, that doing selective favors is simply what representatives do, the formal rule of equal treatment has not been struck down. A rival understanding has quietly overtaken it, one the officeholder considers too self-evident to defend.
The formal equality starting point here is Article 4 of the Greek Constitution, which guarantees that all Greeks are equal before the law. One might assume the equality principle is unavailable because the decision on whether to include the friend’s site in the campaign belonged to a private company rather than an organ of the state. Article 25(1) of the same Constitution provides that fundamental rights also apply in the relations between private persons “to which they are appropriate,” which is a question to be argued rather than an automatic route to holding that Article 4 governs a private advertising decision. The available facts do not support a justiciable equality claim. No similarly situated party has been identified who was treated differently within the same process; there is no comparator to anchor the claim, and no factual record thorough enough to support a legal finding. The equality guarantee has nothing concrete to fasten onto. But that does not place the incident outside constitutional analysis. What it shows is how clientelistic power can bypass the formal moment at which equality becomes legally enforceable. Political access can determine whose interests reach a decision-maker without ever producing the kind of record that an equality claim needs. A claim built on a documented record can be litigated. A rule that decides who receives political mediation may operate without ever leaving such a record behind.
And it is precisely because the available facts fall short of a documented equality claim that the question moves from legality to constitutional culture. The trouble is not the private advertising decision as such. The problem is an elected representative who contacted a Novartis executive to ask that his friend’s site be added to the campaign, and then justified that contact by reference to what he considered the ordinary role of an MP: converting political access into a private advantage and defending that conversion as a normal feature of representation. He did not present it as a lapse he regretted. He presented it as entirely proper for someone holding a seat. That is the constitutional question the statement raises, and it is a sharper one than any charge of illegality.
Not a Greek disease
It would be easy, and wrong, to file this under Greek exceptionalism, the familiar story of a southern democracy that has never quite outgrown its clientelist habits while its northern neighbors have moved on. That framing is simply inaccurate, and the comparative record does not support it.
Clientelism is not a pathology confined to Europe’s south or east. Scholarship on patronage and citizen-politician linkages has documented personalized mediation and selective distribution across affluent, stable democracies, and the point of the comparison is that the mechanism is never quite the same twice. Kitschelt and Wilkinson’s comparative work points to countries such as Japan and Austria, hardly the periphery of the democratic world. In Japan the vehicle has been the kōenkai, the candidate’s personal support organization, through which constituency services and material benefits flowed to supporters under the old single-non-transferable-vote system. In Austria the same logic ran through Proporz, the formalized sharing of public-sector posts and appointments between the two large parties, so that patronage operated as an almost official convention of coalition government rather than a personal aside. The two French cases work differently. Marseille is a case of municipal clientelism run through the mayor’s office and the town hall. Corsica is something older and more diffuse: clientelistic mediation carried by local notables during the French Third Republic, a relationship between society and the state rather than a machine housed in a single municipal office. What differs is the machinery: a personal support society in one place, an inter-party spoils convention in another, town-hall brokerage in a third, notable-based mediation in a fourth; what persists across all of them is the same displacement: impersonal allocation giving way to relationships of proximity and influence.
This is the point at which political favor becomes a governing rule. A completed exchange of benefit for political support is only the visible transaction. The clientelist order depends on an earlier rule: political office is understood as access that may be distributed through personal relationships, and those relationships may legitimately produce opportunities unavailable to everyone else.
What sets the Greek episode apart is how openly the rule was stated. In some of these systems it stays dressed in institutional procedure. In Marseille, on Mattina’s account, the distribution of public resources, in particular municipal jobs and social housing, ran through family and clientelistic channels, so that a favor to a client could take the outward form of an ordinary administrative decision about who got a post or a flat. The relationship did the work, but a procedure gave it cover.
So the Greek episode is not significant because it exposes a uniquely Greek practice. It is significant because a logic that usually stays informal, and that operates in one form or another across European democracies, was stated with unusual clarity as the ordinary meaning of parliamentary representation.
Two kinds of citizen
The deeper problem that an informal constitution of access creates is not that some citizens have rights and others do not. Formally, everyone has the same rights. The problem is what those rights are worth in practice, and that turns out to depend on something the written constitution never mentions: who you know.
The dividing line in an order of this kind is not between citizens who possess rights and citizens who lack them. It runs between those whose rights have to speak for themselves and those who have someone in power willing to speak for them. The first citizen submits an application and waits for a rule to be applied. The second sends a message to a friend. Both may be entitled to the same thing on paper. Only one of them has a shortcut, and the existence of the shortcut is precisely what the general norm was supposed to prevent.
This is where the strongest objection has to be met, because it is the one Georgiadis reached for. MPs should help people; that is part of what representation entails. They are expected to challenge administrative silence, expose the misapplication of rules and demand that public institutions perform their legal duties. None of that describes the intervention he defended. No general entitlement was being restored. No unlawful barrier was being removed. A private opportunity was sought for a particular person for the stated reason that she was his friend. To call both of these things representation is not to defend constituency service. It is to erase the boundary that makes constituency service democratic: the difference between repairing an impersonal rule and quietly replacing it.
The limits of transnational regulation
A remaining question is what the European Union legal order can do in response to such informal access. Its machinery is built to identify institutional failures and breakdowns in enforcement. The budget conditionality regulation is engaged only when rule-of-law failures affect the sound management of Union funds in a sufficiently direct way; the annual Rule of Law Report tracks justice, anti-corruption frameworks, media pluralism and institutional checks; the new anti-corruption directive harmonizes offenses such as trading in influence. These instruments can register the institutional environment in which favoritism thrives. European legal leverage, however, begins only once diffuse political practice can be translated into a recognized offense, a deficient safeguard, an institutional breach or a sufficiently direct threat to Union funds.
An informal constitution of access operates earlier. Its operation shapes which uses of office appear to require no justification in the first place. The difficulty here is not visibility but traction: Europe may see the culture of favor without being able to act upon it. The blind spot is not corruption hidden from public view. It is favor spoken in public and recognized as politics. Europe can address the breach once it announces itself as such; it has almost nothing to say to the officeholder who does not deny the general rule, but redescribes personal intervention as the ordinary work of representation. The erosion of constitutional culture happens in exactly that gap, and it happens before anything the law is built to catch has taken place.
The most disturbing part of the exchange was not the admission that an intervention had been made. It was the certainty with which that intervention was defended as normal parliamentary conduct. Georgiadis did not deny the clientelist logic; he set out its operating principle himself: personal friendship converted into political advantage and defended as an MP’s ordinary work. At that moment, clientelism ceased to be an allegation made against power. It became power’s description of itself.
Suggested citation: Joanna Demopoulou, The Informal Constitution of Access: What a Greek Minister’s Defense of Political Favors Reveals About Equal Citizenship, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Aug. 30, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-informal-constitution-of-access-what-a-greek-ministers-defense-of-political-favors-reveals-about-equal-citizenship/