Greek businessman and political commentator Thanos Tzimeros published a scathing opinion column on 15 September 2026 accusing the leaders of Greece's three main parties of turning the Thessaloniki International Fair into a political show built on state subsidies and unfunded promises, rather than a genuine trade event.
Tzimeros, a businessman and former president of the political party Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece), wrote that in serious countries international fairs are professional, narrowly themed events that politicians attend only to cut a ribbon. In Greece, he argued, the fair has instead become a stage where rival politicians unveil competing giveaways.
Thessaloniki International Fair
The Thessaloniki International Fair, known in Greece as DETH, is the country's largest trade exhibition and has for decades doubled as the traditional platform where the Greek prime minister delivers a major economic policy speech, followed by addresses from opposition leaders.
Tzimeros wrote that 40% of the fair's pavilions are state-run, and that the overall cost of the event, including transport and accommodation for politicians and officials, functions, venue rental and television crews, runs into the millions of euros paid by taxpayers.
Disputing the government's fiscal claims
Tzimeros singled out Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, referring to him throughout the column as the blue socialist, an allusion to the colour of his New Democracy party. He rejected Mitsotakis's claim that Greece has fiscal space because the economy is overperforming, arguing Greece ranks poorly on competitiveness and state effectiveness and second-to-last in the European Union on citizens' purchasing power.
According to Tzimeros, Greece's above-average EU growth rate is driven by European Union Recovery Fund money, a statistical catch-up effect following a deep prior recession, inflation inflating the figures, and stagnation in major European economies, particularly Germany, rather than genuine overperformance.
He argued it was tax revenue, not the economy, that overperformed, largely because electronic cross-checks reduced tax evasion, meaning the state collected more than it needed, which he called anti-developmental and immoral. He also disputed the government's reported primary surplus of 5.725 billion euros for the first seven months of 2026, writing that once debt interest payments of more than 6 billion euros are included in the overall balance, the true result is a deficit of 389 million euros.
Housing programme criticism
All three leaders, Tzimeros wrote, pledged to redistribute wealth through the state, especially on housing, while none addressed why 800,000 homes and apartments in Greece stand empty.
He criticized PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras for pledging state-built housing, and accused Mitsotakis of restricting how citizens can use their own property while promoting the My Home III scheme, which he said would raise the eligible age limit for young buyers to 55. He noted the earlier My Home I and My Home II programmes, covering ages 25 to 39 and up to 50 respectively, had already driven up demand and prices for everyone.
On planned sector subsidies, Tzimeros said Mitsotakis had named pharmaceuticals, food, logistics, manufacturing and critical materials, meaning minerals, as priorities for the next decade, questioning how domestic manufacturing could compete with 5-dollar-a-day wages in Bangladesh and how minerals could be extracted without mining projects that Tsipras's SYRIZA movement had long opposed.
The case against subsidies
Tzimeros set out what he described as the toxic distortions caused by targeted state subsidies. He wrote that they undermine free competition, trap capital and labour in unproductive sectors, distort where businesses locate, keep zombie companies alive, block the renewal of the economy, divert entrepreneurs' energy from improving products toward chasing subsidy criteria, breed corruption in the selection of beneficiaries, and pave the way for protectionism once European funding runs out.
Citing studies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, he wrote that the overall cost of tax collection adds 3% to 5% on top of the tax itself, that administrative costs for universal, horizontal programmes run at 1% to 3%, that targeted programmes with income or asset criteria can reach 15% of a programme's budget, and that schemes requiring case-by-case certification can see administrative costs exceed 25%. For small individual benefits, he wrote, the cost of applying can absorb up to 30% of the benefit's value.
He pointed to the OPEKEPE farm-subsidy fraud case as an example of hidden costs beyond the misused funds themselves, citing the expense of parliamentary committee proceedings and the hotel costs linked to the investigation led by European Chief Prosecutor Laura Kovesi. He also cited the concept of the dead-weight loss of taxation, writing that every 100 euros taken from the productive economy to fund a subsidy causes an estimated 120 to 130 euros of total damage to economic activity.
Threshold effects and wealth taxes
Tzimeros warned that criteria-based subsidies create unfair cutoffs, a phenomenon economists call threshold effects. He cited Mitsotakis's pledge to abolish the ENFIA property tax for settlements with up to 2,000 residents, predicting a wave of people re-registering their residence to stay under the limit before the next census. He added that income thresholds for benefits create poverty traps that discourage people from accepting pay rises, and push unemployed people into undeclared work to avoid losing their benefits.
He argued a horizontal reduction in taxes would be the only measure that is pro-growth, fair and free of administrative cost or side effects, but said politicians favour subsidies because beneficiaries see the gain directly while the cost is spread invisibly across society.
On the minimum wage, which Tzimeros said every leader addressed at the fair, he argued pay levels are set by supply and demand in the labour market rather than government decree, and that raising the minimum wage would force struggling businesses to close or push them into informal arrangements with staff to ignore the increase.
He also criticized Androulakis, describing him as an honorary doctor of the private Turkish institution Koc University, for repeatedly redefining who counts as rich for tax purposes, citing shifting targets including real estate, the 20 most profitable companies, and bank deposits. He said Tsipras had proposed an emergency windfall-profits tax mechanism that Tzimeros likened to Bolshevik-style confiscation, and accused Mitsotakis of heading a 62-member Council of Ministers while retaining every tax he had criticized as excessive while in opposition before 2019, and of overseeing state spending on party-appointed staff and their early pensions that he said is never discussed at the fair.
Tzimeros concluded that Greek voters are effectively offered two socialist options: New Democracy, which retains some free-market pretences, and a green-red alternative he said draws its ideological roots from the Soviet school of thought.
