Kostas Theodorakopoulos had to wait more than a year before receiving his full pension, and scoured the offices of his pension fund dozens of times. “It’s the obstacle course, testifies the sixty-year-old nurseryman. Certainly, we receive advances from the State to be able to survive on a daily basis, but it is better to have savings to get by! » In the premises of the Social Security, piles of files accumulate.
A journalist paid in bills shows up with all her small papers in order to do the count with a civil servant who, calculator in hand, tries to estimate the rights to social security which the young woman can benefit from. If they are still frequent in Greece, such scenes are increasingly a thing of the past: since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government has accelerated the digitalization of public services.
As of March 21, 2020, when schools and businesses had just closed, the ministry of digital governance has thus launched a platform, gov.gr, which brings together 501 online services (sworn statement, birth certificate, etc.). “Since then, digital services have continued to grow. There are currently more than 1,315, and citizens have embraced them: in 2021, the number of digital transactions with the state reached 566 million, six times more than in 2020we are assured at the Ministry of Digital Governance. Between summer 2020 and March 2021, Greeks saved 75,000 hours that they would previously have spent in public administration queues. »
“clientelist system”
During the first confinement, between March 23 and May 4, 2020, the authorities dematerialized exit certificates with the establishment of an SMS system, an initiative welcomed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. At the start of the vaccination campaign, an application allowing people to make an appointment and obtain their certificate was launched.
“The pandemic acted as an accelerator for digital transformation, as citizens needed to stay safe and the state needed to continue to function properly,” says in a recent interview to the Euronews television channel, the Minister of Digital Governance, Kyriakos Pierrakakis. In a country where, according to Eurostat, almost 20% of the working population has neither the necessary skills nor access to the Internet (when the average across the European Union [UE] is 10% in 2019), the bet was not won.
You have 56.65% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.