Fate brought me to experience up close, from positions of responsibility, the greatest crisis the country has faced in decades.
In politics, it is always a challenge to measure oneself against difficult circumstances, one’s endurance, and capabilities. My generation, on behalf of both the previous and the coming generations, was called to make tough decisions, decisions that tried to correct its mistakes, the mistakes of the past, and to create better conditions for the present and future.
During the five critical years of the memorandum, I found myself responsible for key sectors of the Ministry of Environment, Energy, and Climate Change. Within a collapsing political system, in the whirlwind of the international and European financial crisis, with an economy deeply mired in multiple deficits and debts, with a society completely unprepared for the storms, and with an international political system that treated our homeland for a long time as a black sheep, or as the lamb that would bear the sins of others.
The historical challenge was clear: Progressive reforms in all sectors of the economic, social, and political life of the country while simultaneously regaining our national self-confidence and institutional balance in all European and international bodies.
National self-confidence is based on the decision to reject the defeat of the country, resignation, the supposedly fatal and inevitable response to national misery with combativeness, international reliability, and a return to levels of equality.
All of the above constitute the priorities of the texts contained in this book, either as a record of actions and initiatives within the ministry or as political thoughts and proposals from the past year, on a broader political level.
