May they pitch in

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It took 16 years before Greece could allow the establishment of private universities. We could have had them since 2007 when the then conservative premier Kostas Karamanlis proposed a change to Article 16 of the Constitution, but he was not able to secure the consent of PASOK leader George Papandreou.

It's OK though, it's better not to look back and fret about the important reforms that didn't happen and could have changed the country. Like, for example, the well-known pension reform proposed by Professor John Spraos (at the time adviser to socialist Prime Minister Kostas Simitis) and then minister Tasos Giannitsis, which sank into PASOK]s internal party politics. It is important to commemorate these missed opportunities for "educational" reasons and to encourage the next brave reformers. But now we are entering a new era. Care is certainly needed not to trivialize the...

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