Aug 30, 2020
Athens "Airbnb everywhere, neighbours nowhere"
Photo by Nick Malkoutzis - @NickMalkoutzis
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Athens "Airbnb everywhere, neighbours nowhere"
Photo by Nick Malkoutzis - @NickMalkoutzis
On a sunny October morning this year, thousands of people crowded outside an Athens courthouse to hear the landmark verdict in the trial of NeoNazi Golden Dawn.
It brought the party's rapid rise during the Greek economic crisis to a halt but did not necessarily signal the end of the far-right's presence in Greece.
Now that some of the dust from the lengthy court proceedings has settled, The Agora co-host Phoebe Fronista speaks to Ioanna Meitani, part of the Golden Dawn Watch team that covered the trial from inside the courtroom, about the historic process.
Also, Nick Malkoutzis speaks to Professor Daphne Halikopoulou from the University of Reading, an expert in the far-right, looks at the bigger picture and explains how Golden Dawn gained such a following and what might happen now that the party is out of the picture.
Analysis by Nick Malkoutzis in macropolis.gr on the occasion of the Golden Dawn verdict.
For an instant it was exhilarating. Some seven years after antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and migrant worker Luqman Shahzad were murdered and numerous others attacked, the leadership and several members of Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn were convicted on October 7 of operating as a criminal organisation. As the news was relayed to the crowd of at least 20,000 people gathered outside the Athens court, a resounding cheer went up. It was a moment that will go down in Greek history and will be weaved into the country’s social fabric over the coming years.
But, it was the briefest of moments. A few seconds later, riot police were firing their water cannons and tear gas into the crowd. Some protestors complained that the police’s actions were unprovoked, officers argued that Molotov cocktails and other items were thrown by a small group in what was the largest crowd for a public rally in Athens for some time. Perhaps an investigation is needed to establish what led to this release of pent-up emotions being cut short. Hopefully, any probe will take less than the five interminable years needed to establish that Golden Dawn was a gaggle of criminals and racists.
...The rush by Greece’s political leaders to claim the fatherhood of the judicial victory over Golden Dawn demeans the occasion. It sucks the oxygen out of a moment that could have helped breath new life into Greece’s staid, selfish political scene. More importantly, it obscures the learnings we should draw from this hellish experience. In the attempt to paint the judge’s verdict as a victory for a specific political party, for Greek democracy as a whole or for the country’s institutions, we are missing the point. Greece’s political system did hold together, as did our liberal democracy and our institutions – just as they survived the gruelling test of the long economic crisis – but they did so in spite of themselves, of us and the constant attempt to undermine them by those claiming to be their representatives and defenders. We can take some comfort from the fact that there were politicians, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, activists, priests, journalists, victims and their relatives, such as the extraordinary Magda Fyssa, who had the courage to stand up to the Golden Dawn menace. But we cannot ignore that for each one of them, there were many more members of our political system, institutions, media, church and society that turned a blind eye or even molly coddled Neo-Nazis who made no secret of their intent to overthrow the system that provided these same people with protection and freedom, and to steamroller anybody who stood in their way.
A video talk featuring Juan Pablo Riesgo, a partner of Ernst & Young and former Secretary of State for Employment in Spain, and Nick Malkoutzis, editor of MacroPolis, discussing how Spain and Greece should best use the Recovery Fund package proposed by the European Commission.
The discussion is hosted by Carlos Carnicero Urabayen the editor of the Future is Blue newsletter.
This is the latest episode of the video discussions organised by Agenda Public and MacroPolis.
Analysis by Nick Malkoutzis in macropolis.gr
Apart from coronavirus and pandemic, the words on everyone’s lips in Greece over the past few days have been “personal responsibility.” This is what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called for in his first televised address about Covid-19 as he revealed the first batch of measures the government had taken to combat the virus.
“No measure can replace personal responsibility,” he said last Wednesday, after closing schools and universities. His observation is perfectly accurate. In western societies, where paternalistic behaviour from the state is shunned and individual freedoms often overpower collective interests, imposing any top-down solutions is going to be a big challenge. This was underscored in a recent Wall Street Journal article on the different approaches to the virus in Italy and South Korea.
Of course, if he was truly expecting Greeks to show personal responsibility in the absence of a clear and immediate threat, the prime minister apparently does not know the country he leads very well. After all, this is where the smoking ban was flouted for years, crash helmets are used to protect motorcycle riders elbows rather than heads, wheelchair ramps are considered perfect places to park cars, a political leader sells on TV a balm he claims protects users from coronavirus and MPs from the ruling party advertise the fact they have participated in Holy Communion amid possibly the greatest public health crisis the world has faced in a century.
Furthermore, an opinion poll published last week indicated that roughly 30 percent of respondents believe the coronavirus was lab-developed and released to create global instability, would not want the vaccine when it is developed and feel Holy Communion is not dangerous in the current circumstances. If the survey is accurate, the concept of personal responsibility is unlikely to have any relevance for around a third of the population (assuming that the same people gave these three anwers).
...Like their counterparts in Italy and Spain, Greeks are being called upon to go onto their balconies each evening and applaud their health service workers, who are undoubtedly deserving of our gratitude. But don’t let this mask the fact that, in Greece’s case at least, these people work in conditions that do not befit them and are unsuitable for tackling any crisis because of the systematic enfeebling of the public health system over many years. In the coming days, when we are reminded about the importance of personal responsibility, we must act with the maturity these exceptional circumstances demand, but we should not forget the concept of political accountability. When all this is over, we will have to rebuild from whatever is left. And to do so, we will need to be clear about where things went wrong. We should have no doubts that permitting exceptions to rules designed for the benefit of all undermines any concept of a collective effort. We will also have to agree that we need to invest in and nurture our vital public services rather than rely on desperate prayers to respond to challenges, whether they are the ones we face each day or those that will define our generation.0 Comment(s)
Article by Nick Malkoutzis in macropolis.gr
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Centre published a survey indicating how satisfied people are with the way democracy is working in their country. In Greece, 84 percent said they were not satisfied, which was the second highest among the 27 countries surveyed and well above the 51 percent average. A few days later, the Greek prime minister and the opposition leader traded barbs in Parliament about their fathers.
The campaign for this Sunday’s European Parliament and local elections – the first vote in Greece since the general elections of September 2015 – has confirmed the dire state of the country’s politics and the lack of interest in tending to the basics of democracy.
Unsurprisingly, given that national elections are due later this year, European issues have hardly featured on the agenda – apart from New Democracy’s overly-enthusiastic support for Manfred Weber as the European People’s Party (EPP) spitzenkandidat for the European Commission presidency, and SYRIZA’s feeble attempts to argue that Greece’s centre-right party has to be defeated as part of an EU-wide effort to stop the advance of ultra-nationalism and the far-right.
In effect, both parties have shown disdain for the European elections by largely refusing to engage in any kind of meaningful debate about the future of the EU and Greece’s place in it. The campaign has been little more than a proxy war for the national elections.
As in any battle, there have been plenty of casualties. The most significant has been democracy itself. It will emerge from Sunday’s vote wounded as a result of the behaviour of Greece’s leading politicians, who have shied away from an honest, measured forward-looking contest.
...Perhaps this electoral campaign will also have a limited impact because Greeks have truly become inured to attempts to stoke division purely to serve political ends. Even then, though, this means the best-case scenario will be indifference. Two leaders who claim they are breaking with the past should see this as a cause to be embarrassed. Whatever the result of Sunday’s vote, the winners and losers will have to consider how much democracy has been dameged in their efforts to outdo their political rivals and whether they are capable of healing the wounds.
A beautiful tribute to Dionysis Arvanitakis - The Baker from Kos - by Nick Malkoutzis in macropolis.gr
Sometimes it is the simplest acts that touch us most. In our overloaded lives, where information comes at us faster than we can absorb it and there is a surplus of mistrust and rancour, moments of genuineness stand out. We cling to them in the hope that they are what is true about our world rather than the negativity that threatens to sweep us away.
That is why Dionysis Arvanitakis, the baker of Kos who died on Sunday, made such an impression on us. He became the focus of global attention for giving away freshly-baked bread and other products to hundreds of refugees on the Aegean island when the migration crisis was in full flow. It was a simple, kind gesture amid so much desperation and cynicism. ...This use of personal memory to augment the compelling values that clearly existed within him make Arvanitakis’s reactions similar to those of other islanders who used what little they had at their disposal to help refugees. It earned the people of Lesvos, including Maritsa Mavrapidou who also died recently, a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, while Arvanitakis was awarded a Civil Society Prize by the European Economic and Social Committee in the same year. The example they set is far more important than the awards they won or plaudits they earned. While much of Europe asked itself whether it could cope with more refugees, Arvanitakis was one of those who felt he could not remain a by-stander. ...In our grim reality, Arvanitakis’s actions provided us with moral sustenance. He did not just feed needy refugees on Kos, he gave all of us our daily bread, as we continue to forgive those who trespass against us.
Article by Nick Malkoutzis in macropolis.gr
Speaking at the EU-Arab Summit in Athens on Tuesday, New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the prolonged pre-election period Greece has entered is damaging the country. There is nothing wrong with the opposition chief’s observation, apart from the fact he and his party have been calling for snap elections almost daily since he assumed the New Democracy leadership in January 2016.
In Greece there is rarely a time when it doesn’t feel like the country is preparing for the next elections. The parties’ adversarial style, the partisan media and an enduring passion for all things political among voters means the election machinery is almost in perpetual motion.
There were many moments over the last couple of years that could be regarded as the start of the campaign for the 2019 general elections, but the conclusion of the third programme this August is a convenient point from which to pick up the campaign trail.
...The two main quandaries that will be put to Greek voters in the months ahead are “equitable recovery vs unhindered growth” and “old corruption vs institutional decay.” These are the key concepts on which Greeks will be asked to make their decisions when they go to the polls next year.
If the recent trend is anything to go by, much of the discussion will be designed to inflict the maximum possible damage on each other and very little will have to do with making a fresh start after the pain of the last decade. The campaign has not officially begun but, as Mitsotakis suggested, it feels as if it has already been going for too long.