Illiberal Conservatism Comes to Greece

Under cover of the pandemic, Greece’s right-wing government has passed a slew of new measures to benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers, while massively expanding police powers. On the back of a decade of austerity, the latest laws are set to transform the country into a client state and playground for foreign tourists.

by Matthaios Tsimitakis/Mihalis Panayiotakis

Part 5 - Policing Everywhere and at All Times

It is now a meme-producing cliché in Greece to say that the government believes that all problems can be solved by hiring more police officers. Indeed, in inverse relation to the shrinking number of permanent staff in the Greek health system, police numbers have grown amid the pandemic. As the official government census of public employees shows, between January 2020 and January 2021, the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection acquired 4,568 more staff, while the Ministry of Health lost 1,680 employees — possibly the only country in the world to reduce the number of its permanent health workers during the pandemic.

In neighborhoods around Athens, heavy-handed policing enforcing the lockdowns has led to a surge of protests against police brutality, which have merged with incipient movements in defense of the rule of law, as well as against neoliberal educational reforms, to create an unexpected wave of social unrest. That unrest in turn has been met with aggression from the government, which has allowed, if not directed, police officers to run riot in middle-class neighborhoods, university campuses, and the streets of downtown Athens.

Now, pent-up anger is being released, especially among the youth who, under the current conservative administration, have been targets of police violence not just during but also before the pandemic.

This concern about civil liberties has only grown since the the hunger strike of Dimitris Koufontinas in February and March, a former hitman of the urban guerrilla/terrorist group “Revolutionary Organization 17 November.” The government’s treatment of Koufontinas was seen as both vindictive and illegal, and a broad civil rights movement coalesced in his defense, unified by what it perceives as the government’s increasing disregard for the rule of law.

Source, links:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/authoritarian-conservatism-greece-new-democracy-kyriakos-mitsotakis

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Greece is about to become the blueprint for modern feudalism

The Greeks have just committed suicide by electing the most fanatically neoliberal government ever

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