Amid the Echoes of an Economic
Crash, the Sounds of Greek Society Being Torn
By
RACHEL DONADIO, October 20, 2012
ATHENS
— The cafes are full, the night life vibrant and the tourists still visiting in
droves, but beneath the veneer of normalcy here Greece is unravelling. In good
times, money papered over some of the problems. As the economic crisis grinds
along, austerity is fraying the bonds of civility, forcing long-submerged
divisions to the surface.
Members
of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, who are widely seen to have the support of
the police, clash violently with leftists and immigrants, raising fears of the
precariousness of the rule of law. But the discord is not confined to them.
Lawmakers,
increasingly mired in corruption scandals that alienate the public, curse one
another in Parliament. Friends fall out, disagreeing over how deep the
country’s troubles run and who is to blame.
The
divisions are not only political. With unemployment at 25 percent, and
exceeding 50 percent for young people, tensions are rising between generations,
public- and private-sector workers, haves and have-nots.
“In
Greece today, there are people with nothing to lose, and they’re dangerous,”
said a popular blogger, Pitsirikos, as he sat in a cafe here. “If something
happened, it would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. From moment to moment,
things change completely. It’s not stable.”
The
introduction of the euro in 2002 helped raise living standards after lean
years. Today, those gains are slipping. Every day, it seems, the unthinkable
becomes commonplace.
The
government just passed a law allowing supermarkets to sell expired food at
discounted prices. The price of home heating oil has tripled since 2009, and
many apartment blocks are voting not to buy any since too many tenants can’t
afford it.
As
he stood outside a supermarket in a middle-class neighborhood here, a man who
gave his name only as Stefanos, 70, said that his biggest fear was that Greece
would reach a point “where for every five people unemployed, only one is
working.”
“When
that one person comes out of the supermarket, the other five are waiting for
him outside to grab his groceries,” he said.
As
the talks drag on between the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and
Greece’s foreign lenders over politically toxic new austerity measures in
exchange for more aid, the news media are filled every day with leaks about
possible cuts to salaries and pensions, leading to a state of constant,
low-grade panic.
The
leader of Golden Dawn last week threatened that his 18 members of Parliament
would resign en masse in the vote on austerity measures. The move would
probably not jeopardize the foreign aid but would force destabilizing new
elections in key areas in which the neo-Nazis would likely gain even more
seats.
“What
scares me most is that we continue to be suspended in this permanent state of
uncertainty, which creates a political vacuum in and of itself,” said Nick
Malkoutzis, a journalist and blogger in Athens.
Mr.
Samaras recently provoked public outrage when in an interview with a German
newspaper he likened Greece today to Weimar Germany, referring to the fragile
democratic republic in which fascists and Communists fought for power while the
political center eroded before Hitler came to power. “You have both depression
and aggression — thefts, crimes of all sorts, have increased very much during
the last months,” said Nicos Mouzelis, an emeritus professor of sociology at
the London School of Economics, who was recently mugged in an upscale
neighborhood here.
Adding
to the anxiety, a newspaper recently reported that the government of Prime
Minister George Papandreou fired several high-ranking army officers in October
2011 to thwart a coup attempt several weeks before he left office.
Mr.
Papandreou’s office denied the claim, and in a country that had a military
dictatorship from 1967 until 1974 and where democracy is still young, the unsourced
article was widely dismissed as groundless. But to many Greeks, the report
deepened an already profound mistrust of the news media, which in Greece are
largely in the hands of the political parties and business elite.
Critics
warn of a climate of intimidation against journalists. Those who are seen as
representing the business elite often need security details to protect them
from angry citizens. Investigative reporters for Reuters looking into the Greek
banking system said they were followed, Reuters reported.
On
the streets of Athens, clashes between Golden Dawn members and leftists are
rising. A group of leftists arrested last month after one such clash said they
had been hit, bruised and burned in custody and that the police threatened to
reveal their names and addresses to Golden Dawn, The Guardian newspaper
reported and a lawyer for one of the 15 detainees confirmed.
The
police have denied any wrongdoing, and the public order minister has said he
would sue the paper for defamation. But a Golden Dawn lawmaker did them no
favors when he recently told the BBC he believed the group had the support of
50 to 60 percent of the Greek police.
As
she shopped for vegetables at an outdoor market recently, Angeliki Christaki,
58, said she was growing more worried. “We’re heading toward a scenario of
civil war,” she said. “But that’s only natural when the rich are against the
poor, when the extreme right wing fights the extreme left wing.” (Greece ended
World War II with a civil war that inflicted still lingering scars.)
“I
was personally crushed when I saw young kids in a Golden Dawn protest,” she
said. “I could not believe my eyes.”
While
that party is best known for its violent clashes with immigrants, some of its
members teamed up this month with religious protesters and scuffled with
theatergoers and actors to protest a production of Terrence McNally’s 1997 play
“Corpus Christi,” which depicts Jesus and the Twelve Apostles as gay.
“The
neo-Nazis are widening their range of targets,” a columnist, Nikos Xydakis,
wrote in the Greek daily Kathimerini. “First it was foreigners; now it’s women,
homosexuals, artists, leftists, Greeks, anyone who is not deemed to be 100
percent Aryan, super-masculine, a total Greek.”
Some
see humor as the best revenge. On a recent night, a man outside a bar joked
that he was a Golden Dawn member and invited passers-by in for a drink. “Are
you three generations’ Greek?” he asked. “We might have to give you a DNA
test.”
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