Welcome to Anarchia

Central Athens is under occupation by militarized police. The roots of the Iannis Michaelides crisis go back to 2008, and Greece's status as a European punching bag.

If you want to learn about contemporary Greek politics, mention Yiannis Varoufakis to a waiter.

We’ve just returned from a badly needed vacation in Greece. I can’t recommend Naxos enough – a perfect place to do absolutely nothing. I needed nothing, pretty badly, which is why this is the first of these newsletters you’ve seen in quite a while: I’ve been barely hanging on to the edge of being utterly smoked. Burned out. Wrecked. After ten days in Greece, I feel like practically a new man.

Before we took the ferry to Naxos, we spent two days in Athens, also doing not much except eating incredible food.  I don’t exactly remember the transition from tapas to politics, but for some reason at one great little place I told our waiter how much I admired Varoufakis, the left-wing finance minister who served all too briefly in the administration of Alexis Tspiras after the financial crisis of 2008.

It was Varoufakis who pushed hardest for a forgiveness of Greek debt by the E.U., including by threatening to leave the monetary union. His clarity and commitment naturally meant he was summarily cashiered after just months in office. The more accommodationist Tspiras returned to the premiership from 2015 to 2019, and remains head of Siriza, the opposition party he helped found.

(Police buses lined up outside Exarchia on a quiet evening)

The Long Death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos

Anyway. Our waiter updated me on the still-bleak situation in Greece, particularly the case of Iannis Michaeledes and its dizzying fallout. Michaeledes’ legal troubles are far too complex for me to have a solid take on, but in a nutshell, he has been in prison for more than eight years in connection with a politically-motivated bank robbery and subsequent prison break.

Michaeledes’ bank robbery was in turn connected to the 2008 murder of 15 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by police, which took place in the context of widespread unrest on the cusp of the global financial crisis. That killing fueled riots across Greece, but particularly in Exarchia, the central Athens district where the killing took place. The police murder was not an isolated incident, though it still feels remarkable from America, where such murders are routine and have only produced sporadic resistance, itself brutally suppressed.

Michaeledes purportedly robbed a bank to help fund opposition groups in the aftermath of the Grigoropoulos killing. Michaeledes has now served 1/3 of his sentence, which his supporters say should make him eligible for provisional release, something like parole, under Greek standard procedure. But he and supporters claim that he has been denied that release for political reasons, and on May 23 Michaeledes declared that he would undertake a hunger strike until he was released. (This was how we got here from Varoufakis, who I was told has condemned the Greek government’s treatment of Michaeledes, though I haven’t been able to find his statement.)

(Even during the day, police are stationed throughout the neighborhood. It is essentially an occupation.)

Some Recent Attacks

Now here’s where things start to get, well, even wilder. On July 8, just over a month before we were in Athens, a bomb went off in a tax office. This was a seemingly symbolic attack with no fatalities, but an anarchist group reportedly claimed responsibility and said they were acting in support of Michaeledes. Another bomb was found on July 26, linked to the same group.

Our friendly waiter recommended that to get the best sense of what this all really meant, we had to go to Exarchia, just a short walk away, very much in the middle of Athens. The name translates to “no rulers,” and it has long been home to Athens’ dissident elements, culturally and politically. It is full of small, punky bars, and the walls everywhere are plastered with posters for political study groups and activism – just the sort of neighborhood I instinctively love.

But the situation in Exarchia now is extremely grim. We ventured there for a beer at around 9pm. It became immediately clear that the entire neighborhood is effectively under a militarized police occupation. Almost immediately, we were greeted by a squad of perhaps twenty heavily armored tactical police wearing helmets, body armor, and plastic riot shields. They jog-marched with the hup of an infantry unit, taking up the narrow sidewalks on both sides of the street, forcing ourselves and another pedestrian out onto the pavement if we didn’t want to get plowed over.

A bit later, we spotted a row of two prison buses, deep blue and with steel mesh over the windows. Both the riot cops and these buses were the spiritual cousins of buses I’ve seen lying in wait in big cities in America during major protests, ready to haul a critical mass of dissidents off to some desolate jailhouse. (The only difference, large without fundamentally changing anything, is that the Greek riot cops didn’t carry guns.)

I am not an expert on Greek or E.U. politics, but I do know the general outlines of Greece’s continuing subjugation by European powers. Greece is the internal frontier of Europe, at least until places like Croatia and Turkey get in the door. It is in particular Germany’s eternal whipping boy, an endless repository for generous loans and extortionate repayments.

Ultimately, the tensions that run through Exarchia are the tensions that flow downward from Brussels. The Greek bootheels that intimidate and control are themselves ultimately controlled by central bankers far away. And if this is happening in a European capital, how much more might citizens of other subordinate nations trickle down to specific neighborhoods, to specific streetcorners, all in service to burying truths the rest of us would rather not see?