Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to lengthen the fence to cover almost the entire length of Greece’s 192 kilometer border with Turkey by 2026. He also wants the EU to provide the funding, arguing that Greece alone should not bear the cost of protecting the bloc’s most problematic border.

And if the pledge to build a wall and make someone else pay for it sounds familiar, Mitsotakis rejects the comparison with Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidency in 2016 with a slogan to do something very similar with Mexico.

“I don’t have thick blond hair, so I think the comparison is not particularly relevant,” Mitsotakis said in an interview last month with German newspaper Bild, published in English on the prime minister’s website.

He said the work was necessary to avoid another “organized invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory” — referring to an influx of migrants across the Turkish border in early 2020 after an EU-Turkey deal to control the flow of people broke down.

Greeks go to the polls on Sunday, May 21, in an election marked by public anger over a deadly train crash and an unpredictable new cohort of young voters. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leads in the polls with around 36 percent, but is likely to fall short of a clear majority. Syriza is running in second with 29 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.

Mitsotakis has called on Syriza to take a clear stance on the extension of the fence. “Will it tear down the fence by returning to open-border logic? There is no room for half-truths here,” he said during a recent visit to Evros, the province bordering Turkey.

He said the work was necessary to avoid another “organized invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory” — referring to an influx of migrants across the Turkish border in early 2020 after an EU-Turkey deal to control the flow of people broke down.

Greeks go to the polls on Sunday, May 21, in an election marked by public anger over a deadly train crash and an unpredictable new cohort of young voters. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leads in the polls with around 36 percent, but is likely to fall short of a clear majority. Syriza is running in second with 29 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.

Mitsotakis has called on Syriza to take a clear stance on the extension of the fence. “Will it tear down the fence by returning to open-border logic? There is no room for half-truths here,” he said during a recent visit to Evros, the province bordering Turkey.

Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras has said that the existing section of fence was already in place when he became prime minister in 2015, and he didn’t knock it down during four years in office. But extending it is not a magic solution, he said.

“The migration/refugee issue is much more complicated and if it could be solved with fences, Greece and Europe and the U.S. would have dealt with it. Trump was saying the same in Mexico, ‘the fence will save us.’ You can’t be saved by fences,” he told local Skai TV earlier this month.

The socialist Pasok party, polling in third place at around 10 percent, supports the extension of the fence. “Pasok initiated the construction of the fence, because for us both Evros and the sea have borders and must be guarded,” spokesman Dimitris Mantzos said.

Pushback policy

Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s migration crisis since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people from Syria and elsewhere began entering the EU hoping to claim asylum. Many went through Turkey, either crossing the land border into Greece or making the perilous sea crossing to its Aegean islands.

An initial wave of public sympathy and an open-doors policy from many governments, including Germany, was soon replaced by a tougher line as the difficulty of vetting migrants’ refugee status and integrating them into European society became clear. The EU began taking measures to control its borders, including signing a deal with Turkey in 2016. But Turkey proved an unreliable partner — and may well continue to be, if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can best his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in this month’s election runoff.

Human rights organizations and the European Parliament have accused the Greek government of illegal “pushbacks” — forcing back migrants who have made it into Greek territory — and of deporting migrants without due process. Greece’s government denies those accusations, arguing that independent investigations by Greek authorities haven’t found any proof.

“We have followed a strict but fair policy, we have protected our land and sea borders, proving that the sea has borders and we can guard them. We have reduced flows by 90 percent,” Mitsotakis said on a recent visit to the Aegean island of Lesbos.

Gerald Knaus, an Austrian migration expert who led work on the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, said both methods were in play. “Clearly some walls stopped or dramatically reduced flows, but in combination with pushbacks,” he said. “In Greece’s case specifically, you can’t build the wall at the sea, where you have large numbers of arrivals.”

Who will pay for it?

The question of whether the EU should pay for member countries’ border fences is a controversial one. While the migration crisis has stabilized since 2015, it remains a live issue — and that’s unlikely to change given the realities of climate change, war and hunger in the Middle East and Africa.

EU leaders in February pledged “significant” funds to bolster cameras and personnel at the frontiers, but stopped short of directly funding wall-building. A similar proposal was passed in the European Parliament in April, to the dismay of left-wing lawmakers. The possibility of EU-funded walls, once unthinkable, has entered the realm of the possible.

Knaus said it was “dishonest” to reject wall-building, which is legal, while allowing pushbacks, which are not. “By saying we don’t fund the fence, but we ignore violations of the rule of law, the [European] Commission is taking a very easy way out, as symbolic measure that has no real impact,” he said.

For Mitsotakis, it’s only fair that a collective benefit should be paid for by collective funding. “We are a frontline state, we are subject to significant migratory pressures, we expect help from the EU,” he said in the Bild interview. “It’s very unfair on the one hand, to ask Greece to do the difficult job of protecting the external borders and then pointing the finger at Greece because it’s simply doing the job on behalf of others.”

If he wins the election and the EU chooses not to fund the wall, Greece will go it alone, Mitsotakis said at a campaign rally: “The fence in Evros will be finished with or without European money.”

Source: POLITICO

The post Build that wall, Greek leader says ahead of election appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.

The first round was held in May and despite ND winning with a landslide 20 percent margin over the opposition Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ party fell just short of an overall majority in the 300 seat parliament.

In the second round, ND is expected to win by a similar margin and even increase its lead. The average of the latest polls has ND on 42 percent and Syriza on 20 percent. Finishing in first place in the upcoming round, which is based on a semi-proportional representation with a sliding scale seat bonus, would see ND allocated up to 50 extra seats.

It is projected that ND could take 155 to 166 seats in the next parliament, allowing Mitsotakis to form a government without the need for coalition partners. Were this round not to confirm a majority of seats for ND, Mitsotakis said he would not seek to form a coalition, but instead green light a third round of voting to be held in August.

The government was forced to delay May’s election by a month due to the widespread outrage felt by millions of workers and youth at the preventable deaths of 57 people in the Tempi valley train crash. Syriza attempted to make political capital out of the event, but failed abysmally as the population knew that this rotten party was just as implicated in the running down of safety standards on the rail network as ND.

Indeed, it was Syriza that sold off the state rail system in 2017, keeping staff numbers as low as possible in the years prior in order to make the deal as lucrative as possible for the profiteers who bought it at a knockdown price.

The social crisis in the country is so acute, and the government so brutal, that another mass death event—over 500 refugees on an overcrowded boat on June 14, off the coast of—has overshadowed this election round.

Under conditions in which a growing body of evidence points to the culpability of the Hellenic Coast Guard in this crime—with some survivors claiming the vessel was sunk by the coastguard to deter other refugees—the government has released virtually no information, with none of the 80 bodies recovered from the sea identified, let alone the names of 104 survivors.

The survivors were first locked in a fenced compound with highly restricted mobility and access to communications. Spanish daily El Pais noted this week that the coast guard commander “did not clarify why the survivors were subjected to limitations more typical of a prison regime than an aid post for shipwreck victims.” They are now being held in a detention camp near Athens under similarly repressive conditions.

The deaths of hundreds of refugees—the latest of thousands who have died in the Mediterranean Sea in the last decade—prompted mass protests, with tens of thousands demonstrating in Athens and 20 cities around the country. Among the banners denouncing the Hellenic Coast Guard, the EU and its Frontex border protection force were ones reading “murderers”.

Syriza again sought to politically gain, with leader Alexis Tsipras visiting Kalamata and speaking to survivors. He shed more crocodile tears as Syriza raised the deaths in parliament.

As with the train crash deaths, no-one bought this fraud either, given the role of Syriza as the chief jailer of Fortress Europe when in power from 2015-19 and its barely concealed anti-immigration stance.

Doubling down on its their anti-immigration agenda, the ND government is only continuing the dirty work carried out by Syriza. Mitsotakis has made central to his campaign a pledge to lengthen a five-metre high steel fence to cover almost the entire length of Greece’s 192-km border with Turkey, promising to contract another 100-km by 2026. The prime minister said he hoped this would be mainly funded by the EU but stated at a campaign rally, “The fence in Evros will be finished with or without European money.”

Syriza and ND share the same closed-borders policy. In response to Mitsotakis asking of Syriza, “Will they tear down the wall that we have already built and return to a policy of open borders? Or will they preserve it and help secure Greece’s borders?”, Syriza’s European Parliament Vice President Dimitris Papadimoulis replied, “We are not going to tear down anything… And of course, we support EU funding for border security needs, like funds for night vision cameras and coast guard vessels.”

Prior to gaining power in a landslide in 2015, Syriza routinely appealed to mass anti-austerity sentiment. After ditching its promises and imposing even more savage attacks on the working class than the governments it replaced, the party will no longer permit even any public discussion of its pre-power period.

In the weeks running up to the latest round, Greek conservative daily Kathimerini reported, “All the cadres who have been associated with SYRIZA’s tumultuous period between 2012 and 2015 are in a peculiar state of supervision by the party president [Tsipras} and his press office. They will not be able to appear in the media without prior permission from the party.” This was required, said the newspaper “in an effort to reassure the centrist audience that voted en masse for New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis in May.”

An earlier attempt to appeal this constituency, especially voters of the right-wing, pro-austerity social democratic PASOK—and bolster chances of a future coalition government with them—saw Syriza change its name in 2019 to Coalition of the Radical Left-Progressive Alliance.

Tsipras responded to his party’s defeat in May’s election with another step to the right, hiring the anti-communist political scientist and professor Nikos Marantzidis as Syriza’s head of communications for the June poll. Marantzidis was previously a supporter of the pro-capitalist, EU-supporting To Potami (The River) party and has been a leading figure in a right-wing historians tendency in Greece.

A slew of enemies confronts the working class in the upcoming elections. There is no political alternative representing the interests of workers, setting up the widely hated ND for another four years in office. Thanks to Syriza’s betrayals and sharp lurch to the right over the last decade, ND was able to win the support of every demographic in the May election.

Voting is compulsory is in Greece, yet the last two general elections (2019 and May this year) have seen around 40 percent of the electorate abstain in disgust. But no matter the scale of opposition against the crimes of the political elite—as evidenced by the movements which erupted in revulsion at the murderous policies responsible for the Tempi deaths and mass drownings of refugees—these will inevitably dissipate in the absence of a socialist perspective and organisation.

All experience of the last decades, including the strategic lessons of the pseudo-left in power, points to the urgency of Greek workers and youth building their own revolutionary party: a Greek section of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Source: WSWS

The post Syriza shifts further to right in Greece, as conservative New Democracy set to win general election appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.

Pro-government daily hints at SYRIZA’s downfall after final results, while pro-main opposition party newspaper stresses unity ahead of 2nd elections next month

Greece’s conservative ruling New Democracy (ND) party won a big victory in Sunday’s elections, while two major leftist parties, including the main opposition SYRIZA, suffered a severe defeat, which the local media described on Monday as Greeks’ confidence in Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ policies.

The pro-government Kathimerini daily reported that the ND party’s landslide victory demonstrates the Greeks’ approval of the ruling party’s policies while hinting at SYRIZA’s downfall after the final results and major turmoil within the party.

The daily also highlighted that the Greek Communist Party (KKE) increased its appeal, particularly in urban centers and working-class neighborhoods, while the ultra-conservative nationalist Victory and the left-wing Course of Freedom parties performed well surprisingly and secured 6th and 7th positions, respectively.

Another pro-government daily, To Vima, stated that the results are appalling for SYRIZA and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, who is in “shock,” and that they are without a plan B following the strategic defeat.

The government’s generous social payments to citizens at a time when the main opposition could not present realistic plans played a role in the party’s defeat in general elections.

A major private broadcaster, SKAI TV, which is also pro-government, commented that Greek voters did not trust SYRIZA’s pre-election promises, stressing that even traditionally social-democratic, left-leaning provinces shifted to the conservative ND party.

In its report, the Pro-SYRIZA daily Avgi, however, emphasized respect for the people’s will, but warned that “the new situation that is taking shape is not positive for most of society.”

“The battle is lost, but the fight never stops,” it said, urging its readers to unite ahead of the second elections, which are expected to take place on June 25 or July 2.

With 99.68% of the votes counted early Monday, the New Democracy party won 40.79% – twice the main opposition SYRIZA’s 20.07%. Socialist PASOK came in third at 11.46%, followed by Greek Communist Party with 7.23%. Far-right, populist Greek Solution party became the 5th biggest party in the country with 4.45%.

Source: AA

The post Greece’s ruling conservative party wins big as leftist parties suffer crushing defeat appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.