Moira Lavelle is an independent reporter based in Athens, Greece. She covers migration, borders, gender, and politics.
Greece’s elections on Sunday brought a conservative majority — and seats in parliament for three far-right parties. With the collapse of the left-wing alternative to austerity, neofascist and ultra-Orthodox groups are pulling Greece to the right.
Hundreds are missing, presumed drowned after a shipwreck off Greece, which European officials have called the “worst ever tragedy” in the Mediterranean. Far from a chance event, it’s the latest result of an EU border regime built on thousands of deaths at sea.
Greece votes in a general election today, with the right-wing New Democracy resisting the challenge from Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza. The campaign has been subdued, reflecting voters’ limited faith in Syriza’s ability to undo the austerity it helped to impose.
Greece’s right-wing government has been caught tapping the phones of journalists and opposition politicians. The scandal has raised doubts over Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s future — and highlighted his New Democracy party’s worrying authoritarian turn.
Vladimir Putin claims to be protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine. A Jacobin reporter at the Polish border found Russian-speaking refugees outraged at his claims — and at Russian media’s denial of horrors they saw with their own eyes.
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups.
After decades of murderous attacks on migrants and leftists, on Wednesday, a Greek court ruled that Golden Dawn is a criminal organization. The verdict is a triumph for victims, and for the minorities targeted by the neo-Nazi party — and it will embolden the resistance against still-active far-right forces.