On June 4, George Kaminis, the mild-mannered mayor of Athens, visited Greece‘s
Minister of Citizen Protection, Nikos Dendias, to discuss a legislative
proposal put forth by the ministry for the regulation of minor
demonstrations in Athens. Kaminis, a moderately left-wing former
constitutional lawyer, is not one to crackdown on dissent, but he had
reached the end of his tether. Retailers
and hotel owners located in the city center have long complained about
the frequency with which downtown Athens is shut down because of
gatherings of a few dozen people (796 with less than 200 participants
last year), and of the damage inflicted upon their stores when larger
demonstrations get out of hand.
“Everyone has rights—the protesters as well as the store-owners
downtown. That’s how parliamentary democracy is meant to work,” Kaminis
says, sitting in a plush, high-ceilinged room on the first floor of the
mayoral mansion. But Greece’s democracy is not like others. Its politics
are starkly polarized between emboldened extremes on the right and the
left. The more the country’s economic crisis has deepened, the more each
camp has become insensible to—and intolerant of—the demands and values
of the other.
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