Tuesday, July 16, 2013

''The Mayor of Athens: A Sober Voice in a World of Extremes'' By Yannis Palaiologos ''the time''

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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