Editorial: Assault on the everyday

At the time I am writing these lines, hours after landing back in Athens in December, a father and his two sons had been arrested in the central neighbourhood of Koukaki, beaten up by police on their own flat’s roof and the father (Dimitris Indares, a prominent film-maker, as it turns out) was pictured surrounded by heavily armed police, handcuffed and topless, his t-shirt pulled above the neck as some kind of impromptu head cover. What was all this about? Ever since coming to power in July this year, the conservative New Democracy government has leashed a war against migrant and anarchist squats, the newly arriving migrants at the country’s borders, academic freedom, and even clubbing, with a now renowned incident of armed police raiding a night-club full of hundreds of revellers, ordering everyone at gunpoint, all for a mostly fruitless drug raid. The new government has been particularly, and bizarrely so, obsessed with the case of Exarcheia—the small central Athenian neighbourhood that has been a bastion of political resistance for the past decades. Even before gaining power, its main pre-election promise had been of ‘cleaning up Exarcheia’—as if a country reeling from a near-decade of economic crisis was in any need of more policing in a neighbourhood most ND voters had never set foot on. It might not be a complete coincidence that both Exarcheia and Koukaki top the city’s Airbnb list, as the city authorities are seeing the promise of the quick tourist buck as a swift and easy way out of the recession—for some at least.