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The thing with Greece is that everyone focuses on the early stages of the gov's handling of corvid-19 (swift, decisive, broadly positive with some hiccups) and ignores the middle part (corruption, minimum extra funding for healthcare, antagonising doctors and nurses) and the >
Then the exit stage which seems frankly bonkers, with arbitrary measures and tremendous antagonism against parts of the population.
In this context you had the extremely violent interventions by riot police in public squares which today produced a backlash with thousands of people protesting while not maintaining distances etc. And that's just the tip of iceberg.
You can't antagonise the public in these circumstances. You can't send the riot police out to carry out violent operations. You can't arrest people and shove them all together in small spaces with no protection.
But this mentality was evident throughout. ND is a party that has very clear authoritarian tendencies, much more so now that is overrun by hard-right MPs and officials who previously were members of parties that were thought of as far-right.
This is due to the fact everyone still thinks of the lockdown as some sort of magic bullet, the solution to the corvid-19 pandemic. But it's just the first step. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And what I'm seeing beyond the first steps is not encouraging.
And even the first few steps had huge issues. Their dithering around ordering the Churches to close down for instance. It's all chronicled in this piece https://balkaninsight.com/2020/04/27/communion-and-the-coronavirus-covid-19-triggers-deep-orthodox-divisions/
Sure, we can praise the first stage. But that's not all we should be talking about. In fact, in the long term, it's probably not the most important part at all.
And everybody should read this http://www.macropolis.gr/?i=portal.en.the-agora.9663
