“Social Uprising”
Posted by Sappho on December 15th, 2008 filed in Greek News
ekathimerini today reports results of a poll showing that 6 in 10 Greeks see the past week’s unrest as a “popular uprising” rather than the work of “minority activists.”
According to a survey carried out by polling firm Public Issue for Kathimerini, 60 percent of Greeks believe last week’s unrest, triggered by the police killing of a teenager, had been «a mass phenomenon.»
Nearly half (42 percent) of respondents, questioned on Thursday and Friday when the rioting had abated, said they believed the widespread damage wreaked during the unrest had been the work of «a few people» with only 10 percent believing that the majority of demonstrators had been involved. Also half (47 percent) believed the protests were spontaneous, and «not politically motivated.»
The survey also revealed public discontent with the authorities’ reaction to the crisis. A total of 76 percent were dissatisfied with the police response to the rioting, while four in 10 said they believed that none of the country’s political leaders had adopted the proper stance….
PASOK, Greece’s main opposition party, continues to call for early elections. Meanwhile, Greece’s foreign minister, Dora Bakoyannis, said in an interview with Der Spiegel that she was not surprised by the events of the past week.
… Such a tragedy like the death of a 15-year-old from a police bullet is of course a shock. So it is easy to get young people onto the streets….
I expected something like this would happen sooner or later. We have a group of people with ultra-leftist ideologies, the active Black Bloc anarchists. There have recently been repeated clashes with them. As of late, their organization has been improving and becoming more flexible, they are using the Internet and text messages. At the same time, we have to weather difficult reforms. That is the deeper reason for the protests, this is why the anarchists have suddenly been joined by disgruntled young people….
You have to differentiate between the reactions to our economic reforms, which are understandable, and the current protests. The reforms are urgently needed. Greece needs investments and jobs that will be secure over the long run. We need privatizations and we needed the educational reforms introduced last year. You cannot have radical reforms without some reaction from those affected….
Greek protesters continue to use Twitter to share information. Non-Greek speakers can sort of follow this discussion by plugging http://hashtags.org/tag/griots into Babelfish for a typically imperfect machine translation.
The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet suggests that Greek riots could bode more unrest in Europe.
The Greek riots were triggered by a specific police shooting and sustained by broad opposition to a weak right-wing government, and as such are unlikely to spread directly to other territories. But as of yesterday, hundreds of people were detained across the Europe, including Spain, France and Denmark, as protestors attacked banks, shops, police stations and cars in an apparent show of support for rioting Greeks.
“A violent reaction comparable to what has happened in Greece is possible, if there’s some kind of spark to light the fire, such as a youth’s death,” Roberto d’Alimonte, professor of political science at Florence University told Agence France-Presse. “We can’t ignore the phenomenon of imitation, which is very significant right now,” Alimonte said. “At the moment, Italian youth is frustrated and worried for its future. The crisis is only going to make this worse.”