Greece

Right-wing governments and movements are using the C-19 crisis to demand refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere are kept or driven out of Europe. In fact the crisis only strengthens to the case they must be let in, welcomed and integrated. The Syrian government says the country has no confirmed C-19 cases, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports outbreaks in several provinces. It says the regime has issued a gag order to stop medical personnel discussing the issue. Meanwhile Syria is one of very few countries in the region not to have stopped air travel with Iran — the...

For a long time, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been "threatening" to open Turkey’s western borders, and allow the millions of refugees to travel to Europe. Now he is upping the threats and raising the stakes. His aim is not to get better conditions for the refugees. It is to force Europe into greater support of Turkey. Yet, with the renewed attacks on migrants, it is the responsibility of socialists all across Europe to challenge the racist anti-immigration laws being put forward by our governments. In Britain the losses have far outnumbered the victories as Home Secretary Priti...

I started coming to Symi, a tiny Greek island in the Aegean, closer geographically to Turkey than the Greek mainland, 30 years ago. Missing a few years in the middle, I resumed coming five years ago. In these five years, the island has seen many refugees being washed up on its harbour side; mainly from Syria plus some from Afghanistan, Iraq, and sub-Saharan Africa arriving from Turkey just across the water. Although there was consternation on the island from residents who themselves were suffering the effects of the collapse of the Greek economy, the response to the refugees was (and continues...

The 7 July election in Greece confirmed the trends that emerged in the Euro elections: • a comfortable ND (New Democracy, equivalent of the Tories) dominance that revolved around engaging the centre right and alt right voters • a lack of momentum from Syriza (the leftish party that has governed since 2015), which paid the price of its capitulation and transformation into a pro-memoranda, pro-austerity party • the weakness of the anti-capitalist Left to persuade and inspire • the continuing fall of the Golden Dawn, leading them out of Parliament for the first time since 2012. Abstention was at...

An open letter to the Europe For the Many conference on 26-27 October from Greek socialist Theodora Polenta. Dear Comrades: I am looking forward to attending the event "Europe for the Many: a left strategy for transforming Europe" on 26-27 October. But I am concerned about the fact that the conference's top-billed speakers are the Portuguese prime minister and the Greek finance minister. Are the current 2018 Syriza-ANEL government and its financial minister part of our European socialist vision? Can they be our inspiration or our partners in pushing a radical Labour government forwards? No...

The Syriza election was a reflection of the hard, militant class struggle by the working class and neighbourhood community movements against the attacks of the “Black Block” Memorandum governments of the years 2010 to 2012. Syriza gave political substance to this movement, and it carried all of this movement’s political contradictions. The movement had only a vague idea of what it expected of the Syriza government. It expected some form of relief, to get rid of the Memorandum laws and privatisation, to restore wages and pensions and collective bargaining, to give some right to housing. These...

The latest poll in Greece shows Syriza has the support of just 15% of the electorate. Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos has boasted that a third of the austerity measures Greece had to impose as part of the current programme have been “totally completed”, another third are “totally agreed”, while the rest are subject to “political negotiation”. Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza-Anel government, elected in January 2015 with the claim and the hope that it would be Greece’s first government of the left, is overseeing a social counterrevolution. More than a third of the population (35.7 per cent) are...

Participants in the Second Congress of Greece’s once-left party, Syriza, on 13-16 October, were reduced in the role of applauders of the Syriza-Anel government’s memorandum doctrines. Reminiscent of the Tory Prime Minister Samaras, who defended the implementation of the second [2012] Memorandum by saying that “there is light at the end of the tunnel”, Alexis Tsipras claimed the third memorandum could bring a new dawn. “We continue to implement a fair deal and we expect from the institutions and our partners to meet their obligations ... The deepest darkness is before dawn,” he said. There was...

Jeremy Corbyn has said he will defend freedom of movement in the negotiations around Brexit. He has declared: “I have visited the camps in Calais and Dunkirk, which are in an appalling state. Those people are in a very perilous situation. They are all humans, to whom we must reach out the hand of friendship and support”. He has called for Britain to admit more refugees. By contrast, the legacy of the 1997-2010 New Labour Government, of which Owen Smith aspires to be the successor, was seven Acts of Parliament restricting civil liberties on the pretext of fighting terrorism; six on immigration...

On 7 September, Britain's immigration minister, Robert Goodwill, announced that the government will build a four-metre-high wall for about one kilometre along the main port highway in Calais, France, to prevent refugees or immigrants boarding lorries to cross the Channel. Construction will cost about £1.9 million, will start this month and is to be completed by the end of year. "Many continue to pass [the border]," said Goodwill, speaking to a parliamentary committee. "We have raised fences, now we will raise the wall." The wall will be made of a kind of "soft" cement, to make climbing...