Resistance to Authority in Greece as Pessimism Takes Hold

By STEVEN ERLANGERNOV. 5, 2015

The New York Times

LONDON — Yiorgos Kaminis has the privilege and misfortune of being the mayor of Athens, the suffering heart of bankrupt Greece, marked by both the majesty of the Parthenon and a relentless wave of graffiti hooligans, whose work he does not have the money to scrape off.

Now 61, Mr. Kaminis was born in New York and lived there until the age of 5, studied in France, taught law at the University of Athens and was re-elected last year as the nonpartisan mayor of one of the world’s great cities.

With Greece stuffed with migrants as it further cuts spending, Mr. Kaminis is gloomy, to say the least.

“When I look at Europe, I don’t have any optimism at all,” he said. “For a while, everyone will feel good, with the Germans and the Austrians the good guys, but it will help the far right.”

The same holds true in Greece, too, where he sees a bankruptcy of responsible politics. “We live in a situation of extreme urgency,” he said. “We’ve become tired, and we’ve become stuck.”

Greeks no longer believe, if they ever did, he said, in the functionality of politics.

“We have a crisis of the government system in the eyes of the people,” he said. Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister who led the left-wing Syriza party into government on a vow to reject austerity, won re-election on a pledge to enforce a new bailout as painlessly as possible.

“Tsipras would never have been re-elected if we had a credible opposition,” Mr. Kaminis said. “A vote for him was a vote against the old political establishment, and people decided to give him a second chance.”

But governing “will devour Tsipras, too,” he said. “And I’m not happy about that, because after Tsipras, what’s the alternative? It’s Golden Dawn.”

Luckily for Mr. Tsipras, perhaps, the leadership of Golden Dawn, a far-right party with neo-Nazi elements, is being tried on charges of running a criminal organization, and many of its legislators are facing other criminal cases. So he has some quiet as he reluctantly labors at austerity, rather like Sisyphus pushing his rock uphill.

But the real problem for Greece, Mr. Kaminis said, is not economic or political. “It’s cultural,” he said. “It’s our mind-set.”

A long period of occupation under the Ottoman Empire gave the Greeks, like the Serbs, a fundamental mistrust of the state and a pride in stubborn resistance, even if it is self-defeating.

The Ottoman word “inad” or “inat,” from the Arabic, meant something like resilience, but in Serbian, the term came to signal a spiteful, sometimes suicidal obstinacy in the face of power — in the best case, to defend the homeland’s religion and culture from occupation.

The Greeks have inherited the same mind-set, Mr. Kaminis said. If the dark forces from outside were first the Turks, then the Nazis, then the Americans for backing Greece’s military dictatorship, now it is the Germans, who stand simultaneously for Brussels and the Nazis in many Greek minds. Syriza, with its roots in the far left, views itself as an outsider, Greece as alone and the broader world as suspicious and dangerous.

But the Greek mistrust of power goes deeper, he insisted. “It’s resistance, not just against foreigners, whether the Americans or now the Germans — it’s against the authorities, the government and the police.” The state is something to avoid or manipulate, not protect, and the police are considered “the enemy.”

Athens, its budget cut 40 percent in five years, is inevitably deteriorating, the mayor says. Infrastructure is unrepaired, graffiti goes uncleaned, potholes are unfilled, trash is uncollected.

“I have a big problem with people vandalizing public spaces and don’t have the budget for regular police patrols at night,” he said. “So I got some cameras, but many Greeks will say that the cameras are spying by the state.”

Greece is doing what Europe demands, Mr. Kaminis said, but it is like breaking stones in a prison yard. “I’d like to be an optimist,” he said. “But where is the data for it? We have some pockets of performance, but they are isolated. People are beaten down.”