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Jens is a senior policy adviser at the ELIAMEP think-tank in Athens. He also works an independent economic analyst.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his government are coming under greater pressure by the day as the authorities struggle to contain and extinguish wildfires in Greece, particularly on the island of Evia, where more than 45,000 hectares of land has been burnt since the blaze began there last week. New Democracy is facing criticism on multiple fronts. Apart from the opposition parties, which have raised questions about the operational response to the wildfires, social media has also been rife with attacks on the government, including the trending of the “Mitsotakis Fuck Off” hashtag on Twitter. Furthermore, in areas affected by the disasters, citizens and well as local officials – even some aligned to the ruling centre-right party - have increasingly being voicing to the Greek media their frustration with the apparent lack of support in limiting the spread of the fires. Also, some residents of fire-stricken areas have ignored evacuation notices to stay and protect their homes and livelihoods from the advancing blazes, with success in some cases. This has undermined to some extent the government’s main line of defence, which has pointed to the prompt evacuation messages sent by the 112 mechanism and the limited loss of life that this helped achieve (so far only one death, that of a volunteer firefighter, has been confirmed). The fact that some people have stayed to prevent the fires from reaching their homes has highlighted the shortcomings of the firefighting effort but also raised questions about the strategy of evacuating one community after another and, in the eyes of some residents, simply surrendering to the advancing fire. In his televised address last week, Mitsotakis argued that homes and businesses could be rebuilt, and that the priority must be safeguarding lives. At the time, critics suggested that this was an admission of failure and a defeatist approach but in the wake of the political damage the SYRIZA government suffered in 2018 as a result of the fire in Mati, New Democracy felt that keeping the number of deaths to a minimum had to be the number one goal. However, since Mitsotakis’s speech last Thursday, the extent of damage inflicted by the fire north of Athens to one of the few forested areas left around the city (including the former Royal Estate at Tatoi, as Kathimerini revealed) and the destruction still being wreaked by the massive fire in northern Evia has put a slightly different hue on things. The Evia blaze is now considered the largest ever single wildfire seen in Greece, leading to thousands of residents having to flee their villages and towns, some by ferries and other vessels. On top of this, it is estimated that the fire in Attica tore through 8,000 hectares of land, while more than 10,000 hectares burned in the Peloponnese over the last few days. ND criticised the previous government heavily when it was in opposition for the handling of much smaller fires, as well as the deadly Mati blaze. Mitsotakis made a point of promising both in the 2019 election campaign and since coming to power a much more competent approach to fire prevention and firefighting and the opposition is now using his own words against him. Another line of attack from SYRIZA and the other parties has been that since Thursday the government has been absent on the communications front, leaving Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Haradalis to hold two daily briefings regarding the state of the firefighting effort, where no questions from journalists are taken. Government spokeswoman Aristotelia Peloni was forced to deny on Sunday that she and other personnel are absent, but there was no indication of any regular briefings, with the media’s participation resuming this week. ND response Instead, the government is hoping to hit back with another televised address by PM Mitsotakis following a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. There are also plans for the premier to hold a news conference later this week. ND’s aim will be to hit back at the accusations that the response from the fire service has been inadequate, including accusations that efforts were focussed on controlling the fire in Attica, a move that allowed the Evia blaze to grow and traverse most of the northern part of the island. The PM will also seek to heal the wounds by providing more detail on the compensation that the government will hand out to those affected by the fires, including farmers and producers in Evia and the Peloponnese. The details of the financial aid that will be on offer are not yet known but the Finance Ministry has been consulted regarding the fiscal space available. It is expected that the government will try to be as generous as possible in the hope of quelling some of the anger that seems to have built up over the past few days, threatening to completely overturn ND’s carefully constructed effort to present itself as a competent and efficient administration. (Article from macropolis.gr - register for access to more free articles)

In February 2019, the then leader of the opposition Kyriakos Mitsotakis welcomed the publication of an expert committee report on the management of forest fires in Greece, calling its recommendations “a blueprint for the steps we will follow”. The so-called Goldammer report was commissioned in the aftermath of the deadly Mati wildfire of the previous summer, for which Mitsotakis laid the blame squarely on the incumbent SYRIZA government. Mitsotakis was elected Prime Minister a week before the first anniversary of Mati, in no small measure thanks to the public anger stemming from SYRIZA’s mismanagement of the fire, which resulted in the loss of over 100 lives. Two years later, his New Democracy government is faced with its own wildfire crisis. According to an early estimate, wildfires burning on several fronts in Greece’s central and southern regions have destroyed close to 65,000 hectares of forest, cultivated land and homes over the past week – three-and-a-half times the size of the burnt area recorded over the entire 2018 fire season. At 46,000 hectares, the wildfire still burning in north of the island of Evia is already the most destructive since national records began. ...The 2021 fires are clearly not Mati. Several large fronts burning concurrently in widely separated parts of the country, including the outskirts of Athens, pose a much bigger challenge operationally. The response so far, however, suggests that the authorities - and particularly the political leadership - have been preparing to fight the last war, rather than the next one. The experience of Mati – the evacuation alert system put in place subsequently, no doubt combined with the freshness of the memory in peoples’ minds - has so far saved many lives. However, that should not absolve those in charge of responsibility for the overall handling of events. No-one would describe the authorities’ response so far as a fire management success, nor have confidence in the current system - or those in charge of it - to deal with the increase in extreme events expected under even the most conservative climate change scenarios. 

Finally, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, a professor of Public Law at Oxford University who has also dabbled in Greek politics, explains why he thinks the police's problems mirror those in other parts of the public administration and how some, but not others, are being addressed by the government.

Also, Nick Malkoutzis speaks to Professor Daphne Halikopoulou from the University of Reading, an expert in the far-right, looks at the bigger picture and explains how Golden Dawn gained such a following and what might happen now that the party is out of the picture.

A good indication that Greece had the Covid-19 situation control before tourism began was the low daily number of untraced cases, i.e. those that could not be traced back to a specific positive case or were related to travelling.”

...The rush by Greece’s political leaders to claim the fatherhood of the judicial victory over Golden Dawn demeans the occasion. It sucks the oxygen out of a moment that could have helped breath new life into Greece’s staid, selfish political scene. More importantly, it obscures the learnings we should draw from this hellish experience. In the attempt to paint the judge’s verdict as a victory for a specific political party, for Greek democracy as a whole or for the country’s institutions, we are missing the point. Greece’s political system did hold together, as did our liberal democracy and our institutions – just as they survived the gruelling test of the long economic crisis – but they did so in spite of themselves, of us and the constant attempt to undermine them by those claiming to be their representatives and defenders. We can take some comfort from the fact that there were politicians, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, activists, priests, journalists, victims and their relatives, such as the extraordinary Magda Fyssa, who had the courage to stand up to the Golden Dawn menace. But we cannot ignore that for each one of them, there were many more members of our political system, institutions, media, church and society that turned a blind eye or even molly coddled Neo-Nazis who made no secret of their intent to overthrow the system that provided these same people with protection and freedom, and to steamroller anybody who stood in their way.

This is the latest episode of the video discussions organised by Agenda Public and MacroPolis.