The Guardian reports: Almost three years into the debt crisis that began beneath the Acropolis there is no doubt in the minds of many that Greece is at war – an economic war whose byproducts of poverty and hate, anger and desperation have begun inexorably to tear its society apart. And for the great majority the EU – with Germany at the helm – is solely to blame.

“It’s a new kind of war, one without weapons but just as deadly,” said Takis Kapeoldasis, a tattoo artist, giving voice to the mood at large. “I don’t want to be insulting but it’s Europe’s policies that have done us over and now it gets the prize of all prizes for peace and reconciliation.

“Those who made this choice should come and walk our streets now while there is peace and harmony because soon it’s going to be too late.” For young Greeks like Karmela Kontou, who belong to the generation hardest hit by the country’s descent into economic and social meltdown, the idea that the EU had been rewarded for its “successful struggle” to reinforce democracy and human rights was especially galling. After all, she said, “more and more Greeks are killing themselves” precisely because they see no light at the end of the tunnel.

Even worse was the democratic deficit. Growing numbers of Greeks feel they have no democratic say over any of the policies that have changed their lives. Greece may be paying for years of profligacy but the coffins of those who could no longer take the pain of being unable to pay extra bills and higher taxes on wages that had also decreased sharply were also lining up.

“The mood is not just dark, it’s hopeless. People are killing themselves, the suicide rate is soaring, because they just can’t cope and the EU is definitely partly to blame,” said a 25-year-old.

Yiannis Baboulias writes: The timing is nothing if not ironic. On the day the EU has been awarded the Nobel peace prize, we watch as Europe sits idly by and lets fascism brew once again – this time in Greece. If a sharp turn towards religious fundamentalism and fascism is to be avoided, Europe needs to act now.

On Thursday night the Athens premiere of Terrence McNally’s play, Corpus Christi, was cancelled following protests by members of the far-right party Golden Dawn (including some MPs) and religious groups.

The protest had a clearly homophobic agenda. Manolis V, a journalist, was attacked by protesters while the police apparently did nothing: “The police is next to us. I shout ‘They’re beating me, aren’t you going to do something?’,” he wrote on Twitter. “I move away so I can look on from distance. A well-known Golden Dawn MP follows me. He punches me twice in the face and knocks me to the ground. While on the ground, I lose my glasses. The Golden Dawn MP kicks me. The police are just two steps away but turn their back.”

The spectacle of fascists physically attacking people whose moral agenda they disapprove of has become routine in today’s Greece. What should come as more of a shock is the tacit approval of the police.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Greece’s unemployment rate hit a new record in July with one in four now out of work, like in Spain, as a crippling recession and austerity measures continued to take a toll on the labour market.

Unemployment rose for a 35th consecutive month to 25.1 percent in July, more than double the euro zone average and up from a revised 24.8 percent in June, Greece’s statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday.

The jobless rate has more than tripled since the debt-laden country’s five-year recession began in 2008 and now stands at 54 percent for those aged between 15 and 24 years, compared with 22 percent in July 2008.

A record 1.26 million Greeks were without work in July, up 43 percent from the same month last year.

The slump in the Greek economy is expected to accelerate later this year if the government implements further budget cuts of almost 12 billion euros over the next two years as a pre-condition for more funds under its EU/IMF bailout.

The New York Times reports: The video, which went viral in Greece last month, shows about 40 burly men, led by Giorgos Germenis, a lawmaker with the right-wing Golden Dawn party, marching through a night market in the town of Rafina demanding that dark-skinned merchants show permits.

Some do, and they are left alone. But the action quickly picks up, as the men, wearing black T-shirts with the party’s name, destroy a stall with clubs and scatter the merchandise. “We saw a few illegal immigrants selling their wares,” Mr. Germenis says in the video. “We did what Golden Dawn has to do. And now we’re going to church to pay our respects to the Madonna.”

Just a few months ago, the name Golden Dawn was something to be whispered in Greece.

But three months after the extremist right-wing group won an electoral foothold in Parliament, talk of Golden Dawn seems to be on everybody’s lips.

In cafes, taxis and bars, Greeks across the political spectrum are discussing the palpable surge in Golden Dawn’s popularity, which has risen in recent political polls even as the group steps up a campaign of vigilantism and attacks against immigrants.

The poll gains come amid growing disenchantment over rising illegal immigration, and with the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, which is being forced by its international lenders to push through $15 billion in additional, highly unpopular, austerity measures. If Greece were to hold new elections soon, Golden Dawn could emerge as the third-largest party in Parliament, behind Mr. Samaras’s New Democracy and the left-wing Syriza. Currently, Golden Dawn is the fifth largest, with 18 out of 300 seats. [Continue reading…]

Greek Reporter: The Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party has set up an office in New York City in a bid to bolster its support among expatriate Greek communities and promising to dispense it only to Greeks and not immigrants it blames for a rise in crime and who it wants pushed out of the country.

The ultra-nationalist party has been collecting food and medicine at drives in New York for Greeks left destitute by the country’s massive financial crisis and recently distributed the aid in Athens, the Kathimerini daily reported, getting response from Greek-Americans who favor their anti-immigrant, anti-government agenda.

The website of the Golden Dawn New York branch, which features the party’s black swastika-like symbol across a dark New York skyline, promises the aid will be donated “only to Greek people.” Similar drives also have been held in Melbourne, Australia and Montreal, Canada.

Costas Lapavitsas writes: Last week I was in Athens and took the metro to Syntagma Square. Like many northern Greeks, I have mixed feelings towards the capital. Northerners do not like to admit it, but we secretly enjoy the smell of jasmine – the true scent of Athens. But this time the air smelt of cordite.

Syntagma was abnormally quiet: shops shut, people halfheartedly shopping, riot police everywhere. The atmosphere crackled with the expectation of something sinister about to happen. And lo, in Monastiraki Square, afew hundred yards away, agroup of young men attacked a shop owner; just another violent episode in a city resembling a tinderbox.

The prime culprit for the disintegrating social order is the economic policy emanating from Brussels and Berlin. In 2009-10 the troika – the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank – judged that Greece had a problem of public deficits and debts due to profligacy, corruption and tax avoidance. They offered bailout loans in exchange for cuts to public spending, higher taxes, and reduced wages. Successive Greek governments have imposed austerity with alacrity, delivering a vast contraction of the deficit – perhaps even 8% of GDP by the end of 2012.

The trouble was that austerity could not have its usual accompaniment of currency devaluation, since the country remained a member of the European monetary union. The pressure of adjustment thus turned inward, causing an unprecedented depression – GDP has contracted by 4.5% in 2010, 7% in 2011 and probably 7% in 2012. Unemployment has rocketed, and a humanitarian crisis has emerged in urban centres. The NGO Médecins du Monde estimates that for the past several months the majority of its clients have been destitute Greeks rather than immigrants. Its medicine stockpile is currently running very low, and its managers have no idea how they will cope this winter.

But cope they must, because the troika is now demanding a further bout of austerity – cuts of nearly €12bn to create a large primary budget surplus and to start reducing Greek public debt by 2014. Desperate to remain in the EMU, the Greek government has agreed to slash pensions, retirement lump sums, public sector wages, social expenditure and military spending. The ensuing reduction in aggregate demand means recession will continue next year, with official unemployment perhaps even reaching 30%. In 2013 there will be people in Athens who will not have enough to eat. The tragedy is that the pain will be for nothing as the fresh austerity will probably fail. The troika is yet again underestimating the depth of the oncoming recession, and thus the loss of revenue and the higher unemployment expenditure. Greek public debt, meanwhile, remains completely unsustainable. It is very likely that further austerity measures will be demanded in 2013 and beyond. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: A week after an extremist right-wing party gained an electoral foothold in Greece’s Parliament earlier this summer, 50 of its members riding motorbikes and armed with heavy wooden poles roared through Nikaia, a gritty suburb west of here, to telegraph their new power.

As townspeople watched, several of them said in interviews, the men careened around the main square, some brandishing shields emblazoned with swastikalike symbols, and delivered an ultimatum to immigrants whose businesses have catered to Nikaia’s Greeks for nearly a decade.

“They said: ‘You’re the cause of Greece’s problems. You have seven days to close or we’ll burn your shop — and we’ll burn you,’ ” said Mohammed Irfan, a legal Pakistani immigrant who owns a hair salon and two other stores. When he called the police for help, he said, the officer who answered said they did not have time to come to the aid of immigrants like him.

A spokesman for the party, Golden Dawn, denied that anyone associated with the group had made such a threat, and there are no official numbers on attacks against immigrants. But a new report by Human Rights Watch warns that xenophobic violence has reached “alarming proportions” in parts of Greece, and it accuses the authorities of failing to stop the trend.

Since the election, an abundance of anecdotal evidence has indicated a marked rise in violence and intimidation against immigrants by members of Golden Dawn and its sympathizers. They are emboldened, rights groups say, by political support for their anti-immigrant ideology amid the worst economic crisis to hit Greece in a decade.

As the downturn deepens across Europe, the political right has risen in several countries, including France, the Netherlands and Hungary. But the situation in Greece shows how quickly such vigilante activity can expand as a government is either too preoccupied with the financial crisis or unable or disinclined to deal with the problem. Greece’s new prime minister, Antonis Samaras, has said he wants to put an end to the “invasion” of illegal immigrants, but “without vigilantism, without extremism.” Yet, as attacks mount even against legal immigrants, he has addressed the violence infrequently.

BBC News reports: Greece’s right-wing New Democracy and left-wing Syriza parties are almost neck-and-neck after parliamentary elections, exit polls suggest.

New Democracy, which broadly supports a European bailout deal, looked to be almost tied with Syriza, which opposes the measure.

The outcome could decide Greece’s future inside the euro.

The election was the second in six weeks, called after a 6 May vote proved inconclusive.

The two main parties are thought to have polled between 27 and 30%, the exit poll showed.

But though the result could be almost a dead heat, the party that does come out on top will receive an extra 50 seats.

The BBC’c Chris Morris says that with the parties so close, the cliche that “every vote counts” has never been more true.

Costas Douzinas and Joanna Bourke write: The Financial Times Deutschland last week published an article on its front page headlined “Resist the demagogue“. It was written in Greek. The article advised the Greeks to reject the radical left Syriza party and vote for the rightwing New Democracy today. It is the culmination of an astounding campaign of fear and blackmail against the democratic right of Greeks to elect a government of their choice.

Angela Merkel, the European commission president José Manuel Barroso, and even George Osborne, have ordered the Greeks to vote the right way. This direct intervention into the democratic process of a sovereign state follows a plethora of threats and rumours, secrets and lies, telling people that if they vote for Syriza, the country will be ejected from the euro and untold catastrophes will follow.

Why are the European elites carrying out this unprecedented campaign, which strikes at the heart of the EU and would lead to outrage if the target were the British, the Italians, or the French? The reason is simple. If the Greeks vote a Syriza government into office, the EU and the IMF will have to drastically change the austerity policies that created an economic disaster and a humanitarian crisis.

The 6 May result saw Syriza’s share of the vote jump from 4% to 17%, while the New Democracy and Pasok parties, which had alternated in government with a combined 80% of the vote in the last 40 years, collapsed to 32%. On 7 May, the Europeans started admitting the Greeks have been punished disproportionately, and that austerity does not work and must be mitigated. On 17 June, a Syriza victory will be the first defeat of austerity in Europe and will have international repercussions.

The belated admission by the IMF and EU “experts” that austerity does not work is a direct result of the 6 May results. The figures are staggering: more than 20% contraction of output over four years; 22% unemployment and 54% youth unemployment; a 24-point jump in the poverty index; and a 50% reduction in the salaries and pension of civil servants. The second memorandum moved to the private sector, abolishing collective bargaining and other basic labour law protections, as well as cutting the minimum wage and unemployment benefits by up to 32%.

The Guardian has documented the humanitarian catastrophe that followed. Soup kitchens for the middle class, a huge jump in homelessness and mental disease, daily suicides, lack of basic medicines, cancer patients turned away from pharmacies, and hospitals ceasing operation because of a lack of basic supplies. The question on Sunday is not between the euro and the drachma, but between the continuation of these policies or salvation from the greatest destruction a people have experienced in peacetime. If something is leading to the exit from the euro, a probable collapse of the eurozone and a possible world crisis of 1930s magnitude, is not the Syriza policies but extreme austerity and mad economic recipes. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: Greece’s crushing economic crisis, which has upended the country’s politics and jeopardized its currency tie with the European Union, has also put another institution on the spot: the news media.

Amid allegations of unethical journalistic practices that may have contributed to the mess the country’s in, the outsider political coalition, whose popularity has skyrocketed, says it wants to abolish the cozy relationship that’s long existed between media owners and politicians, and to halt the practice of government payments to individual journalists.

On the eve of Sunday’s second-round election, the outsider coalition, known as Syriza, or the Radical Left, was reported neck-and-neck with the conservative New Democracy party. Both parties were expected to draw less than the 35 percent of the vote needed to form a government, and the winner is likely to have to search for a coalition partner.

Public support for the upstart Syriza party has surged largely because of its pledge to suspend the EU-imposed economic austerity measures that have led to a dramatic economic contraction here, but in demanding reforms to the rules governing the news media the coalition may have tapped into another source of voter disaffection. A poll earlier this month published by Mono magazine showed that more than 80 percent of the public do not view the Greek news media as objective.

While Greece has some excellent investigative journalists and some mavericks who challenge the system, the absence of a prevailing ethos of independent reporting helped enable the government to overstate Greece’s readiness for adopting the euro, and later precluded public awareness that the government was lying about its deficit to the European Union, said George Pleios, head of the department of communications at the National University in Athens.

One reason for the lack of trust may be that a significant number of journalists have two masters – their own news outlet and the organizations or firms they are covering. A Syriza official alleged that thousands of reporters maintain conflicts of interest and that 500 to 600 journalists are or have been on the payroll of a government agency.

“The heart of the people of Europe beats in Greece” — a discussion held in Athens on June 3 in which Slavoj Žižek spoke alongside Alexis Tsipras whose victory in the June 17 elections will — if it happens — send shockwaves around the world.

The Guardian reports: In his fresh linen suit and crisp white shirt Alexis Tsipras cuts a dashing figure. Standing at the podium, just a week before Greeks cast their ballots in the most crucial election since their country emerged from the ashes of civil war, the young leftist leader was on vintage form, fists punching the air as the crowd cheered on the man many have come to see as Greece’s salvation in its greatest hour of need.

On Sunday it was Chios. On Monday, Heraklion, the capital of Crete. On Tuesday, Athens. But as Tsipras criss-crosses the country, the message is always the same: “We speak the language of hope,” he says, “where others speak the language of fear.”

In the countdown to a poll, the outcome of which could be as pivotal for Europe as for debt-stricken Athens — with many seeing it as a referendum on Greece’s place in the euro — the politician is on a roll.

The language of hope is what Tsipras is good at. More than two years into an economic crisis that is increasingly being compared to a war, Tsipras’ fiery, feel-good, anti-austerity rhetoric has gone down a treat. So, too, have his fierce denunciations of the corrupt political elite, crooked bankers and barbaric measures that have led to Greece’s “undignified” descent into penury and misery.

Like every war, says the telegenic politician, the first casualty is truth. The Greeks — the eurozone’s poorest nation despite living standards having improved dramatically since joining the single currency — have been duped into thinking that there is only one way out of their economic mess: “through the cruel austerity Madame Merkel and the IMF have inflicted upon us”.

The truth, he argues, lies elsewhere: in the ability to think outside the box; in solutions that are “just and dignified”. The “memorandum of understanding” outlining the onerous conditions Greece must meet to acquire EU-IMF loans to keep its insolvent economy afloat has to be “radically renegotiated” if not “torn up”.

It is heady stuff. Six weeks ago, Tsipras was barely known beyond the borders of his homeland. Today, his Coalition of the Radical Left, Syriza, is one of the frontrunners in the battle to govern Greece after the indecisive election on 6 May.

Since emerging as that poll’s surprise runner-up, Syriza – an eclectic alliance of ex-communists, former Stalinists, greens and champagne socialists – has gone from strength to strength. Surveys show it running neck and neck with the “pro-European”, centre-right New Democracy, although no party is expected to win an outright majority. In Athens, where nearly half of Greece’s 11 million-strong population lives and which has been worst hit by the belt-tightening, Syriza has stolen the show.

As Tsipras storms from town to village, addressing peoples assemblies and pre-electoral rallies, his is a presence that suddenly nobody can ignore: from Washington to the capitals of Europe and Asia, too, Syriza’s meteoric rise from fringe party to possible kingmaker in the next Greek parliament is now being watched closely.

Slavoj Žižek writes: Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying ne0-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.

But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one, they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins – would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: “I don’t believe in heroes or saviours,” says Alexis Tsipras, “but I do believe in fighting for rights … no one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity.”

The man who holds the fate of the euro in his hands – as the leader of the Greek party willing to tear up the country’s €130bn (£100bn) bailout agreement – says Greece is on the frontline of a war that is engulfing Europe.

A long bombardment of “neo-liberal shock” – draconian tax rises and remorseless spending cuts – has left immense collateral damage. “We have never been in such a bad place,” he says, sleeves rolled up, staring hard into the middle distance, from behind the desk that he shares in his small parliamentary office. “After two and a half years of catastrophe, Greeks are on their knees. The social state has collapsed, one in two youngsters is out of work, there are people leaving en masse, the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides.”

But while exhausted and battle weary, the nation at the forefront of Europe’s escalating debt crisis and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is also hardened. And, increasingly, they are looking towards Tsipras to lead their fight.

“Defeat is the battle that isn’t waged,” says the young politician who almost overnight has seen his radical left coalition party, Syriza, jump from representing fewer than 5% of Greeks to enjoying ratings of more than 25% in polls.

The Guardian reports: The two main figures in what promises to be Greece’s most electric election in living memory were on a collision course on Thursday, with one predicting “hell” if Athens adheres to EU-mandated austerity and the other forecasting a “nightmare” if the nation abandons reforms and gives up the euro.

Emboldened by yet another poll showing his party’s wide appeal, the leftwing Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, said the international accord that Greece had signed up to in return for rescue loans was catastrophic for the country. Instead of a rescue, the debt-stricken nation has been thrown into its worst recession since the second world war.

“With this policy [bailout agreement] we are going directly to hell,” he told CNN. “To save Europe we need to change direction,” insisted the politician who has pledged to “tear up” the €130bn (£104bn) “memorandum of understanding” that Athens reached with the EU and IMF earlier this year.

The 38-year-old, who has sent shockwaves through EU capitals with his fiery anti-austerity rhetoric, made the remarks as Syriza announced that he would be visiting Berlin and Paris next week for talks. It was unclear whom Tsipras would be meeting, although aides said the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, would not be among those lined up.

Within hours, the leading credit agency Fitch had downgraded Greece’s sovereign rating to CCC from B-, citing “the risk of a Greek exit from European Monetary Union … in the near term”.

Earlier in the day, Antonis Samaras, who heads the conservative New Democracy party, painted a very different picture in a speech that conjured images of a living hell if Athens quit the EU.

In the event of the debt-stricken country reneging on the pledges it had made, the road ahead would be a “nightmarish” one, he said.

Reversion to the drachma would mean wages, deposits and property values all being “cut in half”, and the price of imported commodities, such as food and fuel, skyrocketing, he predicted. “This is the nightmare that those who speak of a unilateral condemnation [of the loan agreement] will bring,” he told his parliamentary group at its last meeting before the 300-seat house is dissolved and the election campaign officially announced .

“The battle that begins the day after tomorrow for the new elections is not about any single party or its electoral influence,” said the 61-year-old politician, ashen-faced as he delivered the speech. “It’s about whether Greece will remain in Europe, a Europe which is itself changing. Or if Greece will be found to leave Europe, losing much and risking even more.” [Continue reading…]

Nikolaos Michaloliakos: 'Those who betray this country - it’s time for them to be afraid. We are coming.'

The Associated Press reports: The leader of an extreme-right, anti-immigrant party on course for shock success in Greece’s general elections Sunday lashed out at those he described as “traitors” responsible for the country’s financial crisis and said his party was ushering in a “revolution.”

The far-right Golden Dawn party is set to win 7 percent of the parliamentary vote, according to early projections, as Greeks punished the traditionally dominant parties who backed harsh austerity measures tied to debt-relief agreements.

Parties must exceed a 3-percent threshold of the vote to be represented in Greece’s parliament. In the last general election in 2009, Golden Dawn received merely 0.29 percent. It has seen its support jump as a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has spread in financially devastated Greece.

Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos told The Associated Press in an interview that his party had delivered a blow against the country’s corrupt leadership.

“They slandered us, slung mud at us, and shut us out of all the news media — the TV channels of the corrupt elite — and we beat them,” the 55-year-old leader said as the votes came in. “The day of national revolution by the Greeks has begun against those who are selling us out and looting the sweat of the Greek people.”

Golden Dawn campaigned hard against illegal immigration, and its supporters have been blamed for a recent spike in inner-city street attacks against mostly Asian immigrants.

The party’s supporters, routinely seen intimidating dark-skinned immigrants in run-down parts of the capital, wear black shirts, and its emblems resemble Nazi insignia. But Michaloliakos has rejected the neo-Nazi label widely used for his party, stressing that it is staunchly nationalist.

Greek archeologist Despina Kutsumba joins supporters from the Greece Solidarity Campaign to protest at the continued illegal possession of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum

(Counterfire)

The Telegraph reported last week: Until Wednesday morning, Dimitris Christoulas, a respectable middle-class pensioner, was familiar only to the residents of the quiet Ampelokipous district of Athens where he had lived and worked hard for nearly 40 years.

All that changed at 8.45am, rush hour, when the 77-year-old former pharmacist and pillar of his shopkeeping community put a hand gun to his head and shot himself under a giant Cyprus tree on the central Syntagma Square.

He fell to the ground in front of the national parliament that many Greeks have come to blame for the corruption and mismanagement that has plunged their country into crisis, and lay there dead as shocked commuters looked on.

Yesterday, 24 hours after his suicide, the name Dimitris Christoulas is known to most in this troubled country.

“A martyr for Greece” declared the Eleftheros Typos newspaper. “Scream of desperation” said the headline in Avyi next to a picture of Edvard Munch’s celebrated painting. Many press commentaries compared his death to the protest suicides that unleashed the Arab spring in Tunisia and across the Middle East last year.

To many – including neighbours in his close community, he has become a hero.

“He did not rebel from his couch. He was a beautiful man, he will live on in history,” said Pannayotta, a housewife in her late 50s, living on the same street as the pensioner.

The incendiary suicide note Mr Chritoulas left behind urging young Greeks to rise up has also struck a chord with millions of people who see their highly indebted nation’s social fabric being torn apart by economic recession and externally imposed austerity measures.

“I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end,” he wrote. “I believe that young people with no future will one day take up and hang this country’s traitors in arms in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.”