Village of Machairas, Central Greece. Photo: EV

Threatening Greek peasants

On April 15, 2025, the appointed president of Greece issued an order that is bound to have serious, nay, potentially catastrophic consequence on the countryside of Greece. The executive order says that any village of less than 2,000 inhabitants must accommodate with houses and schools at least 100 foreign legal or illegal immigrants as farm workers. Considering that Greece is suffering from dramatic demographic decline, there is no doubt that, should this order stand and Greek villages fill with foreigners, all of Greece will become a foreign country in less than 20 years. Yet, this sensible thought did not enter the calculations of the few people running Greece – in 2025.

According to Eugenia Sarigianni, a Greek psychologist with interest in the survival of rural culture and society in Greece, the presidential executive order, demanding that villagers accept foreign migrants living in their neighborhood as farm workers, was the culmination of a series of national policies that thoroughly degraded the countryside and village farming in particular.

“The governing class,” she says, “created the economic, political and social conditions that made life in the countryside useless. As a result, government policies funded by the European Union emptied the villages of young people, forcing them to impoverishment and pushing them to the far away islands and to the top of mountains. Rural schools closed.… Then the government, through its European Union subsidies, destroyed the traditional and sustainable production of food. This means fishing boats were burned, the raising of food by peasants, their planting the land with traditional crops, was literally uprooted because of EU subsidies. The number of farm animals became smaller and smaller.........

© CounterPunch