A centre-right unease

I voted for this government because I believed it would defend legality, public order and Greece’s Western seriousness. That expectation was not fanciful. Kyriakos Mitsotakis campaigned hard on public safety, argued in 2019 that academic sanctuary had become an “asylum for lawlessness,” and made order one of New Democracy’s defining promises. That is precisely why the government’s hesitant response to recent anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish intimidation feels so jarring.

The most defensible criticism is not that the government has done literally nothing. It is that its response has remained procedural and reactive when the moment required visible political leadership. What is immediately visible after the recent incidents is a prosecutor’s inquiry, a police investigation and a statement by government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis that those involved “should be brought to justice.” What is missing is a clear, early, prime-ministerial line that Greece will not tolerate organized attempts to intimidate Jews, Israelis, tourists or business owners in its streets.

The pattern in Athens and Thessaloniki

The pattern did not begin in Thessaloniki. In Athens, after a July 11, 2025 march by Rouvikonas members in identical black shirts bearing the Palestinian flag, the Athens prosecutor ordered a preliminary inquiry into the offense of threatening to commit crimes. Greek police said the pre-investigation material had been submitted to the prosecutor, that a leading figure had been brought in to provide explanations, and that the case was being handled by the department dealing with racist and extremist violence. Coverage of the incident linked it specifically to patrol-style movement through Plaka, Thisio and Monastiraki, accompanied by rhetoric that Athens’ streets belonged to pro-Palestinian activists rather than to Israeli visitors.

Then came Thessaloniki. After the June 27, 2026 “anti-Zionist patrol,” a Thessaloniki prosecutor ordered a preliminary investigation into whether Rouvikonas could be liable for incitement to violence or hatred and for threatening to commit crimes; Kathimerini also reported that police would examine whether the action amounted to incitement to hatred and violence and whether the organizers could be treated as a criminal organization. The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS) condemned the march as a new formation of “assault battalions,” saying black-shirted groups had threatened and intimidated Jews, Zionists, Israelis, tourists and shopkeepers. That language matters in any city; in Thessaloniki it matters even more, because the city was once one of Europe’s great centers of Jewish life and is still haunted by the memory of the 1931 Campbell pogrom and, later, the destruction of approximately 96% of its Jewish population in the Holocaust. These were not literal pogroms. But they were,........

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