The circumstances of my personal maltreatment by the Greek authorities are admittedly unique. But as an unexpected byproduct, they helped me understand what actually happens behind the doors of Greece’s notorious detention centers. Whichever party executes that plan here in Britain — whether Reform, Robert Jenrick’s Conservatives, or even Labour under new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood — detaining refugees and processing asylum claims in closed, Greek-style centers will only worsen the very problems these proposals are purported to solve.

In brief, I have spent many years reporting on the Kurdish political movement in Syria and the existential wars their Western-allied movement has fought against both ISIS and Turkey. My work as a journalist incurred the ire of the Turkish authorities, who in turn pressured European governments to issue me with a travel ban preventing me from entering the Schengen Zone. The first I heard of all this was when I visited Greece on holiday back in 2021, and then tried to travel on to Italy. Instead, I was halted at the Italian border by gun-toting, balaclava-clad police, locked in a room in a ferry, and deported back to Greece.

I then spent two months held in filthy conditions, including one notorious detention center — a massive ex-military base condemned by the European Committee to Prevent Torture. I was stripped and cavity-searched. I passed days in isolation while severely ill and distressed detainees rattled at their cages, and weeks sharing a room with dozens of men. Many inmates carried the scars of police beatings, and disease and self-harm were rampant. I saw one man slash himself to pieces with a razor after being denied urgent medical care. Shortly before I arrived, a Kurdish refugee died by suicide.

“You’re the Englishman, right?”, bored guards would say as they came to gawp at me. I was languishing in my cell playing solitaire chess on a contraband cardboard set. “Why are you here?” You tell me, I would think to myself. I desperately wanted to get back to Britain, and my jailers had no real reason for keeping me there; Athens, of course, is no friend of Ankara. But thanks to European interests beyond our control, there we were, gazing at one another through the bars.

This summer, Greece has introduced still harsher measures, aimed at curbing migration from North Africa, suspending all asylum applications and criminalizing those seeking asylum in Europe by detaining them in military-style prison camps like those where I languished. It’s an approach that’s gaining traction across the political spectrum in Britain, and one that Aris Roussinos wrote about for UnHerd. But it is also an approach that simply doesn’t work. Rather, it only perpetuates the problem of long-term detention in pressure-cooker detention facilities, threatening migrants with five-year spells behind bars and thus making these detention centers a permanent feature of the local landscape.

Local resentment is fueled and attention deflected from the real villains: canny politicians who weaponize the immigration crisis, distracting locals from sky-high employment and rock-bottom wages, with the result that rage once directed against the IMF and EU is now turned on handfuls of hapless Afghans. Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis implied, without evidence, that migrants were responsible for deadly wildfires that swept the country back in 2023. He thus deftly deflected accusations of government incompetence by feeding into unfounded anti-asylum paranoia. Meanwhile, the charred bodies of 18 migrants were numbered among the dead.

Today, with oversea arrivals back up to 2017 levels, the very persistence of oversea migration to Greece suggests knee-jerk crackdowns are only a temporary fix. Though Greek authorities are talking about declaring a new “state of emergency”, fast-track deportations and the use of illegal violence to deter refugees have been a fact of life there for years. Meanwhile, the first deportations under this “new” system have already been blocked by a Greek court, suggesting the intensified measures are unlikely to end the endless whack-a-mole game between European authorities, smugglers and migrants.

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Doubtless, harsh measures can suppress migrant flows to a given destination. Post-2016, for instance, refugees who were pushed away from the Aegean Islands turned to Spain and Italy, while Libyan smugglers have now set their crosshairs on Crete, after crackdowns elsewhere in the Med. Yet if the Crete route is indeed closed, another will open. A grown-up migration policy should acknowledge this reality. Instead, rival politicians across the globe compete to outdo one another with tough-on-migration proclamations as their costly detention efforts waste time and taxpayers’ money.

In Greece, the locals struggle to get by. Despite its steadily-improving credit rating, the average monthly salary in the country is reportedly 20% lower than it was 15 years ago. All the while, unemployment remains sky-high, prompting mass strikes and an exodus of educated youngsters.

Immigration can certainly suppress wages and damage the economy, and in Greece and Britain both there remains a risk of cynical business-owners exploiting migrant labor to keep wages down. But in the Greek example, this has nothing to do with the refugees passing through, who only started arriving in substantial numbers long after the financial crisis, and who tend to treat the country as a stepping-stone toward other, more robust employment markets.

In contrast to the Greek case, many asylum seekers to the UK want to start working here immediately, as I myself heard from my fellow detainees. Whether fleeing persecution, insecurity or both at home, they hope to improve their English, build a life and contribute to the economy. This could be made to work to our favor by allowing asylum-seekers to work while their applications are processed — rather than crowding them in hotels and detention centers. This way, they would demonstrate that, contrary to much political discourse, they haven’t arrived expecting a comfy, taxpayer-funded existence. Meanwhile, imaginative political thinking around strengthened worker protections and robust investment could easily mitigate the risk of suppressing wages, especially when asylum seekers are overall arriving in relatively low numbers.

Setting up more pressure-cooker detention centers or funneling people into local hotels only fuels local discontent. In Epping, as throughout Britain, clout-chasing politicians seize on tensions, and genuine examples of criminality among asylum seekers, to fan fears of violence and sexual abuse committed by new arrivals. A focus on these individual incidents, accompanied by massaged statistics, obscures the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working, just like most ordinary Brits.

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A political party that acknowledged that reality, rather than inflaming the debate, could then start improving the lives of everyone in the country. In England as in Greece, prior generations of migrants have proven themselves perfectly willing to work and integrate into society, once given the chance. Yet in both countries, ordinary people have been let down by the calculated degradation of the public sphere, with the political class knowing they can rely on cheap shots at newcomers to distract from their own generational failures.

I myself remain strongly critical of the British authorities for continuing to violate my rights as a journalist and perpetuating the Middle Eastern conflicts which drive so many refugees to Europe to start with. Nonetheless, once my ordeal in Greece was over, I felt a great sense of relief once I set foot on British soil again. And I feel confident enough in the life and community I have here to want others to share in that too.

As I learned during my sojourn in Greece’s migrant detention centers, those who want to travel will find a way. Neither the cold fact of the deadly Mediterranean crossing, which claimed over 2,000 lives last year, nor the harsh reality of the British or Greek migration systems, will dissuade the desperate from attempting the journey. As I heard in countless conversations, migrants beaten and abused at one border simply assume things will be better at the next, so desperate are they for a new life. Ultimately, the emotive debate over whether migration is a “right” or a crime misses the point: migration is a fact of life, and our political representatives need to start treating it as such.

Almost 41 years later, Phillip, now a successful businessman, flew into Athens from Los Angeles to get married as parts of Greece once again burst into flames. Wildfires began on 18 July and spread quickly over the following weeks, adding a further complication to an already complicated wedding.

Since late last year, there has been an ongoing, and fraught, North American-Hellenic culture clash, as my LA sister-in-law Christina struggled with the communicative and organisational foibles of Maria*, one of Athens’s most elite wedding planners. Eventually, she had an epiphany: she would hire an LA wedding planner to “help” the Greek one.

Enter Alania: optimistic, fastidiously groomed and possessed of remorseless focus. “Leave it to me,” she beamed over Zoom. “I’ll sort it out in no time.” One week later, she reappeared. Bereft. “I don’t know what to do,” she said forlornly. “She just won’t listen.”

I told Christina that Greece is not LA; that the planning would inevitably be chaotic, but that this is normal and everything would be fine on the night. And it was. What I did not realise was how it would make me think, not only of family but of nation.

When you are a Best Man, you have various vague, small responsibilities and a single, large, clearly defined one: the speech. Over time, I have given several Best Man speeches, and, as a writer, which is to say a minor egoist, addressing an audience who has no choice but to listen is my idea of an enjoyable evening.

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But this one was different. This was the hardest speech I ever had to write. My brother and I have not had a traditional family background (distant, often absent parents and so on), but through it all there has always been the two of us. And even when we are apart, living on different continents, we are together. How, then, do you give a speech about your baby brother — the person you are closer to than anyone else in the world?

The answer emerges from the understanding that weddings are about many things. They are about love and partnership and friendship and family, but they are also, I think, about something else equally powerful: the passing of time.

Greece is a country that is inescapably tied to the concept of time because it is inescapably tied to history and myth, and therefore of course to memory. It is also perennially associated with fire. Homer speaks of wildfires in The Iliad: “And as when consuming fire falls upon thick woodlands and the witching wind beareth it everywhither and the thickets fall utterly as they are assailed by the onrush at the fire.” Thucydides is even clearer, writing of “times past in the mountains when dry branches have been rubbed against each other a forest has caught fire spontaneously therefrom and produced a conflagration”.

In modern times, fires have become an accepted part of life here. Even before the Second World War, farmers would harvest wood to start tactical fires each spring to reduce the risk of larger fires in the summer. Since 1961, the fires have increased. A weak state is one factor, but so too is climate change. 2007 saw Greece experience more wildfire in one summer than any European country over the previous decade. Since then, it has experienced several, with one in 2018 claiming the lives of 103 people, which I remember covered parts of Athens, where I was living at the time, in pungent smoke.

As I stood up to make my Best Man speech, I saw our dad telling me and Phil about the brilliance of Greece — often deploying facts of questionable veracity (Athens being a world fashion centre was a prized example of the genre). I saw our mum preparing huge vats of Persian rice in our kitchen in London. I saw our stepfather, Rene, lifting Phil up onto his shoulders as we walked through Highgate Wood. For some reason, the memories did not have sound. But they didn’t need it. Everything was totally clear.

Then I told some stories. Of how Phil turned our garage in Swiss Cottage into a smoking den for all the teenage Jews within a two-mile radius, and of how every so often I’d had to go down and bellow at them to shut the fuck up. And then there was the five-figure sum Phil once spent on a mattress (after being assured that as part of the deal, people would be dispatched every six months to “service” it). Amusing and sometimes sad memories; wins and losses; Britain and Greece. Taken together, they form coherent life stories.

The fires were a dim light on various horizons as I went from a conference on Crete to the wedding in Athens. I thought about them midway through the reception when the sky erupted into plumes of variegated colour, and I saw Alania streak across the venue like a designer-clad Springbok. “They’ve started the fireworks early!” she roared, “get everyone over to look!” It was an impressive sight no doubt. After about a minute, though, word came through. “Hmmm, it turns out they’re someone else’s fireworks,” she said thoughtfully. “You can tell everyone to go back to their seats.”

Thirty minutes later, ours were launched. Thankfully, they were noticeably better. And as I stood and watched, I reflected on all the things that could have been done with the $20,000 that had just burst into light.

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In March 2021, our father passed away and, later that year, wildfires destroyed the olive trees in our ancestral home in the Mani in the Southern Peloponnese. Then, I reflected on memories of loss, of the almost literal burning away of our family roots. Two years later, another seminal family event took place as fire once again engulfed Greece. This time, though, it was not loss and death they heralded, but the birth of new (wedded) lives and their celebration. What has burned must necessarily regrow. New and often stronger.

And so it will be with Greece. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced that anyone who had their trip cut short on Rhodes due to the fires would a get a week’s holiday next year at the government’s expense. New memories will be made. There will be at least some relief to the trauma, and the political questions that will inevitably follow.

As for the wedding, it was, in the end, a triumph: for our family and friends, for Phil and Christina, and, of course, for both wedding planners.

*Name has been changed.

During this year’s 200th anniversary celebrations, I thought about my ancestor a lot, particularly when I read Mark Mazower’s sublime new book, The Greek Revolution. Mazower describes him as “one of the most powerful magnates in the west of the Peloponnese” — but he was also a complicated man. Probably brilliant, he was a patriot and integral to the war effort. But he was also, essentially, a warlord.

This matters. Mazower is at pains to underscore the relationship between myth and reality and the importance of the latter to Greece’s 1821 revolution from Ottoman rule. In particular, he understands that the “national-togetherness” (ethniki omopsychia) so important to the Greek national story was in many ways just that: a story. In fact, what existed were clusters of people like Sisinis and his followers: local clans and chieftains who often fought each other, occasionally allied with the Ottoman Empire, and frequently had entirely different visions of how to build a nation-state and what that state should in fact be.

Even the idea of the “Greeks” of an Ottoman province was wrong. “The peoples of the peninsula included not only Greeks but also Serbs and Albanians, Bosnians and Romanians, an assortment of Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims and Jews,” Mazower notes. How could this mob be turned toward a single national goal? Mazower’s answer is: imagination, or what we might call myth. The portrayal of chieftains like Sisinis as what Mazower calls “heroes” was and is vital because “heroes have their uses too and in the Greeks’ struggle with a far mightier foe, heroism had been at the heart of revolutionary thinking”.

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The goal was simple: to homogenise a variegated population into a nation, which emphatically it was not. But it worked and “the fiction bolstered what otherwise seemed a hopeless cause”. It was genuinely a tremendous achievement for Greeks; and an important one for the West. Greece was the first country to break free of empire and become a nation state in the modern age. It began the age of modern nationalism that in turn created the Europe — and indeed the West – that we know today.

If Greeks began the first modern nationalist movement then, perhaps fittingly enough, Greece was also the first example of what the historian Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”. For Anderson, all nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.

This is doubly true for Greece, which more than any other country, except perhaps the United States, is not just a state but an idea. The relationship between myth and reality is the nation’s dialectic — fitting for the land of the myths that underpin much of Western civilisation. 200 years ago, these myths drove Lord Byron to travel to Greece to join the battle for independence. He never actually got to fight any Ottomans because he died from a fever at age 36 in the Greek town of Missolonghi. His body was embalmed and sent back to England while his heart was supposedly kept in Missolonghi and placed in a cenotaph that remains a tourist attraction to this day.

But he made his mark. He raised much-needed cash for the revolutionaries and his death was yet one more global event that implanted the Greek struggle firmly into the Western consciousness. Byron had vowed that if Greece should fall, “I will bury myself in the ruins”. But why? What makes a Cambridge-educated aristocrat die for a small Balkan province of the Ottoman Empire on the edge of Europe? The answer, of course, is the idea or the myth of Greece, which for a man of Byron’s class and time was pretty much second nature. As Mazower observes, “travellers to the region took with them not a modern guidebook (there were none), but a fake ancient one, a bizarre eighteenth-century travelogue that purported to describe the journeyings of a young Scythian in the fourth century BC”.

The Greeks were savvy enough to understand this. Delegations were dispatched to Western countries to ham all this up; newspapers trumpeted the struggle of Plato and Aristotle to break free of the Sultan. Greek independence cannot be understood without the mass of volunteers, intellectuals and journalists — as well as the intervention of the Great Powers — who served as geopolitical alchemists transmuting ancient myths into contemporary reality; doing what the Greeks could not do themselves.

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The importance of all this cannot be overstated. The rebels were set to lose the war until the 1827 Battle of Navarino, during which the British and French navies, along with Russia, smashed the Ottoman and Egyptian forces and made independence pretty much a certainty. Mazower tells us that “the country that tourists visit today was born to a large extent out of the revolution of 1821” — and the West made it possible.

Yet from the beginning, the relationship between Greece and the West was both co-dependent and dysfunctional. If the modern state was born in 1821, then so were many of the trends that have defined it throughout its modern history: the familiar idea of Greeks biting off more than they can chew and then getting bailed out by the major — predominantly Western — powers; foreign aid provided to refugees fleeing the fighting in Chios; the Greek nation-state’s entanglement with foreign loans; and above all, the ability of this small patch of land to affect Western history.

When I pitched up in Greece in 2015, what was supposed to be a relaxed six-week family break turned into a frenzied six months dashing around the country covering the financial crisis. It was during this time, as I spoke to those made homeless by the credit crunch and interviewed Syrian refugees flopping down on the shores of Lesbos, something dawned on me. Greece today is a small, not especially rich, not especially powerful state at the eastern edge of the European continent. But it is also the epicentre of three of the great crises of the West: EU, financial, and migration. (And with the recent fires that destroyed over 10% of the country’s forest you can probably add a fourth: climate change.)

2500 years ago, Greek society created the philosophical and political underpinnings of what we call the West. 200 years ago, it birthed modern nationalism. In 2021 Greek society has become the locus of the West’s biggest threats: and therefore, part of a potential solution to them. If you want to tackle migration in Europe, you need Greece; and if you want to at least try to fix some of the disequilibrium between the continent’s north and south, as well as the pervasive financial dysfunction that still exists, then you must internalise at least some of its lessons.

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Whether it’s independent or subjugated, rich or poor (usually the latter) influential or not (almost invariably the latter), Greece has always mattered deeply to the West. Far beyond its importance as a political entity or its power as a national actor.

I try to stroll through Athens each evening, and as I do I pass streets whose names — Alexandros, Themistocleous, Achilleos — have been with me my whole life. But I first heard them not because I am of Greek origin, but because I was an English schoolboy. And they mean so much not because they are a part of my Greek identity but because they are a part of my Western heritage. That is why Greece has always mattered, why it continues to do so today and why, for all its many flaws and endless frustrations, the West will never give it up.

Herodotus’ high estimation of the debt owed by Greece to the Athenians rested on his interpretation of the epic events of the year that we commemorate as 480 BC. 2,500 years ago this summer, the King of Persia crossed the Hellespont at the head of a massive army and fleet. Xerxes ruled the largest empire that the world had ever seen, and the resources available to him seemed so stupefying to the Greeks as to appear effectively limitless. Many, convinced that they had no prospect of resisting such an adversary, scrambled to collaborate.

Only a few cities, headed by Athens and the peerless warrior-state of Sparta, refused to surrender. At Thermopylae, a pass to the north of Athens, a Greek holding-force led by a Spartan king was dislodged after three days’ brutal fighting, and the Spartan king killed. Athens fell soon afterwards. The Acropolis was stormed and burned. But then, in the waters off a nearby island called Salamis, the Greek fleet won an unexpected victory. The following summer, an alliance of various Greek cities routed the Persian land forces. The liberty of mainland Greece was definitively secured. To the Greeks themselves it seemed a barely believable triumph: the most astounding victory of all time.

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Who, though, had best earned the bragging rights? Since it was the Athenians who had provided by far the largest contingent of ships at Salamis, and it was Salamis that had proved the decisive engagement, no one could really deny that their role in defeating the Persian invasion had been a significant one. Nevertheless, over the course of the decades that followed, patience with the notion loudly trumpeted by the Athenians that Greece owed them her freedom came to wear very thin. Athenian triumphalism proved as wearying to other Greeks as English chants about the Second World War tend to be today to continental football fans. Nor was boasting all the Athenians did to make themselves unpopular. Cities liberated from Persian rule in the wake of Xerxes’ defeat increasingly found themselves the victims of an Athenian extortion racket. Sparta, the city that alongside Athens had led the resistance to the Persian invasion, grew ever more alarmed. Relations between the erstwhile allies fell apart. In 431, cold war exploded into open conflict — destined to rage for decades to come. The whole Greek world was made to bleed. Such was the background against which Herodotus wrote his history.

So it was, painfully conscious of making a case that was bound to infuriate many, he invented alternative history. Suppose, he pondered, that the Athenians had refused to fight Xerxes. Suppose instead that they had set sail in their fleet for some distant land, or had actively collaborated.

Both options had certainly been open to them. The Persian king had gone to considerable efforts to win them over to his side. His terms had been generous in the extreme. The Athenians might well have succumbed to temptation. In that event, so Herodotus argued, the fight for Greek liberty would have been doomed. Sparta’s allies would have surrendered. The Spartans themselves might have done the same. Alternatively — following the example set by their compatriots at Thermopylae — they might have opted to stand alone, and then, “after displays of prodigious valour, gone down in a blaze of glory.” Either way, the King of Kings would have succeeded in adding a further satrapy to his immense dominion. Greece would have ceased to be free.

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That this in turn would have had implications for the entire world was something that Herodotus never doubted. Indeed, it was precisely his conviction that the great war between the Greeks and the Persians had also been a global war that first inspired him to embark on his masterwork — and which led him, in the course of writing it, to range in his subject matter as far afield as Ethiopia and India. Many historians since have concurred with him that the Greek victory over the Persian invasion force was indeed one of the key turning points in world history.

If Salamis has been enshrined as a particularly decisive moment, then so too has the victory won by the Athenians 10 years earlier, when a Persian expeditionary force sent to burn their city and transport the survivors into slavery had been defeated on the plain of Marathon. John Stuart Mill famously claimed that the battle, “even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”

Unsurprisingly, then, timelines in which Athens is wiped from the face of the earth have long been a popular feature of alternative history. Mill himself imagined one in which Britons and Saxons continued to wander like savages in woods. Others — drawing on a counterfactual proposed by Livy, in which Alexander the Great was imagined confronting Rome — have portrayed a Mediterranean fought over by Persian kings and Roman consuls. Others yet portray a world converted to Zoroastrianism, or without democracy, or in which Christianity and Islam were never born. All these various alternative histories, despite running in a bewildering array of directions, bear witness to the same founding conviction: that a war in which the Persians had succeeded in conquering Greece would have echoed in eternity.

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Perhaps — or perhaps not. Conjecture on such a theme can hardly help but shade into fantasy. In sombre truth, we know far too little about what did actually happen in the Persian Wars to speculate — except on the most tentative basis — about what failed to happen. This is why Herodotus’ own attempt at a counterfactual is so valuable. While it tells us nothing about the possible impact of a Greek defeat on Rome or Christianity or the Anglo-Saxons, it does provide us with a near-contemporary perspective on how the Persians might have won.

Herodotus’ alternative history is one in which a new Athens is founded far distant from the soil of Attica, perhaps in Sicily or Italy, or else endures in pampered slavery, as a client of the King of the Kings. The Spartans, humbled or destroyed, can no longer continue with the merciless exploitation of their neighbours that had been the foundation of their pre-eminence. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle as it was in the exploitation of its subjects’ rivalries, would doubtless have made sure to grant patronage to cities long resentful of Athenian and Spartan greatness. Perhaps, over the course of the century that followed Xerxes’ victory, Greece would have experienced an unprecedented period of peace. Or perhaps, resentful of barbarian rule, and seeking to take advantage of their distance from the Persian centre of power, the Greeks would have risen in revolt, bringing yet further war to their cities, and suffering on a scale greater even than they were to endure as the result of the great war between Athens and Sparta. It is impossible to know. The path not travelled is a path inevitably lost to oblivion.

For all that, though, the value of Herodotus’ counter-factual does not lie merely in its elucidation of the role played by the Athenian fleet in the ultimate victory of the Greeks. It also focuses for us a question that can risk otherwise, perhaps, remaining obscured. What was it, precisely, that made Athens Athens? Would an Athenian demos that had transplanted itself to foreign soil or submitted to barbarian rule still have ranked as an Athenian demos at all? To what extent were the achievements of the restless, turbulent and self-confident democracy of the fifth century BC dependent on its successful defiance of the most powerful ruler on the face of the earth? “Only the gods did more.” Such was Herodotus’ judgement on the record of the Athenians in the Persian wars. We might be tempted to brush such a comment aside as a mere platitude — but that would be a mistake.

Athenian democracy was founded neither on a secular model of governance nor on any abstract understanding of individual rights. Both concepts, as distinctive products of Christian civilisation, would have meant precisely nothing to an ancient Greek. What sustained Athenian democracy instead was — in the words of Greg Anderson — “a primordial cosmic ecology of gods, land, and people.” This is why to imagine an Athens transplanted from Attic soil to some distant land or under the imperious sway of a satrap is to imagine a city very different from the one that emerged triumphant from the epic ordeal of the Persian invasion. Its democracy would, perhaps, have continued to function; but it would not have been the democracy that provided a stage for the tragedies of Aeschylus, the comedies of Aristophanes, the philosophy of Socrates. Nor, indeed, for the history of Thucydides.

Perhaps Herodotus himself, born a subject of the King of Kings though he was, might never have been inspired to write about “the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect” had the Athenians themselves ended up subject to Persian rule. His counter-factual, then, implies a truly disorienting possibility: a world in which history — and counter-factuals — never came to exist.

The migrant peddlers from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia hawk their rip-off DVDs and trinkets with uncharacteristic lethargy. Punters sit in canvas-covered chairs outside cafes; they drink iced lattes; they talk; they sweat.

Greeks have begun the long descent towards holiday season, a near-ritualistic time in this part of the Mediterranean, which reaches its peak in August. Regular temperatures of close to 40 degrees empty Athens of its inhabitants, who scurry eagerly to island hotspots. But this year is different. The country is gearing up for a general election on Sunday, and it could not be more important.

The election marks the first time Greeks will go to the polls since the height of the financial crisis in 2015. This was when fears that the country might tumble out of the Eurozone, and – though an unlikely scenario – the European Union, caused political and financial tremors from Brussels to Washington.

The far-Left and populist Syriza party emerged victorious twice that same year. Its first victory was in January, after a campaign that promised to tell the so-called Troika (a decision group comprising the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) to get stuffed. Second in September, to ratify its decision to accept even more austerity measures from the Troika after its (obviously doomed from the outset) attempts to take it on failed.

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Now, almost four years later, the centre-Right opposition party New Democracy looks almost certain to win – a result that will have severe ramifications, not only for Greece, but almost certainly for Europe as well.

The domestic implications of this are clear. As journalist Yiannis Baboulias, tells me: “Politically, Greece has moved from the anti-austerity financial-based narratives and conflict of the past decade to a political space in which culture wars now dominate.”

In this sense, Greece is merely reflecting a Europe-wide trend – not least the UK’s internal divisions over Brexit. As Baboulias also points out, it was Syriza that set the scene for this state of affairs with its pre-2015, highly populist and ludicrously unrealistic anti-austerity narrative.

Now, New Democracy has continued the populist trend, but from the other extreme, with a scattergun deployment of hard-Right tropes regarding migrants and LGBTQ issues. And as far as they are concerned, Syriza are hardcore communists who will turn Greece into Venezuela.

Meanwhile, an exhausted society looks on, either angry or apathetic.

“Society has been decimated by austerity and humiliated politically. It’s a dangerous mix,” says Baboulias. “Syriza didn’t manage to be the anti-austerity champion it promised to be and New Democracy has capitalised on that.”

But most alarming of all is New Democracy’s virulent opposition to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement – the treaty that saw North Macedonia change its name in return for Greece dropping objections to the country’s NATO accession.

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The Macedonia dispute is the archetypal 21st-century culture war. At its heart sit questions of identity, nationality, and the weaponisation of history, from Alexander the Great to the wording of treaties. Sizeable chunks of Greeks and North Macedonians are also unhappy with the new status quo.

And so into this potent and volatile societal mix comes Russia. The Kremlin’s nightmare since the end of the Cold War has been encirclement by NATO, and to a lesser degree, EU states. North Macedonia is meanwhile preparing to join the NATO alliance.

Yet, no matter how unhappy it is with the Prespa Agreement, New Democracy will almost certainly not abrogate an international treaty that has been passed by the Greek parliament and is backed by the EU, the US and NATO. It can, however, drag its feet and hold up the process. In particular, it can cause problems when it comes to its neighbour’s desire to join the EU – which Russia will do everything in its power to encourage.

During the Prespa talks, Kremlin disinformation flooded Greece, both at an overt level with the Greek RT and Sputnik channels broadcasting incessantly against the deal, and more covertly as trolls and bots flooded the social media ecosystem with coordinated attacks on both it and Syriza. It is even alleged that the Russian-Greek oligarch Ivan Savvidis paid hooligans in both countries to stage violent protests against the agreement – charges he denies.

With an anti-Prespa New Democracy in power, the Kremlin’s position on North Macedonia will align almost perfectly with that of the Greek government.

Meanwhile, the country is facing an increasingly problematic figure in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s sitting president. Erdoğan is in political trouble, having been dealt a blow after his chosen candidate for mayor of Istanbul, Binali Yildirim, was defeated in local elections earlier in March by opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, by a 54% majority.

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Europe's biggest test yet

By Matt Goodwin

A sure-fire way of uniting Turks is to take up sabre-rattling against Greeks. A critical test for any new Greek government will be handling a potential crisis with Turkey in the next few months. For that to succeed, there must be at least some degree of unity in the country.

Will Kyriakos Mitsotakis, New Democracy’s leader, be able to bring this? He is an able, liberal-minded politician who is keen to overhaul much of the entrenched statism that has caused Greece so much damage. He is pro-business and he is dynamic. He is also the sane face of a party that contains many elements that could be described – charitably – as falling “within the alt-right ambit”.

The trouble is, Greece may still not be ready for the type of tough free market measures New Democracy wants to deploy. It has promised, among other things, to cut taxes for corporations, reduce the size of the state and re-introduce fees in public hospitals. There is much to be said for these measures. The question remains however: are they realistic?

“New Democracy has promised to cut taxes for corporations, reduce the size of the state, re-introduce fees in public hospitals and other measures reminiscent of the agenda that brought down their 2012-14 government headed by Samaras,”  says Baboulias. “But this time there is no Syriza to challenge them. I’m afraid that without an alternative political outlet through which to channel the anger that these policies will generate, the rage will spill out into the streets. Again.”

Further Reading

What Labour could learn from the Greeks

By David Patrikarakos

If this happens, we will have come full circle. Four years of austerity and pain will have achieved nothing. And meanwhile, other forces are at work. Roderick Beaton observes in his 2019 book Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, the fate of the Greeks is, as ever, woven into the decision of the other powers. The years that followed the 1821-32 War of Independence, he argues, can be seen as a cycle of repeating patterns of political conflict, social change and economic upheaval. History has already borne out his thesis – the future will almost certainly reinforce it.

In Exarchia, the hawkers continue to wearily ply their trade among the many cafes and restaurants that dot the area’s central street grid. In between shooing them away from his customers, Yiorgos, a cafe waiter, has spent all day serving iced coffee and cold beer to locals and tourists alike.

He is going to vote on Sunday, though feels it is hardly worth it. “In 2015 I voted for Syriza because I was desperate, but nothing has really changed,” he explains.

“This time I’ll vote for New Democracy – pretty much for the same reason.” But he doesn’t expect much. “In the end,” he concludes “all these bastards are the same.”