“First of all to start in reverse: He is not our adversary, nor will he ever be an adversary, nor the government, nor the authorities, a relative of a victim of a tragic accident, a national tragedy, whatever it may be. Why do we not “weigh” the “value” of the dead, as they do in other political arenas, but it is not a matter of government A or B. It is a matter of a situation, which, I think without any doubt, prevailed for many years post-government, of a phobia towards the “loud minority” of the bachalakis”, said Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister and government representative Pavlos Marinakis in the briefing of the political editors.

“Unfortunately, we have lived through dark nights, where Athens burned, because a tragic murder happened, for which the Justice in both the first and second instance took its decisions. I don’t think that a murder, no matter how tragic, is an alibi for burning Athens. We have said this, we have agreed on it. For 50, 45 years to be exact, we lived under the regime of lawlessness asylum in the universities. How many of those who are listening to us have missed classes, semesters, deadlines for master’s degrees, because some people wanted to occupy universities for two, three, five months? An illegal act that should, of course, cease at that moment, stop, be arrested – if the perpetrators have committed other crimes – and open the university. This is happening now. I don’t think this is a criticism of a particular government. It is an “abscess”, which this government broke, with the abolition of lawlessness asylum in 2019 and the dozens of squatters’ evictions in universities, the tightening of the Criminal Code”, he added.

“How many times have we heard of arrests for incidents and because after the Autoforo they were released or because they were convicted of some misdemeanors, they got probation and continued to do incidents,” he continued. “There is a completely different mood. On the fields respectively. It is not one and two governments. It is one of the biggest wounds of post-political Greece in the name of an alleged moral advantage, this phobia towards transgression of a specific political space. Offenders have no color or ideology. Whether they are far-right, whether they are far-left, whether they are Olympian-Panathenian, whether they are north-south, offenders are offenders. The criminal code makes no distinctions. This was not the case for a specific “origin” violence in Greece, for many years. It was not happening to the extent that the citizens, the tax payers, those householders who some people mock and belong to all the political spaces with their taxes demanded. Let’s tell the truth”, he concluded.