Politis have selected the following series of previously published articles, covering a variety of topics, for your summer reading. Compiled by Politis summer staff intern Miriam Kamil. 1. This cheat sheet is excellent to have on hand while reading other entries in Politis’ live blog coverage of parliamentary elections in Greece. 2. We love Politis […]

Americans look at the crisis in Europe and think they see “an underdeveloped version of the American polity,” that if European leaders only acted more like us, everything would be solved.  This article by Russell A. Berman inspects that fallacy of logic and offers an informative run down of the euro crisis and Merkel’s budgetary […]

Greece in the news up to July 12! In this article from The New York Times on July 1, Paul Krugman offers a logical vindication of Greece as it has been portrayed in the media.   Krugman claims that unduly blaming southern Europe for the crisis is preventing progress.  There is merit to this idea, […]

Derek Gatopoulis 7/10/12 ATHENS, Greece — A leading human rights organization is urging Greece’s new government to take “urgent action” to curb an “alarming” increase in attacks against Asian and African immigrants, including brutal assaults by gangs on teenage boys and pregnant women. In a 100-page report issued Tuesday, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said xenophobic […]

An annotated collection of recommended articles about Greece and the eurozone, updated regularly by Politis’ summer staff intern, Miriam Kamil. To July 5, 2012 Ann Appelbaum of the Washington Post had this to say on June 29 about the immediate post-election climate in Greece.  It is an excellent recap of the events of the week […]

The letter in English: Athens, 27 June 2012 As I have already informed you, I will unfortunately not be able to attend the current European Summit, due to an eye operation I had to undergo. Greece will be represented by the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Karolos Papoulias. With this letter I would like […]

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras (ND) Administrative Reform and E-Governance Minister Antonis Manitakis (technocrat, Professor of Constitutional Law) Deputy Manoussos Voloudakis (ND) Agricultural Development and Food Minister Athanasios Tsaftaris (technocrat, Professor of Genetics and Plant Breeding) Deputy Maximos Harakopoulos (ND) Defence Minister Panos Panagiotopoulos (ND) Deputy Panagiotis Karambelas (former Lieutenant General – Hellenic Army) Deputy Dimitrios Elefsiniotis (former Vice Admiral – Hellenic Navy, former Chief of […]

By Maria Patsarika Whenever I am faced with a dilemma I know that my choices are limited. Dilemmas represent difficult decision making, being torn between solutions neither of which is convincing enough to go for with watertight certainty. (Unless, of course, the dilemma is about choosing between Santorini and Crete for one’s holiday) On the […]

By Ruth Sutton The Greek electorate voted with the less practical parts of their bodies in May… their feet, hearts and gall… and not so much with their heads. The two parties (and their dynasties) that have dominated the political scene for decades desperately needed a wake-up call, but will voters risk instability in order […]

By Dimitris Diamantis and David Wisner “So many candidates, so little time to choose,” reported one interlocutor to us in early May. How can one decide about new parties and about personalities that had until recently resided more or less in the margins of national politics? We have been asked several times how we would […]

By Ian Kehoe               Looking through some of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers recently I found myself shocked and equally intrigued by the vilification of Greece, this corrupt little country that had brought down Europe and irritated those poor suffering markets so much… so much so that I was half expecting a headline saying ‘Greece causes man to […]

Students and faculty from Anatolia and ACT, and the Dukakis Center took part in two clean up activities in Thessaloniki on the weekend of June 9-10, 2012. First, a group of volunteer citizens helped clean up the beach behind the Hondos Center in the Florida shopping center, part of a city-wide initiative led by Thessaloniki […]

Choose4Greece is an online application which calculates voters’ ideological congruence with political parties for the June 17 elections in Greece. Choose4Greece II represents an update, which takes into consideration the changes in the Greek political party landscape, on the initial application that was launched because of the significance of the May 6 general election and […]

By Paschos Mandravelis* Ultimately, youth unemployment is not just a Greek phenomenon, nor is it limited to Europe. It is a global threat to stability and to our societies’ ability to reproduce. Worse than the fact that 13 percent of people aged between 15 and 24 worldwide are out of work is that 6 million […]

By David Wisner There is good news and bad news this week from the birthplace of democracy. On the one hand, according to findings from the European Values Study published by Tilburg University in Holland, more than 80% of those polled in Greece showed support for a democratic regime. This is clearly the highest average in the […]

By Kathryn Lukey-Cout​socostas* Globalization has us readily accepting goods from other lands into our homes. But can countries absorb imported citizens just as easily? Whenever I join the crowd to criticize a line-jumper in a queue in Greece, someone inevitably tries to muzzle me with the classic insider-outsider putdown: “You’re not Greek.” Apparently, only locals […]

By Marten van Heuven The author is a retired senior US diplomat with extensive experience in European affairs. He contributed this note in response to an invitation by Politis for thoughts on the trans-Atlantic dimensions of the crisis in Greece and the eurozone. I find the situation in Greece and in Europe unsettling, in part […]

By Konstantinos Bouas The ongoing administrative reform effort is one of the most critical issues of concern for administrative science in Greece.  Considering the longstanding structural weaknesses of the public administration, as well as the explicit commitments of the Greek State deriving from the Memorandum, it is easy to realize the urgency of immediate and effective […]

Parallaxi, a free-press magazine inThessaloniki who began the well known “ThessalonikiAllios” are organizing the 2nd annual effort to clean up the city ofThessaloniki. Thessaloniki Allios willbe reviving an area of Thessaloniki that has been left abandoned for a longtime, the coastline from Aretsous until Macedonia Airport. One mission will be to clean up the coastbehind […]