Years of neoliberal reforms, corruption and degradation of firefighting equipment and institutions means we now have to endure multiple wildfires every fucking day. It's disgusting what's happening. And you can't blame it on the weather. "But, but, it was really hot, it reached 46 degrees a few days ago" oh yeah? It reached 48C about 40 years ago, and it goes above 40C almost every year in August, It's not a fucking excuse. "But but the wind" there was no fucking wind. Literally nothing. Yesterday it was 2 on the Beaufort scale, idk how much it is today but I'm looking outside and the branches are still. The media is constantly coming up with new dumbass excuses for the failures of the government. Greece doesn't have vast forests where it's very hard to spot a fire if it starts. There's no excuse why this should be happening.
It's absolutely horrible in Athens right now, there's a massive cloud of smoke which has covered everything, and houses are burning right outside the city. Also Euboea has a bunch of fires too, as do some other smaller islands. I don't know why but Euboea burns to the ground like 3 times every fucking year recently, we desperately need guillotines for everyone responsible.
Unironically we should have voted harder because we have like 50 different genuinely radical leftist parties, but people don't end up voting for them even if they do agree to a great extent because 1) it's a bit confusing that there's so many different ones, they don't know which to vote, 2) the vote gets diluted anyways, 3) SYRIZA started out as radical leftists and then they betrayed everyone so now people are distrustful, and 4) people vote for SYRIZA anyways for harm reduction etc although they also really fucking suck (including at fire safety, under their government about 100 people burned alive in Mati). The most prominent leftist party (I'm not including Syriza because I don't think they really count as such any more) is KKE, the communist party, which is in the parliament and gets about 5-6% of the vote these days. However they're just not very good, but people support them because of its history and also because it's kind of a harm reduction thing within radical leftist parties (some people don't like them very much but support them because they are the ones with the most power).
Oof, very big story. A lot of it comes down to their aging base, and also the fact that a lot of higher ranking members are compliant with just being a parliamentary party and care more about preserving that position and making sure they don't leak voters to some other leftist party than really doing anything. The easiest problem to understand for someone who doesn't know about Greece is that they are pretty bad when it comes to LGBT+. The rest I can't explain without context. The upside is that they are the only leftist party which has a great deal of representation in labor unions (actually they have their own separate unions which is kinda... Not very smart for a few reasons but whatever) although they've made mistakes there too. Between the parties in the parliament they are the best though.
KKE is kind of an oddity because it is one of, I think only a couple old guard communist parties which have survived and not changed completely in Europe.
Bad lib shit lol he's also had a bunch of somewhat important members including a parliamentarian quit because they realized it's basically a vanity project disguised as a leftist party.
Also he's (at least on paper, but Mitsotakis probably beats him easily in actuality) like the richest party leader in the country by far thanks to stonks and his wife's financial counseling firm, which is not a great look, and even worse when that first came out he started saying some nonsense about how it is always rich people who start the revolutions or whatever the fuck.
Yeah he stopped the hunger strike eventually because the government didn't budge. Soon we'll probably all die due to massive wildfires though. At this point he should probably get out and do a terrorism ASAP.
Um, I don't think so? It's been a while since something similar to what they used to do happened.
I thought his transfer to high security prison was something of new democracy (or whatever the party is called?) paranoia about that? Or pure retaliation?
Retaliation, 17N has been history for like 15 years or so. Also slop for their voters. BTW 17N killed this prime minister's brother in law, who was also the father of the mayor of Athens, so obviously they were big on retaliation. Ironically they killed the least bad member of that family.
Do you guys have cooling centers for old people to go to with air conditioning?
Hmm I really don't think so but we don't usually have very big problems with heat despite the temperatures being pretty high every year in July andAugust (peak is frequently at 40C or above, it peaked at 48C in 1977 which is the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe). I think the last time there were lots of victims was summer of 1987 when about 1300 people died due to an extreme heat wave that lasted more than a week, but back then almost no one had AC. Perhaps people are more prepared due to this being common, perhaps it is partly because of the climate not being very humid typically.
Like, we've only had AC for about 5 years but we managed, fans are pretty effective too.
