New Athens Municipal Council to be sworn in on Thursday
Athens mayor-elect Haris Doukas and the new city council are to be sworn into office at 11 a.m. on Thursday, in a ceremony at the Kypseli Municipal Market that will not be attended by the convicted far-right councillor Ilias Kasidiaris.
Kasidiaris, who is in prison serving a 13.5-year sentence for his role in the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn organization, will reportedly be sworn in in a separate ceremony due to security reasons, after anti-fascist groups voiced their intention to stage a protest if he was present at the Kypseli event.
Similar protests had descended into violence in 2014 when Kasidiaris – in pretrial detention over the same case at the time – attended the swearing-in of former Athens mayor Giorgos Kaminis and his municipal council.
“Mr Kasidiaris will not be sworn in tomorrow. In cooperation with the Hellenic Police, his swearing-in will take place in a different place, at a different time, over obvious security concerns,” Doukas confirmed on Wednesday.
Doukas, 43, a mechanical engineer and professor of energy policy and management at the National Technical University of Athens who ran in the October elections on the socialist PASOK ticket, succeeds Kostas Bakoyannis of the ruling New Democracy party.
He begins his mayorship after the government passed controversial legislation just before the holiday recess stripping the municipal authority of significant control over major public works projects in the Greek capital.
According to the amendment passed last week as part of an unrelated package of legislation, the company Anaplasi Athinas SA, responsible for city projects, is renamed Anaplasi SA and its supervision is transferred to the ministers of environment and energy, culture, interior, and infrastructure and transport.
