Damaging tolerance
The government is now suffering the adverse consequences of the protracted and unacceptable tolerance that it has displayed in response to the actions of far-left and anarchist groups.
Tuesday’s raid at the Spanish Embassy on the capital’s central Dionysiou Areopagitou Street by members of the Rouvikonas (Rubicon) anarchist group was anything but a bolt out of the blue.
As with the rabble-rousers that turn the downtown neighborhood of Exarchia into a no-go zone on a regular basis, hurling firebombs at police and wrecking store fronts, that particular group appears to enjoy a kind of immunity.
Its members met with no efforts to obstruct them when they entered the grounds of Parliament and the Justice Ministry in the summer, and they have suffered no consequences as a result of those stunts.
It has become abundantly clear that, beyond the insecurity that it fuels on a domestic level, this stance of tolerance that the leftist-led government continues to display to such groups is also damaging Greece’s image on an international level.
