Greece

Many sympathetic watchers on the Greek left argue that Syriza is in no position to reform the state. They point to the loose grouping of the army, the police, the justice system and Greece’s oligarchs at home and abroad.
In interviews Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister, calls these the country’s ‘dark forces’.

This is the deep state, which crystallised during the Civil War as the right’s tool for stamping out communism. The parents of many Syriza ministers were victims of the rightist persecutions of these years; Varoufakis’s father was imprisoned on Makrouisos, a political concentration camp off the coast of Attica. Syriza members themselves fought the relapse into authoritarianism under the Junta. As a student, Nadia Valavani was tortured by the Colonels’ police.

This rightist fringe continued to lurk after the Junta fell, during the metapolitefsi, the so-called decades of democratic prosperity.
Its most visible manifestation is Golden Dawn, which has prospered partly because the justice ministry has allowed it to operate for years with virtual impunity. It has supporters in the church and the police. Two retired generals serve in the European Parliament on the Golden Dawn ticket.

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