The Greek protests are not just about the economic crisis

They're a rejection of authority

Aditya Chakraborrty guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 June 2011 20.00 BST

A sunny Saturday afternoon in central Athens, and Christos Roubanis is sitting outside having a beer, while telling me about the death threats he's received. We're in Victoria Square, one of the most racially mixed areas in the capital. The nearby payphones have queues of Bangladeshis waiting outside, and after every few shops comes that telltale feature of immigrant-ville: a Western Union money transfer booth. Locals reckon that more than a third of residents are non-Greek subjects.

And that's made the neighbourhood the target of fascist activity, especially since Greece plunged into severe recession in 2009. A few minutes down the road is a playground, complete with seesaws, slides and climbing frames. It was where Afghans and others used to take their kids – until the Nazis marched in and declared it a no-go zone a couple of years ago. Although most of the equipment inside looks like it's working, the entire rec is still locked up.

Just outside, on the stones in front of the handsomely domed church, is daubed various graffiti. "I love my country" reads one in the national colours of blue and white. Another is more direct: "Immigrants go home." Sprayed on the shutters of nearby shops are swastikas. They look particularly incongruous in a country that tried so heroically to fend off Hitler's invasion.

Christos lives here, but can't walk me to the playground for fear of getting beaten up. Bald, with a small greying moustache, he's previously stepped in to prevent immigrants being hassled – so the Nazis have turned their attention on him. They ring his mobile "and call me a bloody communist and say they will kill me". Once, he was trapped by a fascist gang brandishing wooden poles. "They brought them this close," he says, his hand stopping just in front of his thick glasses.

Under the awning of this bar, Christos and his friends Afrodite and Olga can debate how waves of badly-managed immigration have put pressure on this working-class neighbourhood. But one thing they agree on is that the fascists are managing to exploit the tension in the area. In elections at the end of last year, the extremist Golden Dawn party won 10% of the municipal vote.

Numbers like that flatly contradict the cosy view of the popular Greek reaction to the spending cuts as being articulate, engaged, left-wing. And it is – in parts. But as Christos and his neighbours will tell you, the politics of austerity can boost the thuggish right as well as the post-enlightenment left. Indeed, the defining feature of the Greek protests is not ideology – it's visceral hostility to anything that smacks of the mainstream, whether in politics, or business or the media.

You see this clearly in the demonstrations in Syntagma Square in central Athens. Writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free last week, Birkbeck professor Costas Douzinas found "striking parallels" between the protesters there, for whom "no issue is beyond proposal and disputation", and the Athenian agora, birthplace of western democracy.

It was a finely-written, humane article that sums up part of what's going on. But just up the steps from the "well-organised weekly debates" that Douzinas talks about is a much rowdier demo. Protesters here chant rather than discuss, and can be seen waving the Greek flag – an indicator of nationalist allegiances. I asked one teenager who he blamed for the crisis. The list began conventionally enough: the prime minister George Papandreou, the IMF, and then "the immigrants, because they take money that could be spent on us."

Down in the main throng, protesters flash green lasers into the windows of the surrounding hotels to ruin the footage of the TV cameramen stationed there. When the Greek equivalent of Huw Edwards tried to present from the rally, the protesters tried to beat him up.

The revulsion to anything that smacks of authority is about two things: the past and the present. Many Greeks feel they were lied to during the go-go years: by the politicians, the media and the businesspeople who claimed the boom was real and sustainable. And now that voters are enduring job losses and salary cuts, rising taxes and transport fares, there isn't a single heavyweight politician raising serious objections to the severest austerity ever inflicted on a developed country.

Economic crises usually lead to the electoral guillotine; just ask Gordon Brown. But even if Papandreou and the Socialists are booted out, the New Democracy conservatives also look likely to take their orders from the IMF and the rest of the eurozone. Astonishingly, in the face of what must be among the most unpopular raft of policies ever to be imposed on any European democracy, there is no credible populist opposition.

As for leaving the European single currency, the question is barely raised in the national media. Yet in what was once the most enthusiastic country in the eurozone, polls suggest that one in four Greeks want an exit.

It's a mistake to think that the nature of the Greek crisis is primarily economic or social; it's now political and systemic too.And it will deepen unless a party vehicle comes along that can articulate credible alternatives. But for now in place of a mainstream, there is a vacuum.

And as the playground near Victoria Square reminds you, extreme policies in can lead to extremist politics out.

The Greek protests are not just about the economic crisis | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian