Last month a member of the Greek parliament vandalised four paintings in the National Gallery in Athens on the grounds they were blasphemous to Christianity. Nikolaos Papadopoulos is one of 10 MPs representing the fundamentalist Democratic Patriotic Popular Movement, known for short as Niki (which means “victory” in Greek). The works, by artist Christophoros Katsadiotis, were part of an exhibition called The Allure of the Bizarre, inspired by the 18th-century painter Goya.
Papadopoulos’s fundamentalist action in attacking paintings of which he disapproves is not unlike Donald Trump’s refusal to countenance otherness or difference; both are symptomatic of Greece’s current geopolitics.
A week after Papadopoulos’s actions, the leader of Niki, Dimitris Natsios (also an MP), demanded the removal of a video installation at the same gallery, which he denounced as “obscene”. It includes singing of the national anthem and the Prayer to the Holy Spirit.
Niki is one of three right-wing parties in the Greek parliament, the others being Greek Solution (11 MPs) and The Spartans (five MPs); together they have 26 seats in the 300-member parliament.
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They took the place of the former neo-fascist party Golden Dawn which, until its electoral collapse in 2019, was the third-largest party in parliament. Many of Golden Dawn’s members are now in jail, having been convicted of murder, attempted murder and xenophobic violence.
Niki, with the motto “Faith, Fatherland, Family”, is closely aligned with the Orthodox Church. Natsios led the campaign for the 2007 removal of a schools history textbook with which the church disagreed, alleging that it “undermined the national heritage”. He founded Niki in 2019 in protest at the Prespa Agreement by which Greece recognised the state of North Macedonia. Many nationalists, including the prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (then in opposition), objected to the name since “Macedonia” is regarded as an integral part of Greek history.
This may seem a long way from the Greek-Chinese accord reached last year in Beijing, which sees the establishment of a Chinese School in Athens, complementary to the many other institutes with archaeological or scholastic interests, representing Britain, the US, France and, indeed, the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies.
Cynics see the Greek-Chinese accord as an example of “soft power”, the hard end of which is Chinese ownership of Piraeus, the fifth-largest (and rapidly expanding) port in the Mediterranean and increasingly the western focus of China’s Silk Road initiative, a renewal of the historic trading route linking east and west.
Tim Whitmarsh, the regius professor of Greek at Cambridge University, is one of those cynics. While he welcomes the boost from Chinese scholars to classical studies which are so neglected in Europe today, he also sees the accord as “a stark illustration of the growing power and brazenness of Chinese statecraft”.
He views the statement in Beijing by Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni – that there are “baleful effects when scholarship panders to minorities” – as symptomatic of Greece’s vulnerability to such statecraft. Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone (which has received numerous productions in Ireland in recent years) demonstrates what can happen when statecraft denies the rights of minorities and those who question orthodoxy.
A previous prime minister, Antonis Samaras, said in 2014 that “Greece can become the main European entry point for China thanks to our strategic location” and even went so far as to suggest a Chinese naval base in Crete.
But it works both ways: Greece is vulnerable to exploitation by China, and although Trump has so far shown little interest in Greece he is likely to see increased Chinese investment there as a threat to American trade. The new US ambassador, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is a close associate of Trump (she was engaged to his son until recently), but Greece has few friends in either Capitol Hill or the White House.
The two events – the vandalism caused by a right-wing MP and the welcoming to Athens of Chinese scholars – may seem miles, or even continents, apart, but the attitude towards minorities, with increasing worldwide opposition to “woke”, immigration, gender transition and other phenomena which do not conform to orthodoxy or convention, points towards both Greece’s geopolitical strengths and weaknesses.
Greece’s “strategic location”, its proximity to Turkey, Israel and Palestine, its centrality in the entire Balkans, and its membership of Nato and the European Union, all raise questions about its status in an era when European solidarity is threatened by the advent of Trump.
Greece’s anxiety about its Ukrainian diaspora in war-torn Kherson (a city founded by Greeks) or Odesa (where there is a sizeable Greek commercial centre and where the Greek war of independence was conceived in 1814) affects its stance on Europe and on the outcome of the war. Balancing China, the US and Europe is a challenge for any statesman. Can Mitsotakis do it?
