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Alexis Tsipras must be stopped: the underlying message of Europe’s leaders - The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/alexis-tsipras-must-be-stopped-the-underlying-message-of-europes-leader

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In a country where an estimated 11,000 people have killed themselves during the hardship wrought by austerity, Juncker offered unfortunate advice. “I say to the Greeks, don’t commit suicide because you’re afraid of dying,” he said.

Juncker’s extraordinary performance sounded and looked as if he were already mourning the passing of a Europe to which he has dedicated his long political career. His 45-minute speech was both proprietorial and poignant about his vision, which seems to be giving way to a rawer and rowdier place.

That was clear from the trenchant remarks of Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor and the head of the country’s Social Democratic party. He coupled the Greek situation with last week’s foul tempers over immigration and said that Europe faces its worst crisis since the EU’s founding treaty was signed in Rome in 1957.

Gabriel was the first leading European politician to voice what many think and say privately about Tsipras – that the Greek leader represents a threat to the European order, that his radicalism is directed at the politics of mainstream Europe and that he wants to force everyone else to rewrite the rules underpinning the single currency.

The unspoken message was that Tsipras is a dangerous man on a mission who has to be stopped.

#Grèce

Greece in chaos: will Syriza’s last desperate gamble pay off? | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/greece-chaos-syriza-gamble-banks-closed-referendum

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Greece under austerity has become frenetic. Athens right now is slick with perspiration; every public space is charged with hormonal tension and political disagreement – even the bakery where you buy your morning bread. The politics are brutal. Last week, stick-wielding anarchist youths attacked the HQ of the Antarsya – a far-left anti-capitalist party – because the latter had tried to make them pay to go into a music festival when the anarchists thought it should be free.

I’ve seen, in the bohemian Exarchia district, a troupe of black-clad 15-year-olds distrupt a whole street full of similarly bohemian cafe-goers on a Saturday night, using petrol bombs and flaming rubbish bins, simply because “creating mayhem” is their doctrine.

Athens has become, in short, the stage for flamboyant acts of self-dramatisation: sporadic riots, public kissing, street theatre and ill-advised scooter techniques. It is, to use a phrase Huxley once used about Shanghai, “life with the lid off”, and for the same reasons: “so much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing”.

Antonis Vradis, a geographer at Durham University who has studied the impact of repeated waves of unrest here since 2008, describes how the youth networks have been preparing for this week’s “rupture” with the ECB: “They are creating structures you can’t default on. Self-organised clinics, the social centres you see all around you. Structures that will help them survive.”