Handcuffs on the Greek tractors by Melina Barnett

The order to arrest protesters and unionists during the farmers’ demonstrations on the Greek highways is not merely an episode of excess policing. It is a political statement, a judicial confession and a warning. It tells us, in plain term that Greek justice no longer even pretends to stand at arm’s length from power. It bends, it reacts and it obeys. And it obeys to Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Farmers blocking highways are not criminals. They are citizens pushed to desperation by rising costs, collapsing incomes and policies designed far from the soil they work. When tractors line asphalt, it is not an attack on democracy; it is one of its oldest expressions. Yet the state’s response was not dialogue, negotiation, or patience. It was arrests. It was intimidation. It was the criminalization of dissent.

Justice did not intervene to protect constitutional rights. It intervened to protect political convenience.

This is where the rot becomes visible. Orders to arrest protesters do not appear out of thin air. They require prosecutors willing to interpret the law aggressively, judges willing to look away, and police leadership confident that no institutional line will be crossed by crossing the people. This confidence does not grow in a vacuum. It grows in an ecosystem where power is centralized, accountability is decorative, and loyalty is rewarded.

The Mitsotakis government has mastered this ecosystem. Institutions are not abolished; they are hollowed out. The courts still exist, but they increasingly function as extensions of executive will. Independence survives as rhetoric, not as practice. When justice moves faster against protesting farmers than against corruption scandals, wiretapping revelations, or political cronies, the hierarchy of priorities becomes undeniable.

Unionists were targeted because unions represent memory. They remember rights that were won, not gifted. They remember that labor protections were not acts of generosity by enlightened governments but the result of conflict. Silencing unionists is not about traffic flow. It is about disciplining society. It is about sending the message that collective action will be punished, not heard.

The highways were chosen deliberately. Highways are visible. They disrupt the illusion of normality that governments desperately try to maintain. Arrests on highways are theatrical. They reassure supporters that “order” is being restored while warning the rest that resistance has consequences. It is governance by spectacle, backed by handcuffs.

Greek justice, in this moment, did not act as a neutral arbiter between citizens and the state. It acted as a shield for power. Dependent justice is more dangerous than openly authoritarian justice because it hides behind procedures. It speaks the language of legality while emptying it of meaning. It does not ban protests; it redefines them as crimes.

This dependency did not begin with one decision or one demonstration. It is the culmination of years in which checks and balances were treated as obstacles, journalists as enemies, and critics as threats. When surveillance scandals fail to trigger meaningful judicial consequences, when ministers emerge untouched from political disasters, but farmers are arrested for blocking roads, justice reveals its alignment.

Supporters of the government will argue that laws must be enforced, that roads cannot be blocked, that order must prevail. But law without proportionality is repression and order without legitimacy is fear. Democracies are not measured by how they treat obedience, but by how they tolerate disruption.

The farmers’ protests exposed something far more serious than agricultural policy failures. They exposed a justice system that looks upward before it looks at the law. A system that calculates political cost before constitutional duty. A system dependent not on principles, but on power.

This is not a temporary deviation. It is a direction. And unless it is named, confronted, and resisted, the handcuffs placed on the highways today will quietly tighten around society tomorrow.

History is unforgiving to governments that confuse control with stability. When justice becomes selective, citizens eventually stop trusting not only institutions, but each other. Cynicism spreads, participation shrinks, and democracy becomes a performance without belief. Greece has walked this road before and it never ends where its architects promise. The farmers on the highways may disperse, the tractors may leave, and the news cycle may move on. But the precedent remains. Each arrest lowers the threshold for the next. Each silent judge normalizes the silence. And each government that discovers how easily justice can be guided will be tempted to guide it further, until guidance becomes command and command becomes habit.

Democracy does not die loudly; it erodes quietly, legally and incrementally.