Fifty-two years ago, in November 1973, a group of young students barricaded themselves inside the Athens Polytechnic, shouting the now-immortal words: “Bread, Education, Freedom.” They were not armed with anything but their voices and their certainty that democracy even bruised, even fragile, was worth more than the generals’ guns. It didn’t take long before all of Athens answered their call. Thousands gathered outside those gates, young and old, workers and teachers, dreamers and the broken. In a city suffocating under seven years of dictatorship, the Polytechnic uprising was the moment the regime could no longer hide behind its lies.
And so, as all terrified regimes do, it struck back. With police batons. With soldiers. And then, finally, with tanks. Those ugly metal beasts whose roar still shakes the conscience of this country. The junta crushed the uprising with deathly force. But the students won something larger; they ignited a fire that outlived the dictators who tried to silence them.
Yet here we are; half a century later, standing in a Greece that has learned all the wrong lessons. Because if 1973 was a symbol of democratic awakening, 2025 has become a symbol of democratic decay. And the decay starts at the top, with a government rotting from its own arrogance, corruption and authoritarian hunger.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s tragically enduring Prime Minister, has managed the spectacular feat of dragging the country backwards while smiling for international cameras and selling himself as a “moderniser.” Modern? Perhaps if modern governance means surveillance states, media manipulation, abolition of rights, and the suffocation of dissent. Under Mitsotakis, Greece has achieved something remarkable: it has sunk to the bottom of Europe’s press freedom rankings and the top of Europe’s corruption scandals.
This is not a government it’s an organised clique. A cartel dressed in suits, protected by friendly newspapers and business interests fattened on public money. And like all cartels, it tolerates no criticism.
When journalists are spied on with military-grade spyware, Mitsotakis calls it “an unfortunate mistake.”
When dead migrants wash up on Greek shores, he blames “bad weather.”
When wildfires consume half the country, he lectures the public on “responsibility.”
When tempers rise, he goes abroad to collect awards given by people who never set foot in an underfunded Greek hospital.
And when the Greek people feel the ground beneath their feet collapse under inflation, poverty wages and suffocating rents, he speaks in the language of technocracy, a cold, bloodless tongue designed to make misery sound mathematical.
Meanwhile, his ministers, those interchangeable faces in expensive ties, parrot talking points with the enthusiasm of frightened interns. The government has all the creativity of a spreadsheet and all the morality of a discount loan shark.
But perhaps the greatest insult, the most grotesque irony, is this the anniversary of the Polytechnic has never been more relevant. The slogan that shook the junta ‘Bread, Education, Freedom’ reads today not like a memorial, but like a demand still waiting to be met.
Bread.
Tell that to the thousands surviving on salaries that vanish by the 20th of each month. To the families forced to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children. To the young who work two jobs and still cannot afford a flat, not even a windowless basement. Greece is the country where “economic growth” means yachts for the few and empty fridges for the many.
Education.
Ask the students crammed into universities where funding disappears faster than ministers’ ethics. Look at the classrooms with no heating, the teachers paid worse than supermarket cashiers, the universities militarised with armed guards as if ideas are dangerous weapons. The junta feared students; Mitsotakis fears them too. That alone should tell us something.
Freedom.
The word has become a bitter joke. Freedom of press? Choked. Freedom of protest? Criminalised. Freedom from surveillance? Nonexistent. Greece has become the country where journalists investigating corruption end up blacklisted, wiretapped or mysteriously unemployed and in some cases ...dead. Where citizens are monitored because someone in power “needed to know.”
The government behaves not like a democratic administration but like a property owner who believes the country is his family estate, an inheritance to distribute among friends, donors and party loyalists.
And while all this unfolds, Mitsotakis stands on polished podiums and talks about “progress,” “stability,” “resilience.” The only thing resilient in Greece today is corruption. The only thing stable is inequality. And the only progress we see is the progress of authoritarianism wearing the mask of European respectability.
Some insist that comparing today’s Greece with the junta years is an exaggeration and some years ago I was one of them. No tanks on the streets, they say. No curfews, no military courts. True authoritarianism has evolved. It has become smarter, smoother, and infinitely more cowardly. Why send tanks when you can send police units with shields and tear gas? Why close newspapers when you can buy them? Why torture when you can destroy reputations with sponsored headlines and silence critics with lawsuits? Why imprison dissidents when you can exhaust them with economic despair until they leave the country voluntarily?
The weapons have changed. The intentions have not.
The Polytechnic students shouted “Bread, Education, Freedom” because they recognised that dictatorship is not only uniforms and curfews, dictatorship is the absence of dignity. And dignity is exactly what is stolen today, systematically, shamelessly, day after day.
So, what does the anniversary mean now, in a Greece governed by a prime minister who behaves like accountability is an optional luxury? It means we must stop treating the Polytechnic as a relic, a ceremonial march followed by polite speeches. Its message is not a hymn, it is a warning.
If 1973 taught us anything, it is that democracy does not collapse in a day. It rots slowly. It erodes silently. It dies from the thousand small concessions people make out of fatigue, fear or resignation.
And so the question, 52 years later, is painfully simple: Are we willing to become the generation that watched democracy suffocate while pretending everything was fine?
The Polytechnic was not just an uprising. It was a refusal to accept that power belongs only to those who claim it. Today, Greece desperately needs that refusal again. Not nostalgia. Not symbolism. Action. Courage. Outrage.
Because the tanks of 1973 crushed bodies, Mitsotakis government of 2025 is crushing hopes.
And a country can live without tanks but it cannot live without hope.
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