Great to see Greece improving, meanwhile Italy is speedrunning its demise.
I speak to my Greek friends and family, mostly outside of tech, and the sentiment isn't yet as positive as the macro numbers in articles like this indicate.
As a diaspora Greek, it's positive news, but it seems this all hasn't "trickled down" to citizens' day to day lives as much. It does give some hope for those who left for economic reasons, and there are even groups out there to encourage a return to restore the brain drain of the 2010s.
That being said the elder population would probably be grumpy no matter how much things improved.
Exactly. Like, what was the outlook ten years ago? Possible exit from EU and euro, state bankruptcy, economic and political collapse. The stability and slow economic improvement might be a bad result for many countries, but for Greece it's IMHO a good result (for me, better than expected).
If you're still on X, or subscribe to newsletters, I can recommend The Greek Analyst[0]. He follows a lot of macro trends for Greece and makes an active effort to be a positive voice in the sea of Greek pessimism, including results like these "great result in relative context" pieces.
I find the ancient and Byzantine history fascinating myself. Naturally the liberation struggles are also important, but the very religious and closer-to-present history and culture don't interest me as much. I also always found it quite hypocritical of the older generation that they biased towards the more recent history and the Orthodox religious aspects, but then they'd sell you trinkets of the ancient world while quietly ignoring the pagan nature of it.
IMO, one of the last big issues with Greek culturally and in terms of economic opportunity for young adults, is mandatory conscription. I won't be returning for anything more than a holiday unless I get a permanent exemption. Many Greeks tend to ignore the opportunity cost this impacts young men with. It's not just "a forced gap year" since you have to do it regardless of if you study or not.
By having emigrated before the peak of the crises around 2015, I avoided both wasting a year on conscription and finished my studies sooner. Anecdotally I'm pretty sure taking that leap was the best thing I could've done, considering what I know of my pees right now (highly educated, but overworked and underpaid).
I believe it's important for the country to look beyond that history. Not saying one shouldn't be inspired by it, almost everyone in the West is somewhat inspired by it anyway. This is a piece of humanity that played out on the same geographical area as modern-day Greece with a somewhat similar language, but it's long gone.
And I totally agree regarding conscription - if it were some sort of useful exercise for 6 months or so, one could probably make sense of it, but as it stands currently, it's a total waste of time.
IIRC there was an election in ~2015 which Syriza won, back then pretty radical in its anti-austerity campaign. But after they won, they made a turnaround and more or less went along with the austerity.
His best man is the biggest gangster in Greece, Marinakis. They found a ship of his containing 2 TONS! of heroin, and nothing happened.
Because the Mitsotakis family controls the court system in Greece.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159252/noor-one-vampire-ship...
Sure every nation has an elite, but it’s a stretch to say that Germany, Sweden, Denmark, USA, and many other countries have an oligarchic system similar to how it is in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.