The Androulakis leadership is doing everything possible to substitute vulgarities, trial by intention, moral degradation, lies, slander for confrontation with positions and arguments.

The selective class ethicology of the newspaper “Avriani”marked the entire 1980s, not only as a journalistic discourse but also as a current with political and social roots that sowed its seeds in subsequent generations. It expressed antipathy to elites and bourgeois intellectuals. It proclaimed… disgust for Leonidas Kyrkos as a “bourgeois” leftist and… contempt for Manos Hadjidakis as a “bourgeois” liberal.

He was born and bred as a populist of the centre of a passionately anti-right-wing Greece, with Andreas Papandreou‘s iconoclasts in the vanguard. A Greek centro-socialism of “us or them”, with rivers of words about the traitor, the Neneco, the bribe-taker and a new version of the… democrat. “Criminalised” sexual selection, “professors” and “culturalists”, while every bourgeois “protected” a… moneylender.

It became the historical symbol of what was later called national populismand as an outrage similar to that later expressed in the “upper” and “lower” squares that brought Alexis Tsipras‘s SYRIZA to power.

It’s been years…

And if in the 1980s the benchmark was PASOK of Andreas, in 2015 “autrianism” was carried on the backs of “horseman” Tsipras, while in 2026 a group of nostalgics in Charilaou Trikoupis dreams of bringing back the glorious days of the unyielding Pasokian struggle, substituting the political confrontation of positions and arguments with chaydology, trial of intentions, moral degradation, lies, slander and… character assassination whispers.

Avriani worked to shape and entrench the mentality that anyone who disagrees with us “is with the enemy” and that those expressing the other view are either “caught” or “have it ready” and (why not) “are even agents.”

This practice would be politically inaugurated in the 1985 election. On one side was the “light”, i.e. PASOK (according to Menio Koutsogiorgas) and on the other the “dark”, i.e. the Right. It was then that the “Florakis” had yachts and factories, they were “sold”, that’s why they “were with the Right”.

On every occasion, sacrificial ceremonies were staged, aiming to isolate the political victim, to shame and eventually to exterminate him. And with this… ritual he called upon the crowd to unite. Avriani was the newspaper that introduced toxicity into the political debate. It campaigned against the right-wing of Georgio Rallis for Lacoste. It launched unprecedented insults, calling Manos Hadjidakis a “fig” for criticizing it by calling it a “moving cesspool”.

He used a photograph to depict, in a humiliating manner, Constantine Mitsotakis in the Occupation as a collaborator of the Germans. It was the newspaper that Andreas Papandreou had called “a model of journalism”.

The newspaper that created a laboratory of lies, mud and guttering, over the years it demolished Karamanism, but then served it. The newspaper changed its name but not its perception or culture. Supported Tsipras who would tear up the memoranda, dance on the markets and exclaim “go back, Mrs Merkel”.

And SYRIZA picked up the baton of authoritarianism as early as the day after the May 2012 elections with identical practices: “dilemmas” SYRIZA or the Right, conspiratorial voices and provocations about “lost votes” on the Left, “former green guards” calling for a rally with SYRIZA, slander and innuendo. Who doesn’t remember the mails circulated by members of SYRIZA and supposedly “innocent” asking “where does ANTARSYA get the money and participate in the elections”?

In the strategy of neo-aurianism by SYRIZA was an army of voters lined up behind slogans of anti-systemism, ready to fight to destabilize the political system, against any reformist political project, forming social groups that were taught to have only demands and never obligations.

Followers and easy victims of any kind of populism but, above all, perpetrators and perpetrators of political toxicity. With the denunciation of the elites, conspiracy delirium, anti-Semitism, homophobia, the instrumentalization of lies, “yellowism” at the forefront. Pithy character assassination headlines, inflammatory editorials, divisive civil war discourse and hatred.

Aurianism has found space to reproduce itself, not only on social media but also in Parliament, right up to the present day. With insults and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and fake news.

The roots are deep

It’s been 40 years or so since that Friday 10 May 1985, when “Avriani” published a photo with the octostatic headline “Costas Mitsotakis is a Nazi man!” and with the ultimate goal of winning the elections for PASOK. In January 1995, Giorgos Kouris had said in a television interview that the photo was personally handed to him by Andreas Papandreou.

In 2026, in PASOK, authoritarianism appears resilient as an evergreen weed. Another photo is aimed this time at Kyriakos Mitsotakis and a couple with the… mister “Frappe” of OPEKEPE, at a wedding in Crete 21 years ago…

Today’s PASOK seems to be trying to keep alive in historical memory the blackest pages of its rule. It adopts every fake news and conspiracy theory on the internet to make opposition. It adopts catastrophism, populism and rhetoric that points to parties of extremes.

He gives credentials to the extremes and the parties of… Psorokostina, and Nikos Androulakis is playing his part having lost his place in the center. Some there, in Charilaou Trikoupis, are nostalgic for the glamour and green privileges of the era of Aryanism.