The orcism of a city councilman in the Municipality of Athens should be a serious moment. A clear commitment to the city, its citizens and the laws of the land.
Petros Konstantinou decided to make it a political show. Instead of the prescribed oath, he stood in the city council and announced his own “oath of struggle”, filled with slogans, ideological obsessions and revolutionary fantasies. Not a single word about loyalty to Greece. Not a single word about respect for the Constitution and laws.As if he thought institutions were secondary to his own political agenda.
The image was offensive to the institution itself. Inside the capital’s municipality, not at a party rally, a councillor appeared in a Palestinian headscarf and turned the inauguration into an activist show. And next to him, almost symbolically, was the president of the Pakistani community, Javed Aslam, for whom a decision is pending from the Ministry of Immigration on whether he should retain his asylum status in Greece.
This is no longer just a provocation. We are talking about a complete disregard for common sense. While the competent authorities are examining such a serious case, this man appears as an official guest at a political fiesta inside the Municipality of Athens. And instead of having a basic institutional distance, the municipal authority rushed to cover him politically.
The Charis Dukas responded to the reactions with the well-known grandiloquent references to the “city of solidarity”. That sounds good in the slogans. Only Athens is neither a student assembly nor a hangout for activists. It’s the capital of the country. And a mayor must first respect the institutions and decisions of the state, not act as a political protector of every cause that raises antisystemic flags.
But the worst part is that all of this was to be expected. The Duke was elected thanks to a strange alliance of forces that came together not because they had a common plan for Athens, but because they wanted to bring down Bakoyannis.From SYRIZA and ANTARSYA to every bitter “anti-right” front, everyone was squeezed under the same umbrella. And now the city sees the result.
It sees a municipality that instead of dealing with cleanliness, neglect and the daily suffering of its citizens, it turns into a stage for political activism by hosting performances of revolutionary narcissism. See institutions trivialized and the capital city becoming a backdrop for ideological performances.
And let this finally be a lesson to those who became complacent in the last municipal elections. For those who believed that “it doesn’t matter if I don’t go to vote in the second round, Bakoyiannis will surely come out.” In politics, vacancies are never left empty. They are always filled by the most fanatical, the noisiest and often the most extreme. And then the city wakes up to find the Municipality of Athens looking more like a squat than an administration of a European capital.
