Yesterday’s images from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and the University of West Attica were not just another episode of university violence.
It was a crude attempt at intimidation just hours before the polls of the student election opened. Helmets, batons, hoods and organised attacks inside university campuses. Not for some “ideological clash”, as such situations are often dubbed, but to send a message to the silent majority of students: “Stay away.”
For years, a small section of the extra-parliamentary left has treated universities as its own personal turf. It cannot stand free participation. It cannot stand normalcy. It prefers auditoriums closed, faculties under occupation and assemblies under the control of the most fanatical minorities. Their democracy ends where different opinion begins.
Most challenging is the contradiction. The same people who denounce daily “regimes”and “human practices”in a country with an elected 41% government, attempt in schools to impose their own line with bullying, threats and violence. They speak in the name of freedom, but are afraid of the free vote. They speak in the name of students, but they never trust the judgment of their majority. They speak of fascism, but it is the worst form of fascism. The leftist.
The student election is not a formality without meaning. It is the only time when young people can send a clear message about the university they want. About whether they want schools open or schools held hostage. About whether they want librariesor fields of conflict. About whether they want institutions that produce knowledge or permanent miniatures of partisan civil war.
This is why yesterday’s attacks carry so much political weight. They did not happen by accident. They happened on the eve of the election because some people know full well that the more students who participate, the less influence the organized groups that have been preying on schools for years have.
The response is not fear, nor is it abstention. It is participation. It is the vote. It is the decision of thousands of young people to take back their universities from those who want them permanently mired in tension and toxicity.
And maybe that’s ultimately what the practitioners of “resistance” fear most: a generation of students who have rested from outrage, are turning their backs on the hoods and are finally choosing freedom, safety, and real democracy inside the schools.
