Referring to the government’s attempt to limit protests at the monument, a key site of recent mobilisations following Routsi’s 23-day hunger strike, the committee said Mitsotakis’s initiative violates the constitutional separation between the armed forces and civil life. ‘The Constitution explicitly prohibits the action of the armed forces against citizens, that is, acts of repression,’ it stated.

The committee accused the prime minister of acting out of political revenge: ‘The Mitsotakis “party” cannot forgive Panos Routsi for the victory he achieved, against the wall they had erected together with the “independent” judiciary to his just request.’

It argued that Routsi’s hunger strike, which forced the government to approve the exhumation and toxicological testing of his son’s body after the Tempe rail disaster, ‘did not allow the parody of a staged express trial to pass, the trial the government wanted to use to cover up the crime and absolve itself while it still remains in power.’

The committee described the government’s decision as part of a broader authoritarian drift: ‘We should not take these attempts to militarise social and political life lightly,’ it warned. ‘Mitsotakis is flirting with yet another unconstitutional coup, as he did, for example, with Article 16 of the Constitution, which explicitly prohibits private “universities”. The Constitution forbids any military involvement in civil life, a principle won through the Polytechnic Uprising and the democratic freedoms it secured after the junta.’

The statement further accused the government of courting the far right and its media ecosystem: ‘They do not hesitate to collect every far-right piece of garbage to fish for votes. The same well-paid journalists that badmout evey attempt at resistance.’

‘The hatred of the Mitsotakis government is understandable,’ it continued. ‘Routsi’s victory not only exposed Mitsotakis within New Democracy and society at large, it opened a new path for the families of the victims and the solidarity movement. It showed that we can win with unity, if we are determined to go to the end.’

The committee urged citizens to remain vigilant against efforts to ‘militarise public life’, warning of parallels with the United States, where the use of the army ‘against the internal enemy’ has become increasingly normalised. ‘The more isolated and delegitimised a government becomes, like Mitsotakis’s today, the more inclined it is to test such extreme fantasies,’ the statement read.

It concluded with a call to collective resistance: ‘We remain vigilant for any necessary mobilisation, so that this unacceptable, junta-style measure does not even pass as a thought. Syntagma Square does not belong to the government organisers of the cover-up and their mechanisms. It will remain free — for the expression of social protest, under the nose of a Parliament that has evolved into a coordinator of the cover-up. The struggles of workers, youth and all those who can no longer stand the regime of concealment, poverty, 13-hour workdays, war and repression will take care of that.’

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