Greeks seek new start after ‘last act of a martyr’
Pensioner’s public suicide angers the already defiant
Until Wednesday morning, Dimitris Christoulas, a respectable, middle-class pensioner, was familiar only to the residents of the quiet Ampelokipous district of Athens where he had lived and worked for nearly 40 years.
All that changed at 8:45 a.m., rush hour, when the 77-year-old former pharmacist and pillar of his shopkeeping community shot himself under a giant cyprus tree on the central Syntagma Square.
He fell in front of the national parliament that many Greeks blame for the mismanagement that has plunged their country into crisis, and lay there dead as shocked commuters looked on.
Today, the name Dimitris Christoulas is known to most in this troubled country.
“A martyr for Greece” declared the Eleftheros Typos newspaper on Thursday. “Scream of desperation” said the headline in Avyi next to a picture of Edvard Munch’s celebrated painting.
To many, he has become a hero. “He did not rebel from his couch. He was a beautiful man, he will live on in history,” said a neighbour.
The suicide note Christoulas left behind urging young Greeks to rise up has also struck a chord with people who see their highly indebted country’s social fabric being torn apart by economic recession and externally imposed austerity measures.
“I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end,” he wrote. “I believe that young people with no future will one day take up and hang this country’s traitors in arms in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.”
Violent clashes with riot police followed the suicide. Hundreds of demonstrators, some carrying placards proclaiming “may his last act be a new beginning,” gathered around the tree where Christoulas died.
Anger over the suicide was directed as much at politicians as at the harsh austerity prescribed by foreign lenders in return for aid to lift the country out of its worst economic crisis since the Second World War.
With an election expected on May 6, smaller parties opposed to harsh spending cuts included in the country’s second bailout were quick to blame bigger parties backing the rescue.
Smaller parties, such as the Independent Greeks have been riding high in opinion polls at the expense of the two main ruling parties, the conservative New Democracy and socialist PASOK, which backed the bailout.
The two big parties are together expected to take less than 40 per cent of the vote. Losing more voters to the smaller parties could mean they will not have enough seats in parliament to forge a pro-bailout coalition again.
That would have profound implications for Greece’s finances as continued aid from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund depends on the next government’s pushing through of reforms.
“The main issue is not the suicide itself but the reasons behind it,” Thomas Gerakis from the Marc pollster group said.
“The problem is far more serious than a single suicide. It shows that there is a serious — and growing — problem of people in despair.”
Resentment is rising in Greece over repeated wage and pension cuts that have compounded the pain from a slump which has seen the economy shrink by a fifth since 2008.
Lucas Papademos, the technocrat prime minister appointed under EU pressure late last year, tried to ease the tension.
“In these difficult times for our country we must all — the state and its citizens — support those next to us who are in despair,” he pleaded.
Christoulas’s daughter, Emmy, has refused to discuss whether her father was severely ill and worried about how to pay medical bills. She insisted political motives were the driving force behind his suicide.
“His act was a political act,” she said, adding her father had given “no indication” of his plans, either to her or his estranged wife.
Stavros Papachristos, a theologian of the Greek Orthodox Church, called on EU officials to give Greece some respite.
“The EU must take off the pressure. We cannot handle it. Europe must understand that millions of Greeks are dying slowly,” he said.