Thousands of demonstrators gathered across Greece this week to protest against the government’s push to effectively make immunisation against COVID-19 mandatory in order to lead a normal life. Proudly holding Christian crosses and waving Greek flags, anti-vaxxers made their voices heard and expressed their support for the view of the Greek Orthodox Church, that vaccination should remain a free choice. But they inadvertently also sent another message: that a part of Europe still lives in the Dark Ages. Nationalistic rhetoric, of course, was there as well. “This land does not belong to anarchists and Bolsheviks,” some protesters chanted. Rather than judge the education or IQ level of these people, this Brief aims to point at the responsibility of mainstream parties, which have managed to stay politically afloat either by indirectly mobilising these people, invoking an external threat, or by simply treating them as “useful idiots.” However, apparently blinded by their short-term political objective, these political parties tend to forget that the masses will always hit back, at some point, in keeping with the old saying: “They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind”. Many analysts in Athens suggest that the anti-vax protesters who turned out this week were the same ones who flooded Greek streets to protest the 2018 name-change deal between Athens and Skopje – a sensitive national issue that hit on a raw nerve. Back then, as now, Greek flags and Christian crosses dominated mass demonstrations against an external enemy. That time, it was Greece’s tiny Balkan neighbour, North Macedonia. The only difference back then was that those protesters were silently backed by the then opposition New Democracy party, which also opposed the name change deal. | 
