“Every day we try above all to save people at sea,” Vassilis Milathianakis, Symi’s coastguard chief, said this week on the patrol boat as it hummed through the waters beyond the natural harbor that’s the heart of the island. “There are so many incidents, very often two or three a day.”
The drama on Symi -- where an Iraqi teenager was killed last month during an exchange of gunfire between refugee traffickers and authorities -- underlines how Greece again is the focal point of a crisis that’s threatening to divide Europe just weeks after the country won another aid package to keep it in the euro following a nail-biting political standoff.
With their place in the single currency at least secure for now, Greeks will vote this weekend in the country’s second election in eight months. They will choose a government that can expect no honeymoon at home as the economy sinks, or abroad as European leaders struggle to maintain support for emergency proposals to accept at least 120,000 asylum seekers.
“It may complicate considerably the new government’s efforts to revive the Greek economy if Europe fails to agree on substantial burden-sharing and support for frontline states,” said Thanos Dokos, director-general of the Athens-based Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. “It may also boost the far right’s long-term political fortunes.”
Polls show the Sept. 20 ballot is too close to call with Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras neck and neck with the New Democracy party he unseated in January. The anti-immigration Golden Dawn, whose insignia resembles a swastika, is projected to retain third place in the election.
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