Democracy

In July 2025, Greece took a radical, if unsurprising, decision to ban people irregularly arriving on its shores by boat from North Africa from claiming asylum. The government presented the asylum ban as a decisive measure against an increase in arrivals on the southern Greek islands of Crete and Gavdos. The new Greek asylum ban is a textbook breach of EU rules neither unprecedented nor isolated. It comes as a fresh symptom of the deteriorating state of the EU’s Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and of the rule of law that sees governments across the continent openly flout straightforward refugee protection standards, disregard the courts, and get away with it.

The Thessaloniki Social Atlas, a new digital project with the signature of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, was launched with a major public event. This platform, which resembles an open online “encyclopedia” for the urban space and anthropogeography of Thessaloniki, offers - perhaps for the first time - an organized, interdisciplinary and fully documented material, with emphasis on the visual representation of data, addressed to the scientific community, the general public, but also to decision makers and policy makers at the same time.

The national elections of June 2023, as well as the European elections of 2024, recorded the highest abstention rates in the 20-year period 2004-2024. This fact is investigated, in terms of its qualitative characteristics, by the present survey of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Kappa Research leading polling agency, which was conducted between 3-17 July 2024. In this article, you can read some of the key findings, but also find the entire survey in pdf format.

Violence against women is particularly alarming, as one in three women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence. In this article, lawyer Ekaterini Georgiadou provides an unparalleled critical review of the legislative framework for gender-based violence in Greece. She examines the provisions of the Istanbul Convention and the severe concerns reflected in GREVIO's evaluation report about the implementation of the Convention in Greece. Furthermore, she focuses in particular on the newly adopted EU Directive on combating violence against women, which Member States are obliged to transpose into their national law within three years.

The European election brought dissapointment to almost everyone in Athens, except to the far Right and the far Left. Yet, the most striking result was the collapse of the vote for the governing New Democracy – 10% of the registered electorate, one million people, abandoned Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ party in one year. What are the reasons for that? And why did the parties of the opposition not do better? An analysis by Pavlos Eleftheriadis, Professor of Legal Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi and a Senior Research Fellow at Mansfield College Oxford.

The issue of women’s visibility in the media is key to understanding and addressing gender inequality at the social and political levels. Mass media, after all, reach the majority of citizens, contribute in shaping their views and thus affect electoral behaviour. In this article you can read the preliminary findings from the research project "Gender (in)equality in Greek media & politics" (GenderINmediaGR) by the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), with the support of Heinrich Böll Foundation.

At a time of increased environmental, economic and social problems on the planet, the alternative political proposal of the Greens appears to have a broader appeal in the electorate of several Western countries – both at local and national level. However, the same is not the case in Greece, where the political expression of the Green parties remains weak. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a nationwide public opinion survey in November 2021 with a qualitative and quantitative component, in collaboration with Kappa Research.

In one of the first scientific articles to use the data from the 2021 census, Professor of Demography Byron Kotzamanis describes the evolution of the population in Greece since the first post-war period, based on births/deaths and spatial changes. He also analyses the scenarios for how the population will look in 2050, sounds the alarm about irreversible developments and points out the issues on which the state should focus in order to mitigate the economic and social consequences.