Friends, good morning!
“Some attitudes that have been cultivated for many years [...] must come to an end,” said Citizen Protection Minister Michael Chrysochoidis yesterday, describing what is happening in parts of central Athens.
And he is right. For many years. In Patissia, Agios Panteleimonas and elsewhere, the minister says, landlords rent flats to foreign nationals, who sublet them to other migrants for €10 to €30 a night. As many as 30 people may be crammed into the same home.
Clearly, this situation must end. Not because these people are foreign nationals, but because it raises issues of legality, safety and hygiene, quite apart from what other residents of the apartment blocks have to endure.
There is just one problem: all of this has been known for years.
In August 2020, the Hellenic Police announced an arrest in Victoria Square for “facilitating the illegal residence of third-country nationals for profit”. The person arrested had sublet a flat, turned it into an “informal hostel” and charged migrants €30 a week or €100 a month. Further cases followed, involving informal hostels, safe houses, people staying illegally, forged travel documents and migrant smuggling.
So the state knew. And it was not “powerless”.
The Migration Code already prohibits renting property to a third-country national who lacks the necessary documents establishing their legal status, and punishes the facilitation of illegal residence more severely when it is done for profit.
If, on the other hand, the tenants are in Greece legally, the questions change, but do not go away. Can a flat effectively operate as a 20- or 30-bed establishment? Are the proceeds from nightly charges of €10 or €30 declared? Is subletting legal? Are tax, health and other requirements being met?
There are laws governing all of this. There are also regulatory authorities, including the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. Now, however, Mr Chrysochoidis is announcing a new provision to ban these rental and subletting arrangements, alongside police operations at the flats in question.
Until now, then, what exactly prevented the state from intervening wherever the law was being broken? And, above all, why now?
New Democracy has been in government since July 2019. The Hellenic Police have demonstrably been aware of the phenomenon since at least 2020. Yet six years later, the problem has suddenly become a matter of urgency.
With one interesting coincidence of timing: elections are approaching, and a sizeable share of the electorate is now looking to parties further to the right than New Democracy.
Immigration, of course, is an issue on which the right has a natural advantage in political competition. And the government has every right to pursue a tougher policy. It also has a duty to enforce the law, protect residents of these areas and prevent the exploitation of people crammed into a flat for a few euros per person.
But when a problem known since 2020 becomes an urgent political issue in the autumn of 2026, one question remains. What changed? The flats or the polls?