Anti-austerity movement

Police officers shouted slogans during an anti-austerity rally by members of the force in front of the White Tower in Thessaloniki on Friday - a day before the opening of the annual Thessaloniki International Fair by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

The demonstration was attended by police, firefighters and port authority officials from all over Greece.

An Athens court has exonerated 18 police officers accused by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras when he was still in the opposition of using excessive force during an anti-austerity protest in the summer of 2011.

Greek pensioners are reflected in a shop window mirror as they take part in an anti-austerity rally in central Athens, Tuesday. An estimated two thousand pensioners took part in a rally to oppose government cuts to their pensions. [Yannis Kolesidis/EPA] 

Greek politicians from across the spectrum on Saturday paid their respects to the three bank employees who died when protesters firebombed a branch of Marfin bank in central Athens eight years ago during an anti-austerity protest at the onset of Greece's financial crisis.

Alexis Tsipras grew into a political force inside the anti-memorandum movement and by siding with the so-called Indignant anti-austerity protesters who demonstrated in Syntagma Square in 2011. His vocal champions at the time are the same people who are putting the prime minister through the wringer today because of his position on the name talks with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Concerns are increasing about the apparent impunity with which self-styled anarchists and other anti-establishment activists are operating following a fresh spate of incidents on Thursday, one involving the increasingly active Rouvikonas (Rubicon) group.

Members of the Communist Party-affiliated union PAME vandalized the entrance to the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) in central Athens with red paint early on Tuesday.

The PAME members targeted SEV's offices during an anti-austerity protest.

In a statement, PAME blamed Greek industrialists for repeated cuts to salaries and compromising workers' rights over the years.

Some 50 to 60 members of the union representing Greece's public hospital workers, POEDIN, on Thursday barged into the Health Ministry and made it to the ministry's amphitheater, where Health Minister Andreas Xanthos and his alternate, Pavlos Polakis, were meeting with other unionists.

The POE-OTA union representing local authority workers is to stage a demonstration on Friday morning outside the capital's main court complex in solidarity with 35 of its members who are to face trial for their part in an anti-austerity protest in 2011.

Anti-establishment activists belonging to the groups Libertarian Initiative of Thessaloniki and Rouvikonas entered the Ministry of Macedonia-Thrace on Tuesday morning to protest Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's upcoming appearance at the northern port city's annual trade fair.