Foteini Athanasopoulou was forced to resign her candidacy for vice presidency of Greece’s Food Authority when parliamentarians from the former governing party PASOK and the new “centre” party POTAMI used personal facebook material to publicly expose her as a “conspiracy theorist”.
Mrs. Athanasopoulou is a leading member of ANEL, (Independent Greeks), SYRIZA’s sovereignist coalition partner in the present Greek government. POTAMI would like to see SYRIZA split with its left wing and form a government that would also exclude the “right-wing populist” ANEL and include POTAMI, in a “centre-left” coalition of a type very familiar in Europe and representing what is regarded as “normality”. POTAMI is evidently prepared to hit below the belt to achieve this (probably unachievable) objective and they have many willing helpers in the European Union “mainstream”.
Despite the brief public scandal that ensued from Mrs. Athanasopoulou withdrawing her candidacy, and despite pressing requests from the mainstream media, she did not take her case to them. She went back to her own area (she is a professor at the University of Thessaly) and spoke only to a local television station in the town of Trikala, where her relations with people are personal. This is the interview, with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ4zhb7oI0Q&feature=youtu.be
As a footnote, it might be worth mentioning that a former president of the Food Authority is Nikos Katsaros, one of the earliest activists against the global clandestine aerosol spraying (popularly known as “chemtrails”).
POTAMI was established as a “centre” party, at the initiative of the journalist Stavros Theodorakis. But before moving into politics, Theodorakis had made a programme whose purpose was clearly to intimidate “conspiracy theorists” whose claim is that “they are spraying us”. This included the seven or so parliamentarians who have raised the subject in the Greek parliament.
Here is a relevant extract from this programme, with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaYe64tQyxI
The entire programme is also online, with English subtitles, unfortunately not well synchronized: https://vimeo.com/76750641
There is an examination of the course of POTAMI from the programme against “conspiracy theorists” to the subsequent participation in the European elections and the election of two Europarliamentarians, including Giorgos Grammatikakis, a participant in the programme http://enouranois.eu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/next_step_for_the_movement.pdf It starts on p. 13 of the 19-page text with the words: “And what do the mainstream media in Greece have to say about us?”