Greece: Communists on the frontline against evictions, defending elderly people's homes

In Greece, workers, communists and trade unions are demonstrating that organized solidarity can stand in the way of banks, real estate funds and the capitalist machinery of evictions. In two separate cases within days, mass mobilizations  in Thessaloniki prevented elderly people from being thrown out of their homes, exposing the brutality of a system that places capitalist profits above human dignity.

Greece: People's solidarity stops seizure of pensioner’s home by the banks

Protest in Athens in support of pensioner Ioanna Kolovou (Right)

On Monday, November 21, at 5.30 in the morning a bailiff with police forces broke into the house of an elderly woman, a low pensioner in Athens, Greece, in order to evict her and her home to be given to a fund that had bought her debt.

The elderly woman, Ioanna Kolovou, mother of a person with special needs, had a debt from credit cards of 15.000€, which, when she lost her husband, she could not afford its payment and asked for a settlement of the debt. While the bank was delaying the procedures the interests were growing and doubled the debt with the Bank going forward to auctioning her home to a Fund (called "vultures" for taking people’s homes).