Greece’s ‘war on Roma’ is Europe’s new blueprint for discrimination

Mass raids on Roma communities show how Europe is recasting racial discrimination as crime prevention and public order.

Jonathan Lee is a Romani activist from Wales, working at the European Roma Rights Centre.

For the Romani families living in Nea Zoi, an informal neighbourhood near Aspropyrgos, Greece, the pre-dawn hum of surveillance drones has become a regular soundtrack to their lives. By daybreak, K-9 units and tactical police have blocked narrow dirt roads, police in riot gear have formed a perimeter around the neighbourhood, and armed officers are breaking through doors to makeshift homes, all under the banner of “public order”.

Since late 2025, this routine has repeated with terrifying regularity: at least 76 raids in six months, involving 473 officers, targeting 152 Romani communities across Greece. That amounts to more than one raid a week throughout the country. Documented by the European Roma Rights Centre as the most extensive anti-Roma police operation in decades, these actions are presented by Greek politicians as a tactical response to organised crime. But the pattern of police violence represents something more sinister: a strategic convergence of migration control, border security and domestic policing that criminalises Romani life.

In examining the mechanics of the so-called “Operation ENTOS”, meaning “from within”, in the context of other anti-Roma actions in Europe, it becomes clear that Greece is only the sharp edge of a continent-wide shift in policy that treats racialised minorities not as citizens, but as internal threats to be managed, contained and erased. Greece has become the laboratory for this dangerous new experiment in European governance, and Athens is providing the blueprint for a preventive policing model that threatens the fundamental rights of marginalised communities across the entire European Union and beyond.

The language used by authorities is carefully chosen to bypass legal scrutiny. You will not find the word “Roma” in official Greek police briefings regarding Operation ENTOS. Instead, officials speak of “socially homogeneous groups”and “hotspots of illegality”. This bureaucratic euphemism allows the state to sidestep anti-discrimination laws while explicitly targeting specific neighbourhoods. This is not a Greek innovation; it is an increasingly common legislative sleight-of-hand. Just as Slovenia criminalised “illegal gatherings”, a provision wielded almost exclusively against Romani neighbourhoods, and Italy targeted homeless Romani women through its security decree, Greece has done the same on a mass