The “woke” enemy of the nation
The word “woke” comes from African American vernacular and has been used since the 1930s to describe social awakening to racism and discrimination. Over the decades it became associated with awareness of broader social inequalities — sexism, LGBTQ+ rights — and entered mainstream consciousness through the Black Lives Matter movement and its rallying cry to “stay woke.”
Today, the word is back. But it has been turned inside out. It is now wielded almost as a threat. Something dangerous that must be stopped before it destroys us. From Christos Christou’s “we will stand against efforts to impose the woke LGBTQ agenda” and Afroditi Latinopoulou’s “woke ideology wants to tear down what has kept us united,” to Donald Trump’s “we will end woke ideology” and Marios Pelekanos’s “the woke agenda is trying to demolish our values and ideals.”
But everything the far right brands as “woke” is nothing more than freedoms and rights won through decades of social struggle. In the very Western nations these people hold up as models of civilisation, same-sex marriage is legal. Civil partnerships have been enshrined in law here since 2015. Legal gender recognition is considered a fundamental right across most of Europe, backed by rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. Same-sex adoption has been constitutionally recognised in Greece since 2024 — the country with which these politicians so fervently and constantly seek to identify themselves politically. The same goes for women’s rights that are now taken for granted: from the right to abortion to the right of a woman to have a child alone through a donor, which Cypriot law now provides for.
The deepest irony is this: many of those who present themselves as defenders of children supposedly at risk of being raised in same-sex families are the very people poisoning those children’s minds every single day with fear, hatred, and exclusion. Through television panels, billboards, and slogans on the streets we walk, and even inside schools — the spaces that should be children’s safe havens. “What right did a representative of a far-right party have to visit my school?” asked a sixteen-year-old girl in a speech in Nicosia on the normalisation of the far right and its impact on the coming of age of a new generation. It may be the most important question of all.
What right do they have to shape our children? What right do they have to plaster bigoted billboards across public spaces and present the Christian nuclear family as the only acceptable model of family to pupils who are growing up next to same-sex couples? Who have only one parent? Who have classmates who are immigrants? Who are immigrants themselves? Who practise a different faith, or none? To young people who are growing up — or who ought to be growing up — with the principle that equality, acceptance and respect are not defined or limited by anyone’s agenda?
