ATHENS – Despite a rise in violence making politicians and business leaders potential targets of anarchists and anti-establishment groups, some 700 police who have been guarding buildings and senior officials will be transferred to neighborhood patrols.

They will be joined by another 100 from other police bureaus and services, said Kathimerini, with major rival New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis asking for the number of those guarding his party’s headquarters, which has been assaulted before, to bve reduced by 20 percent.

The VIP bodyguards have also been assigned to to judges and other top officials who anarchist and terrorist groups said are in their crosshairs. Former interim Premier Lucas Papademos was wounded in May of 2017 when a package bomb went off in his car, followed by warnings that other officials would be next.

The additional police being put on the streets came after rival parties accused the ruling Radical Left SYRIZA, which is riddled with anarchist and terrorist sympathizers, of being soft on crime and using a law it passed to let violent criminals out of jail.