Golden Dawn may be finished but the far-right lives on in Greece

After five years, around 450 sessions and more than 200 witnesses, the Court of Appeal in Athens this week finally gave its verdict on the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn: guilty as charged.  

The long-awaited ruling that the far-right group is a criminal organisation, not a legitimate political entity, as well as the conviction of a number of its members of murder, attempted murder and bodily harm should be the final nail in the movement’s coffin. Sentencing will be announced in the coming days.

Once the third-largest party in Greece, attracting nearly half a million votes at its peak in 2012, its ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant, antisemitic platform failed to win any seats in last year’s election and the party has since been plagued by in-fighting and desertions. On Wednesday, as nearly 20,000 anti-fascist protesters gathered to celebrate the court’s decision, Golden Dawn’s leadership was conspicuously silent.

Yet this does not mean the far-right in Greece is dead. Other virulently nativist parties are already springing up to fill the gap left by Golden Dawn, hostility towards migrants remains dangerously high, and just last week there was an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish cemetery in Athens.

“Fascist ideas have spread all over the right-wing part of Greek society,” said Thassos (not his real name), a middle-aged participant at Wednesday’s protest. “Politics now is much more racist and homophobic and so on than it used to be.”  

It’s a reality even prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who heads up the conservative New Democracy party, acknowledged, saying that although the verdict “closes a traumatic cycle” in the country's history, “the trial of racism, intolerance and violence in society remains ongoing”.

Yet for many, New Democracy is among those who fan the same xenophobic sentiments that helped propel Golden Dawn to power. “Politicians here often use anti-immigrant language and take anti-immigrant measures,” said Eva Cosse, Greece researcher at Human Rights Watch. “When leaders make inflammatory remarks about refugees and NGOs, this sends the wrong message.”

Anti-immigrant feeling is widespread in Greece, an overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox country that sits at the EU’s border and sees hundreds of people – mainly Afghans and Syrians – arriving every month, according to UNHCR. It currently hosts 120,000 registered refugees and migrants, nearly a quarter of whom live in squalid conditions in island camps near Turkey.  

Violence towards them is not uncommon. Last year, local NGO Racist Violence Recording Network documented 100 incidents, half of which targeted migrants and refugees or those protecting them. In 2018, for example, Afghan refugees peacefully protesting Lesbos’s overcrowded facilities were attacked by far-right extremists who reportedly threw bottles and shouted, “Burn them alive” and “Throw them in the sea”. Far-right vigilante groups, often working alongside the police, have been found patrolling the borders.

“I’m very worried because I see things happening now that remind me of what happened when Golden Dawn was flourishing,” said HRW’s Cosse. She pointed to the government’s ongoing closure of buildings housing migrants, which is causing a rise in homelessness that some media outlets are linking to increased crime. Without a shift in mainstream rhetoric about migration, she added, “there’s a risk the far-right will find ground again”.

Some are already succeeding. Set up in 2016, Greek Solution is not a neo-Nazi party but does share many of Golden Dawn’s ultra-nationalist views. Its leader, telemarketer-turned-MP Kyriakos Velopoulos, has suggested fortifying the Turkish border with landmines and electric fences, openly admires Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and wants to send illegal immigrants awaiting deportation to uninhabited islands. The party won 10 seats at its first election last year.

“The voters choosing Greek Solution are the same ones who voted for Golden Dawn,” explained Vasiliki Tsagkroni, an assistant professor at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science. “Are they all fascists or neo-Nazis? No. But there is definitely a part of the electorate that identifies with far-right politics. Greek Solution embodies neoliberal, conservative, anti-migrant, Orthodox values that many voters can identify with.”

Another party, Greeks for the Fatherland, was set up this year by former Golden Dawn-spokesperson and MP Ilias Kasidiaris – who infamously assaulted two female opposition politicians on live TV – with the slogan “Greece belongs to the Greeks”. By August it had apparently attracted 20,000 members. The party’s future depends on what sentence Kasidiaris now receives, but such views clearly have an audience.

“The issues that prompted people to vote for Golden Dawn are still there – there is still a lot of prejudice and very bad handling of integrating migrants – so the potential for another far-right party is still there,” said Maik Fielitz, a specialist in Greek extremism at the London-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. “As long as migration is a central part of political discourse, there will always be people from the far-right trying to make this an issue of culture and race.”

Most agree, however, that it would be difficult for another party to replicate Golden Dawn. The group was founded in the 1980s but only garnered enough support to enter parliament amid explosive anti-establishment anger triggered by a brutal debt crisis and swingeing austerity measures imposed by the European troika. With the economy more or less recovered, that fury has dissipated and the bulk of Golden Dawn’s more opportunistic and issues-driven voters have switched to other parties.  

Yet a question mark remains over what happens to its small hardcore of neo-Nazi ideologues. As the trial against Golden Dawn dragged on, extreme-right militant organizations such as AME-Combat18, Apella and Krypteria took up its cause, involved in incidents such as an arson attack on an Afghan community centre and anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish sites.

“There is a threat that the neo-Nazis that were with Golden Dawn now go more extreme,” said Fielitz. “If their avenues of legal expression are closing, violence could be one means they pursue.”

Just earlier this month, a Jewish cemetery in Athens was vandalised with the Nazi slogan “Juden raus” (“Jews out”) and symbols similar to Golden Dawn’s version of the swastika. Yet the overwhelming condemnation of the incident from across the political spectrum is a sign things are improving, said David Saltiel, president of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece. “I think this shows Greeks are starting to understand what neo-Nazism really means.”

For him, this week’s ruling is a huge victory against the far-right. “There is no other organisation like Golden Dawn – the other parties are so small that I think this is the end of neo-Nazism in Greece,” he said. “The government and the public will not fall in the same trap again. We know more now.”