Wednesday’s landmark guilty verdict against Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party draws a line under the country’s violent ultra-nationalist surge in the aftermath of its sovereign banking and debt crises. In a case that has been compared to the Nuremberg trials to investigate the Nazi Holocaust, a three- member tribunal ruled that while the party’s several former Members of Parliament, including the founder Nikolaos Michaloliakos, ran a criminal organisation, others were culpable of involvement in various brutalities.
Among the guilty is a Golden Dawn supporter who murdered a hip-hop singer in September 2013, those who attacked trade union members affiliated to the Communist Party the same year and hooligans who assaulted Egyptian fishermen in 2012. In all, 68 defendants and 200 witnesses were involved in four cases in a trial that lasted five years. Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has hailed the verdict as a victory for democracy in the country.
Mr. Michaloliakos, a former special forces commando in the Greek Army, launched the neo-Nazi party in the 1980s. A known Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler, he has described Golden Dawn as a party of patriotic nationalists. By the time of Mr. Michaloliakos’s 2010 election to the Athens city council, his black-clad party cadres, the Swasthika-like party emblem and torch-lit parades had gained notoriety for taunting and even physically targeting trade union activists and migrant workers in the capital’s working class suburbs.
Their hate-mongering was on vivid display even as Greek society was convulsed by crippling austerity and high unemployment. The Mayor of Athens who tried to block the party’s food distribution and blood bank programmes exclusively for native Greeks was punched by one of the MPs. Another slapped a woman legislator in the house, and a third attacked a female panellist in a television show. When the government was debating a new anti-racism law, Golden Dawn countered the proposal with a draft Bill to ban racism against the Greeks.
The party was catapulted into the national Parliament in 2012, when it polled 7% of the vote and garnered 18 seats to emerge the third largest in the 300-strong legislature. Its meteoric rise from a few thousand ballots in the previous elections was a direct consequence of the erosion of public trust in mainstream politics, three decades after the end of military dictatorship in Greece. The severe economic strictures that Athens submitted to in return for the EU’s three bailout packages served as a fertile ground for the party to peddle its polarising propaganda, pitting the poor and the pensioners against the influx of immigrants.
Murder of a musician
The September 2013 murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a highly popular hip-hop musician and anti-racism campaigner, marked the brutal climax of Golden Dawn’s violent track record. Even as the incident drew nationwide outrage and demands for the party to be outlawed, its infiltration into the police machinery forced the investigation into the crime to be transferred to the anti-terror unit. The subsequent months saw a number of Golden Dawn MPs being stripped of their parliamentary immunity from prosecution to face charges of involvement in racial attacks and belonging to a criminal group. The party’s participation in the 2014 European parliamentary elections was, however, cleared by the Supreme Court since the charges were yet to be proved.
The dip in poll ratings following the murder of Fyssas was but short-lived. In the January 2015 election, Golden Dawn retained almost all of its seats. Significantly, the party failed in last year’s polls to secure the minimum 3% vote threshold to gain entry into the legislature. Notwithstanding these reverses and Wednesday’s ruling, it would be premature to downplay the potency of the party. It is the raison d’etre of the far-right anywhere to tap into popular disaffection with the government over the conditions of living and fuel divisions of race, religion, nationality and all other conceivable social cleavages. Europe’s far-right has demonstrated a capacity to mobilise across countries. The singular focus of the judicial trial on holding Golden Dawn accountable for the brutalities, as distinct from the party’s narrow nationalist ideology, to counter the party perhaps holds wider significance.
