Greece election: rise of the far-right

Helena Smith in Athens guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 17.52 BST

Anti-immigration platform finds plenty of supporters with fascist far-right party Chrysi Avgi polling at 5%

A Golden Dawn member holds a flag bearing the party logo at a campaign rally in Athens. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

It is 9 o'clock on a Saturday evening and the stairwell in the apartment block at 50 Deleyiannis is jammed with young men engaging in banter. Most are dressed in black with little or very short hair, some wear black caps emblazoned with the words Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn), almost all ripple with muscles and tattoos.

On the first floor of the three-storey building, the men mingle with women, the vast majority also wearing Chrysi Avgi T-shirts. A giant room, the space is packed. Those who can find a chair sit around tables stacked high with papers listing the names of election candidates Chrysi Avgi will field. The mood is buoyant, even euphoric. "Things are going well, very well," says Alexandros Lyris, a Chrysi Avgi diehard.

Days away from an election that shows all the signs of catapulting the party into parliament, Chrysi Avgi, Greece's unrepentantly neo-Nazi "popular nationalist movement", has much to be euphoric about.

From marginalised pariah, the far-right group's popularity has soared in the midst of the economic crisis. Polls show the extremists poised to gain about 5% of the vote – enough to secure a dozen or more seats in the 300-member house for the first time since the collapse of the rabidly rightwing regime of the Colonels in 1974.

At 50 Deleyiannis, Chrysi Avgi's party headquarters, the walls hold framed pictures of men carrying giant red flags. The logo on the flags, like those on Chyrsi Avgi caps, T-shirts and vests, resembles the swastika. Books on display in the party's first-floor bookstore are thinly veiled diatribes on the power of racial supremacy with titles such as White Power. Neo-Nazi symbols are rife. The cover of yet another tome shows the lead singer of a local heavy metal band delivering a fascist salute.

Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the man who formed the party in 1994, openly backed Greece's military dictatorship, but firmly denies that Chrysi Avgi is full of unreconstructed fascists. Instead, he says, the group is more of an anti-immigration platform, the home of "patriots who want to return Greece to the Greeks". The 235 candidates that the party will field include farmers, shepherds, workers and retired army officers.

"They are simple people who do not come from the antechambers of foreign embassies," says Michaloliakos, who was vaulted into the national consciousness when he won a seat on Athens city council in 2010 and addressed its first session with a Nazi salute. "Nor do they come from the filthy political circles which are to blame for the wretchedness of our homeland!"

Chrysi Avgi's astonishing rise – in October 2009 it captured a mere 0.23% of the vote – mirrors the anger and fear of a nation grappling with falling living standards, spiralling crime and an influx of immigrants who are widely blamed for much of "the rot". Its recruiting ground has been the underclass that emerged after successive rounds of pay and pension cuts, tax increases and belt-tightening. From the grimy suburbs of Athens to cities and towns across Greece, they are the country's new poor. Cadres talk of 10,000 signed-up members and "thousands more supporters and friends".

The party's weekly paper, distributed by well-manicured women – along with clothes and food parcels and "guards" who escort elderly people to ATMs – proudly lists the new citizens' groups multiplying under its stewardship.

"We aren't against Europe, in fact we think we have a lot in common with our partners, but we are opposed to this Europe of bankers and loan sharks," said party member Alexandros Lyris, 26.

"We're also a reaction to all the rot and decay. The situation with immigrants is out of control. Greeks are afraid to walk the streets anymore … well, we say 'foreigners go home' and if you don't like your homeland, 'tough luck'."

With at least a million people, roughly 10% of the Greek population, believed to be migrants, the extremists have capitalised on the issue, proposing that immigrants, whether legal or not, be immediately expelled and the nation's notoriously porous borders landmined against further "invasions". Unprovoked attacks against foreigners have proliferated as neo-Nazi vigilante squads roam the streets.

Chrysi Avgi is not the only fringe group to exploit the power vacuum provided by a dysfunctional state and discredited political elite.

Across town the Independent Greeks, an offshoot of the main conservative party New Democracy, is polling as much as 11% – enough, say analysts, to deny the frontrunner New Democracy a majority.

Virulently anti-German, the party has tapped into the nation's mood by vehemently rejecting the terms of the EU-IMF rescue loans propping up the near-bankrupt Greek economy and demanding that Berlin pay reparations for the crimes of Nazi occupation troops during the second world war.

"The conditions on which we have received these loans are unacceptable," said Terence Quick, the son of a Briton, a former news anchor and the party's deputy leader. "They were passed without a mandate from the Greek people and now we are literally under occupation, at the mercy of loan sharks and bankers directed by [German chancellor] Angela Merkel and her finance minister [Wolfgang] Schäuble."

With polls showing New Democracy and its socialist rival Pasok jointly capturing less than 50% of the vote – parties on the far left are expected to garner around 30% – mainstream forces have found themselves on the defensive and hardening their own stance, not least on the issue of immigration.

The anti-immigration drive intensified this week, with authorities opening the first of dozens of detention camps for migrants on the outskirts of Athens. "They should know that from now on they will not be allowed to roam our country freely," said Michalis Chrysohoidis, the socialist minister in charge of law and order.

The rise of extremists has drawn parallels with Weimar Germany amid fears that Greece is heading for profound political and social unrest because of mounting opposition to the unpopular economic policies.

"All signs are that after the election the governing of Greece will be much more difficult," said Dimitris Keridis, professor of political science at Panteion University in Athens.

"Parties like Chrysi Avgi have become the vehicle to channel anger. Greece is proving that the first stop of popular frustration might be the left, but the final destination is always the far right."

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