The neo-fascist party Golden Dawn is struggling to find candidates to fill its electoral lists in light of the snap elections to be held on the 25th of January. According to sources, there is a significant unwillingness among supporters and officials of the group to seek election under the party’s ticket. As a result the party has yet to finalize its lists of candidates.
‘My wife won’t allow me,’ and ‘I don’t have the funds to support an election campaign’ are some of the excuses put forward by Golden Dawn members when asked to represent the group as candidates for parliament in the electoral showdown.
These pretexts conceal concern on the part of new prospective candidates that they too may ultimately find themselves jailed as leading members of the group which prosecutors say amounts to a criminal organization. Numerous high ranking members of Golden Dawn including the party’s leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, have been remanded in custody pending their trial on charges of running and participating in a criminal group that conducted systematic campaigns of violent attacks and lawlessness. Others are unwilling to publicly support many of the more extreme positions of the party.
The situation for Golden Dawn is made more difficult by the months-long imprisonment of Michaloliakos, who as the undisputed leader, was long the glue holding the party together, as well as its chief ‘head-hunter’ recruiting individuals to bolster Golden Dawn’s strength and support.
According to sources that role, as well as directing the party’s pre-election preparations, have fallen to Artemis Mattheopoulos, Michaloliakos’s son in-law, and Ilias Panagiotaros a high ranking MP with the party who was also imprisoned but subsequently given conditional release.
Despite the difficulties, Golden Dawn officials insist that the party remains unbowed and highly motivated. They also predict a strong showing by the party in the elections with the party capturing 11-12% of the vote. However, according to recent surveys the party is polling at about 5-6% although it may still win third place in the election behind New Democracy and SYRIZA.
At the same time it is expected that Golden Dawn will be supported by other far-right wing European parties (in England, Belgium and Italy – in France the National Front under Marie Le Pen has rejected cooperating with Golden Dawn). They will seek to ramp up the pressure on the Greek government, arguing – like their Greek counterparts – that the trial of Golden Dawn MPs is politically motivated.
The crux of the issue is that, despite the brutal murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September of 2013 and the subsequent slew of revelations of the neo-Nazi nature and behaviour of the organization, Golden Dawn will continue to employ the same extreme rhetoric in the run up to these elections as it has done in the past.
Golden Dawn’s parliamentarians made that much clear themselves following the third and final parliamentary vote to elect a new president of the republic. Following the roll call vote which triggered the snap elections when parliament failed to elect a new head of state, the leadership of Golden Dawn began cursing and swearing at the government’s representatives.
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