The frightening popularity of Golden Dawn's anti-Semitism in Greece [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

In the cradle of democracy, next week’s elections are not looking good — for Greeks, European unity or NATO..

In local elections held Sunday, 16% of Athenians voted for Ilias Kasidiaris, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn’s candidate for mayor of Athens. Kasidiaris, who sports swastika tattoos and once read from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on the floor of Parliament, did even better in the neighborhood where Plato founded his Academy, winning 1 in 5 votes there, three times what the party won in 2012.

“The message of the citizens will be even more fierce in the [European Parliament] elections,” Kasidiaris said in an ominous “victory statement.”

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While Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik party and other far-right parties are running strong across Europe, they can’t win a majority anywhere — yet. So it would be tempting to dismiss Golden Dawn’s popularity as a protest against the painful cutbacks imposed as a condition of Greece’s financial bailout. It would also be reassuring to view the party’s feisty pushback against government prosecution as a legal oddity that will naturally correct itself.

But that would underestimate the malevolence of Golden Dawn. Like other neo-fascist parties, it can make hateful vitriol against Jews, gays, Roma, socialists, migrants and even Brussels bureaucrats seem acceptable, if only by dint of making it commonplace. But Golden Dawn puts muscle behind its menace. Its leaders deny organizing a terror campaign against migrants, but there are hundreds of reports that migrants as well as Greeks of color have been beaten, tortured, mutilated and killed. Prosecutions have been rare, convictions even rarer.

more: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-greece-elections-neo-nazi-golden-dawn-20140522-story.html