Why the Rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn Party Is Bad for Europe

In Thermopylae, in the year 480 B.C., King Leonidas of Sparta and hundreds of Greek warriors made history by battling 300,000 invaders who made up the army of Xerxes, the Persian King of Kings. A bronze statue of Leonidas towers there now, and on a late August day in the year 2012, about 800 people crowded around it. Many were unsmiling men in army fatigues and black T-shirts printed with a meandros, an ancient Greek symbol that happens to resemble a swastika. Some had shaved heads and pork-chop sideburns. “Greece belongs to the Greeks!” the men in black chanted as they marched, giving Nazi-style salutes and waving giant Greek flags as ominous orchestral music blared. They flanked the statue, lit flares and yelled, “Blood! Honor! Golden Dawn!”

Cheers issued from the crowd, which included bleached-blond grandmothers in Black Sabbath T-shirts, young couples with babies and a priest carrying olive wreaths. “Traitors and thieves are everywhere!” screamed the party’s leader, a mathematician and former army-reserve commando named Nikos Michaloliakos, 54. He accused politicians of plundering the country and allowing a flood of illegal immigrants from Africa and South Asia to “pollute” Greece. “We are being invaded, and we must clean our country of them!” he declared. “No more Hassan, Mohammad, Ali!”

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That paranoid vision isn’t coming from a fringe party. More potent than fascist and ultra-nationalist groups that have begun to thrive elsewhere on the continent, Golden Dawn has manipulated a weak Greek state and disastrous austerity management by European bureaucrats to become, according to recent polls, the third most popular political party in the country — a noxious omen for the euro zone and a worrying challenge and counterpoint to the very idea of the E.U. itself, which received this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Healthy democracies usually know how to blunt the appeal of such obvious fascism. But the birthplace of democracy hasn’t been healthy for a while — and it has been hobbled by an economic crisis that won’t lift (if the optimists are right) till well into the next decade. Three years ago, Greeks ignored Golden Dawn, seeing its members as neo-Nazi thugs waging war against migrants and giving it a miserable 0.29% of the vote. This year, however, Golden Dawn — rebranded as an anti-austerity party — won nearly 7% and secured 18 of the 300 seats in Parliament. Its ascent has continued in opinion surveys despite its parliamentary deputies’ being filmed attacking immigrant vendors and demanding that all non-Greek children be kicked out of day-care centers and hospitals. As the cash-strapped government struggles to offer its citizens basic services, Golden Dawn has set up parastate organizations to police the streets, donate to Greek-only blood banks and help unemployed Greeks find jobs. The party has also promised to cancel household debt for the unemployed and low-wage earners. “Soon we’ll be running this country,” says Ilias Panagiotaros, a beefy 38-year-old army-supply-shop owner who is now a Golden Dawn parliamentary deputy representing Athens. “The people love us.”

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Golden Dawn draws much of that love from fear. Greece is now the main entry point for at least 80% of the E.U.’s un-documented migrants. Frontex, the E.U. border-patrolling agency, estimates that 57,000 illegal immigrants slipped into Greece last year and more than 100,000 entered in 2010. Many travel through Turkey, often via a land border that Golden Dawn wants to plant with land mines. Some seek asylum, and because of E.U. rules, those who want to apply for refugee status must do so in their country of entry — in this case, Greece — which often takes years to review the applications. As Europe turns a blind eye to the immigration crisis, many impoverished foreigners find themselves trapped in an economically crippled country that can’t sustain them.

Some Greeks no longer want to be hospitable. In the past year, gangs of vigilantes, many sporting Golden Dawn’s black shirts, have beaten and stabbed hundreds of migrants, according to human-rights groups. In June a number of them broke into the Piraeus home of Abouzeid Mubarak, 28, an Egyptian fisherman, bashing him with iron rods until he fell into a coma. “It was a hate that was inhuman,” says Mubarak, who is still recovering.

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A Greek Phobia
Greece is reclaiming a word it invented: xenophobia. This summer, the government’s Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias, from the conservative New Democracy party, ordered a sweep operation called Xenios Zeus — named, without irony, after the god of hospitality. It’s now common to see police line up immigrants from South Asia and Africa in public squares and along streets in central Athens. Those without legal-residency permits are arrested and sent to detention centers to be deported. Police claim they have detained nearly 42,000 people since August, though only about 3,400 were arrested for not having residency papers. Dendias defended the crackdown, which was strongly denounced by human-rights groups, by comparing undocumented migrants to the Dorian invaders who purportedly brought down the Mycenaeans in 1100 B.C.

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Michaloliakos certainly likes the invasion metaphor. The small, chubby man with Brezhnev eyebrows and a perpetual scowl is a lifelong devotee of the most toxic strain of ultra-nationalism. He was an early supporter of Konstantinos Plevris, a godfather of Greek neofascist politics who’s best known for his deeply anti-Semitic book Jews: The Whole Truth, in which he praises Hitler and calls for the extermination of Jews. Michaloliakos also supported the colonels who led the 1967-74 military junta and whom many Greeks despise. As a young man, Michaloliakos was arrested for attacking journalists and carrying guns and explosives; the second offense earned him a year in prison in 1979 and a dishonorable discharge from the army.

In prison he laid the foundation for the movement he would establish in 1985. In its early days, Golden Dawn was so attached to ancient Greek symbolism that its members did not discourage worship of the 12 Olympian gods. (The party now professes to support the Greek Orthodox Church.) By the 1990s, Golden Dawn was attacking leftists and anarchists in an attempt to tap into buried anger about Greece’s 1946-49 civil war. By the late 2000s, as more non-white immigrants went to Greece, the party turned on them. As crime increased in central Athens and Greeks grew more fearful of immigrants, the party began to rebrand itself as a patriotic citizen-protection force that would escort old ladies to the bank so they could avoid muggings when they withdrew their pensions. Amid the debt crisis, as austerity measures stalled the country’s economy, cutting people’s income by up to 50%, the party exploited the ire toward the political elite. Before parliamentary elections this year, Golden Dawn neatly folded the anger about undocumented immigrants and corrupt politicians into one brute slogan: “So we can rid this land of filth.”

So far, the Golden Dawn deputies haven’t brawled inside Parliament, but they haven’t hesitated to take it outside. Ilias Kasidiaris, 31, the party’s spokesman, drew international attention in June for slapping a female Communist Party deputy on live TV. More recently, two other parliamentary deputies — Giorgos Germenis, the bassist of a black-metal band, and Costas Barbarousis, a longhaired electrician — were filmed smashing the stands of immigrant vendors in two provincial cities. (Parliament voted to lift their immunity so the two can be charged for the attacks.) Meanwhile, on Oct. 11, Panagiotaros, the Athenian MP, was filmed ranting obscenities during a protest outside a production of Corpus Christi, Terrence McNally’s play about a gay Jesus that the Greek Orthodox Church has deemed blasphemous. “Wrap it up, you little f——!” Panagiotaros is heard screaming to theatergoers. “You little whore, your time is up! You f—ing Albanian a——!”

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The Secret Formula
The key to golden dawn’s rise has been its populism. In late July a small crowd of unemployed Greeks lined up in the main town square in the southern city of Corinth. It was evening, and they were waiting for free packages of rice, pasta, olive oil and potatoes being handed out by 30 burly men in army fatigues and black T-shirts, some with the telltale meandros. Before receiving the food, those in line had to show the men their Greek identity cards to prove their ethnicity. Then they were directed to foldout tables, where more black-clad men, as well as a few women, wrote down names, addresses and ID-card numbers in a membership roster. Anastasia Stergiopoulou, 32, walked away with four bags of free groceries. “The other politicians take things away from me,” says Stergiopoulou, who lost her job as a secretary for an agricultural cooperative three years ago. “But Golden Dawn gives me food today, and tomorrow they will find me a job.” She proudly says she was one of more than 425,000 Greeks (out of a turnout of 6.2 million) who voted for Golden Dawn in the June 17 parliamentary elections.

Corinth is the main city in Corinthia, a conservative district in the Peloponnese that’s anchored by fertile vineyards and a Motor Oil refinery. It also has the highest unemployment rate in the Peloponnese: 17.2%, nearly double the rate at the start of the debt crisis three years ago. Golden Dawn received 10% of the vote there in June, its second best showing in Greece.

The party’s MP in Corinth is Stathis Boukouras, 39, a baker who owns a fast-food café. He has roots in Corinthia but grew up in the western Athens suburb of Peristeri. Boukouras is a high school dropout, having left at 16 to run the family bakery in Peristeri after his father was stricken with cancer. As a young voter, he supported PASOK, the center-left party that dominated Greek politics in the past 30 years and whose founder, Harvard-educated economist Andreas Papandreou, connected deeply with a working class that had long been shut out of the political system. But by 1998, Boukouras says he had grown angry at the corruption and lack of “true Hellenic” patriotism in PASOK and New Democracy.

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And so in 2000 he voted for Proti Grammi (Front Line), a far-right nationalist party, and a decade later joined Golden Dawn. He admired the party’s worship of ancient Greek heroes and its flare-lit marches to stake claims on Imia, the uninhabited islets on a disputed maritime border with Turkey. “I am disgusted with modern Greeks, who have forgotten traditions and don’t know who they are,” he says. “Ever since I became part of Golden Dawn, I have become a true Greek.”

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Boukouras is wiry and energetic and has the gait of a street fighter. He rarely dresses up, favoring the black T-shirt and fatigues worn by Golden Dawn diehards. He likes visiting the local hospital, which he says is badly run because of corrupt politicians and austerity wreaked by “the occupiers’ memorandum,” referring to the terms of the bailout-loan agreement by the country’s troika of lenders: the E.U., the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. During a visit to the hospital in August, Boukouras gave blood that he wanted to be designated for Greeks only (the hospital refused) and glared at an Albanian teenager who wanted to see a doctor for stomach pains. “Why is he here, milking free health care for Greeks?” Boukouras said loudly. Then Sotiria Christodoulou, 56, who was there for a checkup, spotted Boukouras. “My boy, you’re here looking out for us!” Christodoulou cooed, trying to kiss Boukouras’ hand. “The media only report lies about Golden Dawn,” she said, turning to me. “They are nice family men. They don’t hurt anyone.” Boukouras grinned.

Later, as he ate souvlaki on his terrace with his wife, he showed me photos on his digital camera from a summer camp where Golden Dawn members learned “survival techniques,” often with weapons. The party anthem, a martial ode to Hellenism, is the ringtone on his phone. It rang often, usually with people who want money or jobs or someone to “sweep” immigrants out of a neighborhood. On the last count, Boukouras is happy to oblige. “Until 2002, I employed Pakistanis at my bakery in Athens,” he says. “I hadn’t realized then the terrible things these people who enter illegally do to my country … I fired them, and now I only hire Greeks.”

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Boukouras says he’s never physically attacked an immigrant, but he blames them for a rise in crime in Corinth, categorizing them all with this statement: “They steal from us, they rape us, and they kill us.” Corinth police data doesn’t support his claims. Though robberies have quadrupled and burglaries nearly tripled since 2009, a Corinth police spokesman says most of the perpetrators are Greeks and Albanians who have legal-residency papers. Rapes and murders are extremely rare and have not increased, he added.

Until recently, many of the undocumented immigrants in the area worked on grape harvests and squatted in the abandoned railcars in the old train station. From there, it’s a short walk to the port where the cargo ships dock before sailing for Italy. This August, when Boukouras and his head of security, a bearded winemaker named Kostas Tzas, 37, stopped by the station, skinny young men from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Algeria were washing their jeans in barrels filled with dirty water. “What the hell are they doing here?” Boukouras said, shaking his head. “There’s no work here. Don’t they understand something so simple?” When I walked toward the men, all of whom were smiling, Tzas tried to stop me. “They’re very dangerous,” he said. “They will kill you.”

Golden Dawn claims that all immigrants to Greece are illegal, but it’s especially concerned about those who are not Caucasian. It is not shy about its white-supremacist beliefs. Its manifesto says it wants to create a Greece that acknowledges “the spiritual, ethnic and racial inequality of humans.” Boukouras, like other Golden Dawn members, strongly rejects the neo-Nazi label, though he does note that “history has not judged Adolf Hitler fairly yet.” He believes the South Asian and African immigrants “will pollute the Greek race.” He doesn’t, however, believe there’s a problem with white, Christian immigrants, like Tzas’ Russian wife. “Pakistanis should stay in Pakistan, Indians in India and Somalis in Somalia,” Boukouras says. “These ethnicities have offered nothing to humankind.”

The sentiment is in contrast with Greece’s inspiring history of struggling against fascism and standing up for minorities — including heroic examples from World War II and the postwar struggle between right and left. “The Greeks who despise Golden Dawn far outnumber the Greeks who support them,” says Theodoris Vassilakopoulos, an anti-racism activist in Corinth. “But these are also extremely dangerous times. The state is crumbling, no one has money, and the Europeans have spent two years humiliating us as lazy thieves. Greeks are desperate for heroes, and some are looking in the darkest places for them.” With the unease over the economy, he says, “it’s easy to point to a brown-skinned immigrant who will work for less than a Greek and say that an immigrant is stealing jobs. It’s harder to blame the European bankers, who have had a much bigger hand in worsening the debt crisis, because a banker is faceless.”

“This Is Not Greece”
In Thermopylae that hot august night, the angry men in black chanting “Foreigners out of Greece!” anointed themselves as modern-day Spartans who would drive out the latest “barbarians.” “The millions of illegal immigrants in Greece are the direct descendants of Xerxes!” declared Golden Dawn spokesman Kasidiaris as the crowd applauded. He and Michaloliakos railed against more enemies, including Europeans, Americans, Jews, Muslims, leftists and journalists.

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Orange-red flares lit the darkening sky. I sat in a nearby meadow next to a skinny little girl with long brown braids and an anxious middle-aged man talking on his cell phone. They were tourists who had come to pay homage to Leonidas but did not expect to hear Kasidiaris ranting and blaming “those who work for the Jews” for the country’s financial crisis. The girl chewed on sunflower seeds and sang a nursery rhyme about the moon. The man on his cell phone scrunched his face in pain. “Yes, I’m here,” he shouted into the receiver, over the chants of “Blood! Honor! Golden Dawn!” “I’m here, but this is not Greece. Dear God, this is not Greece.”

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