Why did Golden Dawn's neo-Nazi leaders get away with it for so long?
In the end, the leader of a party whose supporters threatened “civil war” and to turn the skins of immigrants into lampshades could not even bring himself to face judgment in person. Nikolaos Michaloliakos, like other senior members of Golden Dawn, was absent from court in Athens yesterday as a judge read out a series of damning verdicts on the neo-Nazi party he leads. Golden Dawn, which shot to prominence amid Europe’s economic crisis a decade ago, and is responsible for a years-long campaign of violence and intimidation against immigrants, LGBTQ communities and political opponents, was found to be a criminal organisation.
Seven of the party’s former MPs, including Michaloliakos, have been found guilty of directing the organisation, while a range of members are guilty of crimes including murder, attempted murder and possession of weapons. Some now face sentences of up to 15 years in prison. It is the culmination of a lengthy court process that some campaigners have called the largest trial of Nazis since Nuremberg, triggered by the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, an antifascist Greek rapper, in 2013 – at a time when the party was Greece’s third-largest political force.
The trial, which lasted more than five years, has already effectively stopped Golden Dawn from operating. The verdict now offers Greece the chance to close a painful chapter in its recent history. Born of the fascist milieu surrounding the far-right military dictatorship that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974, Golden Dawn was given its greatest opportunity by the global financial crash of 2008. As Greece struggled from a profound economic slump, and public anger grew at the remedy insisted on by the European Union – austerity – the party attracted unprecedented support.
It chose familiar targets to blame for Greece’s predicament: immigrants and refugees, out-of-touch politicians and a global banking elite. But this far-right rhetoric was backed up by a paramilitary-style organisation that operated in parallel to the political party, and a cult-like devotion to Nazi beliefs. As Golden Dawn grew, assault squads of uniformed members, sometimes armed, sought to take over neighbourhoods in Greek towns and cities by attacking and intimidating parts of the local population. Much of the violence was carried out openly – yet for years it went unpunished.
Ahead of the verdict, political leaders from left and right struck a conciliatory tone. “Greece suffered as few countries from nazism,” wrote the centre-right prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in a newspaper, referring to the country’s devastating occupation by Germany during the second world war. “There is no place in our country for [its] mimics and followers.” But reconciliation requires truth, and the trial raises a series of questions that must still be answered.
Why, above all, was Golden Dawn allowed to operate unhindered for so long? The party is associated with a string of serious assaults going back to the 1990s, yet for years Greece’s political class seemed reluctant to enforce the law: as Kostis Papaioannou, a human rights activist involved in monitoring the trial, told me, “a long tradition of impunity for racist attacks” allowed Golden Dawn to “coexist” with Greece. There have been allegations that some police officers sympathised with Golden Dawn: wiretap evidence heard in court revealed direct contact between Golden Dawn members and several police officials. Will these connections now be fully examined?
There are broader political questions, too. Did New Democracy, the governing party at the time of Golden Dawn’s electoral success – and in government again today – find it useful to have a far-right party acting as a counterweight to its leftwing challenger Syriza, as it tried to force through unpopular austerity measures? Why did EU policymakers and international lenders persist with such rigid conditions attached to Greece’s bailout, when it was evident they were tearing apart the social fabric of the country? Greek society must surely face an uncomfortable question, too, namely why it took the murder of a Greek man – Pavlos Fyssas – to trigger a decisive backlash against Golden Dawn, when a well-documented string of attacks on immigrants failed to have the same effect.
Such questions matter – and not just for Greece. It would be easy to write Golden Dawn off as an aberration, a throwback to the darkest moments of the 20th century which is best regarded merely as a matter of criminal justice. But far-right violence is in many ways a symptom of a problem, not its cause – and the conditions that gave birth to it are found elsewhere in the world today. Not all far-right nationalists secretly worship Hitler, and not all of them orchestrate street violence in the way that Golden Dawn did. But the farright worldview is inherently violent: it offers a single explanation for social discontent, which is that the nation has become polluted by the wrong kind of people, and the solution lies in their removal. Some seek to use this violence as a route to power; others talk their way into power so they can make their violence legal.
All too often, there is a temptation to deny this threat of violence; to explain it away as an ordinary, even reasonable part of politics. Even in a case as extreme as Golden Dawn, people have tried it: in July 2013, two months before the murder of Fyssas, the Spectator columnist Taki Theodoracopulos wrote that the party’s members were “good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks” who were angry at immigration and political correctness.
Perhaps the most important story to be told about the trial is not what it revealed about the defendants, but about the people who fought back. Without the human rights activists and investigative journalists who painstakingly documented racist violence, the anti-fascist activists who organised mass protests, the volunteer legal teams who brought private prosecutions, and the victims and witnesses who gave evidence in court, this verdict would not have been reached. Racism, discrimination and far-right nationalism have not disappeared from Greece – and nor have they elsewhere – but a movement that sought to organise these into the most appalling violence has been shattered.
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, and Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right