At long last Greece is fully free from the fascist Golden Dawn party
EVENTUALLY, BELATEDLY, yet hopefully permanently, Greece is cleaning its house. On 27 April, Ioannis Lagos, an MEP and one of the founders of Golden Dawn, Greece’s neo-Nazi party, was arrested in Brussels. Now he is being extradited back to Greece, where a jail cell awaits.
Golden Dawn (Chrysí Avgí) has been a blight on Greece for years. Though its leaders reject the Nazi label, the group’s swastika-like insignia and the endless Seig Heils its moronic adherents were forever throwing always made this truth plain.
Vertiginous conspiracy theory? Check. Fetid antisemitism? Check. A quasi-fetishist adoration of Hitler? Double check. Golden Dawn had it all: Nazism 101 for the 21st century.
Like all fascist parties, Golden Dawn was also criminal gang. As its leaders roared in parliament, its foot soldiers beat, harassed and sometimes killed immigrants in the streets.
If these thugs didn’t quite have impunity, they had something very close to it, helped, almost certainly, by sympathisers in the Greek police.
Golden Dawn had long skulked in the nether regions of Greek politics, but the 2008 financial crisis made them. People lost their homes, they went hungry and they got angry. They sought answers and Golden Dawn provided them. Foreigners and immigrants were to blame; timeless lies that always find an audience.
In September 2015, it won 17 seats to make it Greece’s third largest party. Most Greeks were horrified. They feared the worst. But thugs always eventually come undone by their own savagery. In 2013, a Golden Dawn mob attacked Pavlos Fyssas, a hip-hop promoter and anti-racism campaigner who went by the stage name of Killah P. By the time they were done, he was dying from stab wounds in the street. Protests strafed Athens. Pundits demanded action. Then-prime minister Antonis Samaras promised to stop “the descendants of the Nazis from poisoning our social life, to act criminally, to terrorise and to undermine the foundations of the country.”
Fyssas’s murder was the beginning of the end for Golden Dawn. The court cases began. Almost six years later, in October 2020, 68 party members were found guilty of being “part of a criminal organisation” and 15 out of the 17 members accused of Pavlos’s murder were convicted. The party was done. Its leader Nikos Michaloliakos, along with several of his colleagues, were given 13 years in jail.
The end of Golden Dawn does not mean the end of the far-right’
Lagos was one of them. But abroad in Brussels and swathed in diplomatic immunity, he remained untouchable — until last month when his immunity was stripped.
He was planning to flee but wasn’t fast enough. Just after his arrest, he tweeted: “I am in a Belgian police van. The thieves, atheists and anti-Greeks are taking me to prison. I remain faithful to Christ and Greece.”
Athens wanted him badly — and it’s no surprise. According to the Greek journalist Yiannis Baboulias, “Lagos was one of the main organisers of the violent ‘activists’ of the party, and potentially of the attack that ended with the murder of Pavlos Fyssas. He reported directly to the leader of the party, Nikos Michaloliakos, which places him close to the centre of power.”
The end of Lagos is just one more bit of good news for Greece in these past months. After the financial and political turmoil of the crisis, the country is moving forward under the Harvard and Stanford-educated technocrat, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. US officials I have spoken to are especially hopeful about post-Crisis Greece: a Greece 2.0 vital to the eastern Mediterranean, with an ever more belligerent Turkey unsettling leaders in Brussels and Washington.
Greece recently signed a military deal with Israel — something that would once have been unthinkable in a country where for so long Israel was very close to an anathema.
Now, along with Cyprus, the two countries form a ‘triple alliance” — focused on energy and security — in the region. Greece’s troubles are not over yet. As Baboulias points out, the end of Golden Dawn does not mean the end of the far-right in the country. Nor does a change of government mean the end of dysfunctional politics in Greece. But as Covid-19 showed, the powerful EU states will protect their own. Small nations like Greece must rely on themselves, especially if they face hostile — and far larger — enemies.
Lagos’s arrest is about more than the end of Golden Dawn. As Greece slowly frees itself from internal trauma, it is once more starting to look outwards into the world.
There it now sees in Israel not a colonist endeavour but the type of small, agile state it aspires to be. There, it finds a region ripe for energy exploration and international cooperation.
And there, as it emerges from its many challenges over the last 15 years, it can play a key role for the region in the decades to come.