Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Support Dips Slightly in Greece Election

Supporter of the lefitst Syriza party celebrates win in Athens. Image by getty images

By JTA January 26, 2015

The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party maintained its strength in Greek national elections as the far-left party Syriza came to power.

With almost all votes counted from Sunday’s election, Golden Dawn received 6.3 percent of the national vote, giving it 17 seats in the 300-member national parliament and leaving it the third-largest party in Greece.

The election saw the leftist Syriza party fall one seat short of a majority needed to govern alone as Greeks embraced the party’s promise to end six years of economic austerity.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ center-right New Democracy party came in second with 27.9 percent of the vote.

The vote total for Golden Dawn is just slightly below their count from the 2012 election when they garnered 6.9 percent of the vote and 18 seats. They barely shrank despite a widespread crackdown during the past year that saw most of the party’s top leadership jailed on charges of heading a violent criminal organization.

Golden Dawn has been has been accused of being behind dozens of racist attacks on immigrants. It frequently uses Nazi imagery, and its leaders have denied the existence of Nazi death camps and gas chambers.

As part of attempts to crack down on the party, Greek lawmakers recently passed a law with harsher penalties for inciting racial violence and denying the Holocaust. But the law cannot be applied retroactively.

It is also not clear whether the newly elected government will continue the previous government’s crackdown on the neo-Nazi party.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO