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Old May 9th, 2012 #58
Alex Linder
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Neo-Nazi party plots rise after Greek elections

Greece’s major parties were still in shock Monday from the drubbing voters dealt them in Sunday’s national elections.



[Far-right Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos speaks during a news conference in front of a banner with the twisting Maeander, an ancient Greek decorative motif that the party has adopted as its symbol in Athens, Sunday, May 6, 2012. The party won enough votes Sunday to earn seats in the Parliament. Petros Giannakouris / AP]

ATHENS, Greece - Election advertisements for Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party called for “taking the dirt out of the country,” “cleaning up Athens” and planting landmines along the borders to stop illegal immigrants from crossing in.

On Sunday, Golden Dawn won enough votes to earn seats in the Parliament, and now Greeks – and the estimated 1 million foreign immigrants here – are bracing to see how the party, with its swastika-like logo and the black-shirted toughs who come to its rallies, will try to commandeer the debate.

[Does A3P have any toughs? Why not? When is it going to get some? A party that can't physically defend itself might as well not exist.]

Greece’s major parties were still in shock Monday from the drubbing voters dealt them in Sunday’s national elections, and it seemed increasingly unlikely they could form a new government. Antonis Samaras, whose right-of-center New Democracy party finished a weak first place, abandoned an attempt to form a new coalition government after just six hours Monday.

Expectations were low that the surprise second-place winner, the Radical Left coalition headed by Aleksis Tsipras, would be able to assemble a left-of-center government, and chances were put at rock bottom for the socialist PASOK, headed by Evangelos Venizelos, which had led the outgoing government but fell to third place in Sunday’s balloting.

If all three parties fail, and President Karolos Papoulias is unable to summon a national unity government, then Papoulias is required by law to call new elections in one month.

A majority of Greek voters either stayed home or cast their ballots for fringe parties Sunday, with one vote in five going to a party that fell below the 3 percent threshold for entering the Parliament.

Golden Dawn was among the few parties celebrating Sunday’s results. It won 21 seats in the 300-seat Parliament after garnering nearly 7 percent of the vote, an immense gain over the 0.3 percent it obtained in the 2009 parliamentary elections.

The issue that put the party into Parliament was illegal immigration, a topic that major parties had largely refused to touch until the eve of Sunday’s elections, when Samaras denounced illegal immigrants as “tyrants.” But Golden Dawn, whose advertisements also featured the burning of American and Israeli flags, has many even more controversial positions, such its call for unifying Greece with Cyprus, a move tried by the Greek military regime in 1974 that led to the Turkish invasion of the island. Cyprus has remained divided ever since.

In his victory speech Sunday, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos also called for the “liberation” of Northern Epirus, an area of neighboring Albania that has many Greek-speaking inhabitants.

Michaloliakos first became known internationally when he was elected to the Athens city council in 2010 and gave a stiff-armed, Nazi-style salute.

One of the main reasons Golden Dawn has been able to expand its base is that Greece now has as many as 1 million immigrants, many of them from North Africa, Afghanistan or Bangladesh, possibly as many as half of them illegal.

After a Greek man was killed in May 2011, reputedly by Afghan immigrants, Golden Dawn militants stopped traffic every afternoon for weeks, hauled immigrants off of public transport and beat them up, according to Marina Vichou, formerly a journalist with the BBC Greek service, who lives close by the scene and witnessed some of the incidents. “The police did nothing but protected Golden Dawn,” she told McClatchy.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/0...#storylink=cpy

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 9th, 2012 at 12:48 AM.